Souter Buys Home in Swanky Area, Says Farmhouse Won’t Hold All His Books
Retiring U.S. Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter won’t be returning to his rickety farmhouse in Weare, N.H.
Instead, he’ll be moving to a 3,500-square-foot Cape Cod in a neighborhood of “swanky” homes in Hopkinton, the Concord Monitor reports. He reportedly paid $510,000 for the home sitting on “2.36 well-manicured acres,” according to the New York Times.
“While Justice Souter’s new home is only 8 miles from the farmhouse, the two could be worlds apart,” the Times says. “The farmhouse has no phone lines; the Hopkinton house has ‘multiple,’ according to the real estate listing. The farmhouse’s lawn was spotted with brown; the Hopkinton house has a verdant lawn and neatly trimmed hedges. And for Justice Souter, 69, who is known to be a fitness buff, there is a home gym as well as a spa bath.”
Souter’s former neighbor Jimmy Gilman told the Monitor he’s devastated to hear that Souter is moving. “I think the world of the man, and I don’t care who knows it,” he said. Gilman told the newspaper that Souter said the home wasn’t structurally strong enough to hold the thousands of books he owned. “He said there was just so much weight from the books, it would be too much for the house to support,” Gilman said. “He said he wants to live on one floor.”
A previous story in the New York Times described Souter’s old farmhouse, with peeling paint and rotting wood, as looking “only slightly more seductive than a mud hut.”
Souter was in Chicago last weekend to urge lawyers at the ABA Annual Meeting to join him in an effort to improve civics education in the United States.
