At Hemingway Site, a Legal Battle Also Rises

An environmental group that owns the former home of Ernest Hemingway rejected an offer Friday from neighbors to buy the property, setting up a legal row.

The board of the Nature Conservancy’s Idaho chapter voted to move ahead with a plan to turn the 13-acre property in Ketchum into a library and museum.

The plan includes opening the home, where the Nobel Prize-winning author shot himself in 1961, to tours.

Neighbors fear the proposal would disrupt the residential character of the upscale Ketchum community and plan to discuss the latest development with their lawyer. They have threatened to sue, claiming a private driveway leading to the residence should be off-limits to tourists.

“We’re disappointed they didn’t accept our offer,” said Gene Whitmyre, a retired real estate executive who lives next door to the home. “We thought it was a win-win for everyone,” Whitmyre said, “but the board didn’t feel the same way.”

The home was purchased by Hemingway and his fourth wife, Mary, in 1959. The neighbors had agreed to pay market value for the property -- which could have fetched more than $5 million -- on the condition the house be moved elsewhere.

The Nature Conservancy’s board members decided that uprooting the home would have been difficult and would have been contrary to the wishes of Mary Hemingway, who left the estate to the group in 1986.

“The board appreciated the offer, but thought it was in the public interest and best represented what Mary Hemingway wanted for the land and the home to remain together,” spokesman Matt Miller said.

The Nature Conservancy used the property briefly as office space. But it has been trying to get rid of it for years because it costs as much as $50,000 annually to maintain and doesn’t fit with the group’s mission of environmental protection, said director Geoff Pampush.

The environmental group still must persuade the Ketchum City Council to sign off on its plan, which includes turning most of the property into a nature preserve.

Its proposal calls for transferring ownership of the property to the Idaho Hemingway House Foundation. Its members include the author’s granddaughter, actress Mariel Hemingway, and actor Tom Hanks.

The group would organize literary workshops, fundraising events and tours of as many as 15 people a day.

The house was built in 1954 by Henry J. “Bob” Topping Jr., the onetime owner of the New York Yankees.

There are reminders of the writer inside: a mounted gazelle’s head in the second-floor master bedroom; a painting of a slaughtered bull after a corrida by Waldo Pierce, a Hemingway friend from their days in 1920s Spain; and a postcard-sized drawing by Pablo Picasso.