Mary Bruce Inn (The Jungalow)

Famous reformer Upton Sinclair, author of The Jungle (1906), lived in Arden from spring 1910 to early 1912, spending the first year in a tent before building a house at the edge of Arden Woods with a $1,250 advance he had received for a book, Love's Pilgrimage (1911); the dwelling ended up costing $2,600, however. The main room, of stained wood, boasted a huge fireplace. A high shelf ran all around, holding Sinclair's library. In the 1930s, the place was the Mary Bruce Inn; then, in 1941, it underwent massive alterations. Immediately east is the Scott Nearing Cottage. A Wharton School economist, Nearing paid $13 annual rent for the last available lot on the Green, a low-lying corner. He spent summers here from about 1905 to 1915, building a cabin with, he recalled, a waist-high foundation and huge stone chimney. Sinclair remembered it as being one room and that he himself rented it as a study. Arden helped inspire Nearing's move to Vermont in 1932, in which he founded the modern back-to-the-land “homesteading” movement.