No Public Tours of Hemingway Home

Plans to open for public tours the Ketchum house where author Ernest Hemingway killed himself in 1961 have been scrubbed -- a victory for neighbors who said gawking tourists would have disrupted their upscale neighborhood.

Now the Nature Conservancy, the environmental group that inherited the house in 1986 from the writer’s fourth wife, Mary Hemingway, plans to hire a caretaker and use the home for charitable events and fundraising.

The conservancy had originally hoped to change the zoning on the property and then give it to a foundation, which would have offered tours.

But prolonged opposition from neighbors -- who threatened to sue -- became a liability, said Lou Lunte, acting director of the environmental group’s Idaho chapter.

“We didn’t see an impact on fundraising, but certainly it was taking a lot of time,” Lunte said Thursday. “We were getting a lot of questions about the house. Our focus is wildlife preservation. Spending time answering the questions wasn’t allowing us to focus on the incredible features in Idaho we are trying to protect.”

Traces of Hemingway remain in the home: There’s a typewriter on the top floor beneath a window that faces the mountains. Animal heads, including an impala from Africa, adorn the walls, and a painting by Waldo Pierce, one of the author’s friends from 1920s Spain, is mounted in a stairwell.