Bird Haven Farm - The Story of an Original American Garden by Janet Mavec - Interview

The mysterious history behind Nancy Drew wouldn't be complete without a visit to Bird Haven Farm. The farm was once Harriet Stratemeyer Adams's retreat, located in NJ. It's now owned by Janet Mavec and Wayne Nordberg and their restoration of the property and the old Sears kit home that Harriet lived in while at the farm, is a magnificent testament to its rich history and the beauty of nature and a peaceful balance. Members of my Nancy Drew Sleuths organization, a group of fans and scholars of Nancy Drew, visited the farm in 2015 and had an amazing time exploring and hearing more about the farm from Janet. It was somewhat surreal for us to be in such a lovely place, very serene and to be able to put references and stories about the farm from the New York Public Library's Stratemeyer Syndicate archives to real life moments, was a real thrill. Janet even has a neat key necklace inspired by a key to a lock on the farm, she sells in her Janet Mavec Jewelry line - it's the Nancy Drew mystery key.

Harriet spent a lot of time writing at the farm as well as hosting family and friends and employees of the Stratemeyer Syndicate on fun weekend events and holidays. She had a desk on the second floor she outlined a lot of her Nancy Drew books at. They even say her ghost haunts the farm and her presence is noted - a happy presence. It is at the farm, that she passed away in 1982 at age 89. Within two years, the Stratemeyer Syndicate was sold to Simon & Schuster.

I was happy to see that Janet had written a book about the farm and that it was coming out this month on September 2nd - Bird Haven Farm - The Story of an Original American Garden. I ordered a signed copy from her website and reached out to her to ask a few questions for this blog, and she kindly answered. I received a signed copy of the book and it's absolutely beautiful. It's a large hardcover with dust jacket. The book is full of the history behind the farm including a chapter on Harriet, and about how Janet and Wayne restored the farm to its current glory. The photos by Ngoc Minh Ngo are stunning and really help bring to life the flora and fauna of the farm in all the seasons. There are recipes and menus including a delicious applesauce recipe and I can't wait to try them. 

Reading through the book took me back to the visit ten years ago, and I hope to one day visit again. There was something very prescient and calming about being there. Below is my interview with Janet and then also some photos interspersed that I took when The Sleuths visited Bird Haven Farm. There are a couple of shots of the chapter on Harriet and an image of Janet from the book as well as the cover below and I included one with my key necklace.

NDS: What's your connection to Nancy Drew? Did you read them as a kid or discover them more fully when you bought the farm and found the connection to Harriet Stratemeyer Adams? 

JANET: I loved reading Nancy Drew as a kid in Ohio.  To me Nancy was brave, adventurous, kind and determined- all the things I admire in a person.  Plus, she was fashionable.  

NDS: How surreal is it to live in the peaceful splendor that "Carolyn Keene" once loved and herself enjoyed for many years? 

JANET: It is very inspiring rather than surreal.  

NDS: When the Nancy Drew Sleuths organization visited back in 2015, you mentioned that Harriet's spirit was still lively about the farm. Do you still feel her presence there? Why do you think that she still lingers there? Any lessons learned from her presence there? 

JANET: She is definitely still here- I can sometimes feel her presence.  And she helped me write my book! I never got stuck/writers block- The flow was constant.  She still lingers because her spirit got stuck in the thick walls.  and lessons, yes, keep writing, tell the story.   

The Nancy Drew Key to Bird Haven Farm - linked here.

NDS: How do you pay homage to the history of Harriet's ownership and how did this play into renovating the farm and rebuilding it into what it is today? 

JANET: I did the research before making any changes to what was here.  We honored her boxwood collection by making the upper boxwood garden wave.  

NDS: If there was ever to be a fictional tale, The Secret of Bird Haven Farm, what would the mystery be about? 

JANET: The Tale of the Missing Dahlia Tuber. A fine and rare dahlia tuner goes missing.  Nancy is called in.  The dogs are erroneously blamed at first.  The Nancy uncovers that the bear is getting over the deer fence and ate all of them.  

NDS: Tell everyone about the mysterious key and how that inspired the Key Necklace in your Janet Mavec Jewelry line. 

JANET: This impeccably designed, rose-colored key necklace is for a woman who dares for something to stump her. She possesses the tenacity to figure out the real mysteries in life. Like which door this hauntingly well-designed replica unlocks.   The Nancy Drew Key Necklace to Bird Haven Farm unlocks a stone 1700s farmhouse in New Jersey where books in the Nancy Drew series were written. The publisher and writer to the series, Harriet Adams, lived at Bird Haven Farm for over 50 years. Janet Mavec now lives there and designed the Nancy Drew Key Necklace to Bird Haven Farm to unlock the potential to solve all life's problems.   

NDS: What was it like writing about the farm for this book and what do you hope readers gain from being immersed in the beauty of the farm and the wonderful photos and stories inside?  

JANET: I hope the book inspired them to create something beautiful - plant more trees, bushes, flowers, entertain some friends with a home cooked meal, and honor nature.

NDS: Is there anything you'd like to add for the readers of this blog or the Nancy Drew fans about the connections to the farm? 

JANET: To honor the past but live for today.

The window that Harriet's desk looked out over as she plotted her Nancy Drew books...

More info on the book:

Bird Haven Farm tells the story of Janet Mavec's transformation of a historic property in New Jersey into a vibrant and evolving garden paradise. The book chronicles her journey from city dweller to passionate gardener, detailing the challenges and triumphs of blending the old with the new, honoring the land's history (including its connection to Nancy Drew author/publisher Harriet Stratemeyer Adams), and creating a space for community, celebration, and connection with nature. It explores the thoughtful design principles implemented by landscape architect Fernando Caruncho, the contributions of other gardening experts, and Mavec's personal evolution as a gardener and designer. Ultimately, the book celebrates the beauty and bounty of the land, emphasizing the importance of stewardship, sustainability, and sharing the garden's gifts with others. It’s a story about the evolution of a garden and its impact on the lives of those who cultivate and enjoy it. It includes recipes, beautiful photography, and thoughtful essays by contributors.   Photography by Ngoc Min Ngo, menus and recipes with Gail Monaghan, essay contributions by Fernando Caruncho, Celia Hilliard, Wayne Nordberg, Stephen Orr,  Lisa Stamm, and Angus Wilkie.  

Published by Rizzoli, 9/2/25

Where to Buy:

Janet Mavec Jewelry Website - Signed Copies

Amazon

Where to find Janet:

Facebook

Instagram

Nancy Drew: The Case of an America Icon & The Mystery of the Missing Funds * SOLVED

Nancy Drew: The Case of an America Icon & The Mystery of the Missing Funds

Nancy Drew, Mystery’s IT girl for the generations, has inspired a lot of little girls who grew to be amazing women! From educators to detectives to lawyers, even librarians. Very few fictional characters can say they are BFFs with most of the women on the US Supreme Court. But it’s not just an all-girl’s club these days – even a few men read Nancy Drew and a few famous fans include Stephen King.

As we celebrate Nancy Drew’s 95^th anniversary this year, the history behind the mystery is a tale at times even more baffling than Nancy Drew’s most thrilling cases.

And it began with Nancy Drew’s creator, Edward Stratemeyer of The Stratemeyer Syndicate whose very modern creation for the time, was brought to life by the original ghostwriter for the series, Mildred Wirt Benson. Benson, a real-life Nancy Drew in her own right, took a 3-page plot outline from Stratemeyer and gave girls a ray of light in a very dark time. Nancy Drew debuted on April 28, 1930, during the Great Depression, just ten years after women got the right to vote. She was a very intelligent and curious teenage sleuth, whose father treated her as an equal without a mother to reign in her daring exploits. With her trusty roadster, fashionable frocks, and her magnifying glass, she sought to rid her hometown of River Heights of all the crooks and dastardly villains and right wrongs. She wasn’t afraid to chase suspects down dark alleys or tangle with villains. The Nancy Drew of the 1930s and 1940s – a testament to Benson’s skillful writing – was inspiring to young girls and a role model.

Now, 95 years later, with nearly 700 Nancy Drew books published since 1930 in the classic series and various modern spinoffs, fans still fondly celebrate their experiences reading Nancy Drew as kids and how Nancy Drew gave them the gumption to do more in their lives. Not only that, fans – and even Benson herself, have often pondered in perilous situations, WWNDD? Between entertaining mysteries and life lessons learned, fans of all ages have passed the Nancy Drew mysteries down through the generations.

A full-length Nancy Drew documentary by filmmaker Cathleen O’Connell of Desert Penguin Pictures will tackle the fandom of Nancy Drew, how she inspired women through the decades and will pay homage to her mysterious history behind the scenes. However, just like a Nancy Drew mystery, there have been some foibles and detours along the way. With most of the NEH’s funding wiped out earlier this year, part of a production grant O’Connell was awarded from the NEH was wiped out and the Nancy Drew documentary’s fate came to a standstill. But, like many before her, O’Connell pondered WWNDD and created an online Kickstarter campaign to “Save Nancy Drew.” Nancy Drew fans of all ages have turned out in support of the campaign to help get Nancy Drew: The Case of an American Icon over the finish line and fully funded. In helping solve The Case of the Missing Funding, everyone can pitch in and solve that mystery by supporting O’Connell’s documentary project. And you have just one more day to do it! The Kickstarter campaign ends on July 30th.

The Nancy Drew Documentary, the first of its kind, is something that fans have wanted to see done for a long time. Support O’Connell’s vision and pledge through the Kickstarter campaign so you can help solve the mystery behind Nancy Drew. There are so many inspirational stories to tell that come from Nancy Drew’s creators and how Nancy Drew has become such a Pop Culture Icon. Most importantly, the legacy of Nancy Drew is one that continues to bring fans of all walks of life together. Being a Nancy Drew fan isn’t just youthful rite of passage relegate to a memory box in an attic. It’s a real sense of community and sisterhood, a timeless bond that brings everyone to the table for a common good, even when the world is stumbling through time and a bit off kilter. Little girls and women need good role models and Nancy Drew is one for the ages.

Happy 120th to Mildred Wirt Benson & a Huge Debt of Gratitude to Geoffrey S. Lapin

Happy 120th to Mildred Wirt Benson!!

Her 120th birthday since her birth would have been on July 10, 2025, though she passed away at the ripe age of 96 in May of 2002. Several of my good friends in Nancy Drew and I wanted to visit the legendary Geoffrey S. Lapin, the man who discovered Millie was Carolyn Keene and other famous pseudonyms back in the 1960s. We even celebrated with a few cupcakes and special cupcake toppers.

My friend Mary and I were able to make a quick trip up to the Toledo Public Library to donate some wonderful items that Geoff reached out to me about wanting to go to Toledo - including his beautiful 1939 Nancy Drew Reporter movie poster. The library will be framing it to hang in my Jennifer Fisher Nancy Drew Collection room. Geoff also donated the desk contents of Millie’s from The Toledo Blade when she passed which included a lot of notes, notebooks and letters and cards from fans and even schools some of which are pictured below in this blog.

There was an article someone wrote and sent her, pages from The Cool One. An unpublished radio transcript. Most of an outline for the Penny Parker book, Hoofbeats on the Turnpike. Plus, a child reader with a short story first published in St. Nicholas and some bound volumes of St. Nicholas with her short stories in them. They will be invaluable for researchers and fans who visit the Toledo Public Library and will add to and enhance the collection they have there. Geoff even made it official by signing the paperwork to donate his research, articles, signed books and other ephemera related to Mildred Wirt Benson to the University of Iowa Women's Archive to join the papers and collections of Mildred Wirt Benson and Carolyn Stewart Dyer. What an amazing gift and honor!

Many thanks to Geoff for his generous gifts to the library so that fans and researchers can learn so much and learn about his journey to discovering Millie and all the work he did to get Millie recognition for being such a great writer and the woman behind a lot of famous pseudonyms!

Nancy Drew Documentary Kickstarter - Nancy Fans Help Fund This Amazing Project!

 CALLING ALL NANCY DREW FANS & SLEUTHS:

The Nancy Drew Documentary - Nancy Drew: The Case of the American Icon by Cathleen O'Connell of Desert Penguin Pictures was well underway, filming complete but going into production and editing to be finalized when funding from the NEH was wiped out - grants that were going to help fund and finish this! It was quite an honor to receive these grants and so much work was done on the documentary. I am an advisor and was interviewed for the documentary. It's a project dear to my heart and so I wanted to spread the news among the Nancy Drew community that you can help!

To help Cathleen get to the finish line, she's got a Nancy Drew Kickstarter campaign that's running from July 2 to July 30, 2025 to raise funding, though don't let the goal fool you, she really needs more than she's trying to raise in this first funding, so let's get the funding up to $95K for the Nancy Drew anniversary this year and beyond! It would mean the world to her and the Nancy Drew community to see this first ever full-length documentary happen! It will air on PBS and at film festivals, museums, libraries and more if we can help support it!

You can pledge outright and donated to support it or there are pledges for goodies like bookmarks, stickers, totes and more limited rewards - even a reward to get your name in the credits as a thank you - in the film festival version! Don't let July 30 creep up on you and miss out - click this link and pledge now to show your support! 

Cathleen and I are all about keeping Nancy Drew's amazing history alive and this documentary will cement that legacy in a very visually appealing and commemorative way!

Thank you to all of you who support this endeavor, and I appreciate the community coming together to help out Cathleen - it's A Case of What Would Nancy Drew Do! So do your "Drewty" and pledge now!

New Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys Box Sets at Sam's Clubs

New box sets out from Grosset & Dunlap, an imprint of Penguin Random House. You can find them a Sam's Clubs - I'll post links below to order online. Publishing date is July 2024 per the photos of the bottom of the boxes. They are called "The Nancy Drew Mystery Collection" and "The Hardy Boys Mystery Collection" - both feature the flashlight editions of book 1 and 2 from each series. The back cover of the box shows the covers of the books inside and a graphic of an open book with text and an internal illustration. The tag line on the back of each is "Add mystery to your bookshelf with" and then "the Hardy Boys" or "Nancy Drew." I'm not sure how long these will be in stores or online so get them while you can! Click here for the Hardy Boys set and click here for the Nancy Drew set.

See more photos below of the boxes - if you are a box set collector, these are neat ones to collect!

 

The Mildred Wirt Benson Historical Artifacts Recovery Project

THE CASE OF THE HISTORICAL NANCY DREW COLLECTION DUMPED IN A DUMPSTER...OR THE SAD REALITY OF COLLECTING WHEN YOU PASS ON. 

DO YOU OWN MILDRED WIRT BENSON DOCUMENTS AND PAPERS? – Yes, quite a few of you do! The story about the dumpster – it just happened! Read on for more clues and my contact info below to get in touch with me about what you have.

It’s time to consider donating or selling your historical items and ephemera related to Nancy Drew, series books and Mildred Wirt Benson to archives where they can be properly preserved and properly archived – not only for their survival but also to preserve history. An important history that you clearly are interested in since you own these items. At the very least, make copies of what you have and donate those for now – it would be a very simple and easy and very inexpensive gesture to preserve the contents of these items if you’re on the fence about donating and sharing. At least then we’d have a record of the document(s) if you made copies. Donating the actual items themselves isn’t always easy but it’s very rewarding. After all, I donated an over 5000+ piece Nancy Drew collection that meant a lot to me to the Toledo Public Library, but now it means a lot to the world. There’s great value in donating and being altruistic. However, in the alternative, there are institutions who would pay to have items and people like me who will pay to get items to donate for the greater good to an archive. Because it is that important and does mean that much.

Recent fires in CA where so many historical papers of many and collectible items and art were lost should be a wake-up call. A natural disaster can hit at any time, without any warning, sadly. And there are a lot of collectors in and around where these fires have been happening.

I consider those fires a big wakeup call and then the dumpster happened! I have been percolating on doing something for a few years now and I’ve created The Mildred Wirt Benson Historical Artifacts Recovery Project to help get documents and artifacts to archives. 

Today’s unfortunate bombshell, that that in recent weeks a collector’s passing led to wholescale dumping of items and historical items – Mildred Wirt Benson papers and documents – now lost to history – should also be a huge wake-up call. I can’t tell you how distressed, as a historian, I am over this wave of bitter news. I am being very serious here in my post in trying to help some of you understand why this is important to the series book community at large and the history of children’s publishing. You may love what you covet and hold dear, but most likely someday no one else will regardless of what they promise you now and I’ll note some examples of that.

For a moment, if you could picture your collection or historical documents in a dumpster or burned up in a fire or tossed in a recycle bin, is that an acceptable outcome to you? I hope it is not, and that you will begin to think about what you have and what you should be doing with it as a good steward of series book history in having originally purchased these items. If you can’t bear to part with anything now, please make copies and donate those and please consider a donation agreement taken care of and signed now this year in honor of the 95th anniversary of Nancy Drew, 120th anniversary of Mildred Wirt Benson, with an institution so that once you have an estate someday, these items can go to a good home – having a signed donation agreement is imperative. It’s your responsibility to deal with these important items, not your heirs. And if you don’t have a will, a liquidation company will come in as was done recently and just dump everything. They don’t care. But I do! And I hope that some of you care as well. If you can’t see yourself donating and must recoup some value having purchased these items, I’m working to establish a fund to help recover documents, so if there’s a will, there’s a way.

As to delaying donation or selling until later, however, keep in mind, that this collector that recently passed had planned – for quite some time – to sell or do something with that they had and that never happened. Time, nature and other disasters don’t care about our feelings nor history. Also, another collector who passed away in the 2000s had plans for their collection and donations and the admin/executor did what they wanted with the items instead, so there’s no 100% guarantee that anything you wish to happen once you’re not around to facilitate it, will actually happen. It’s much better to handle it while you are still with us in order for your wishes to be fulfilled. Another collector around a decade ago had plans among several collectors to have their collection given to them, but again, once they passed away, nothing happened as planned. This is rather typical of estates and executors unfortunately, especially when the state gets involved and there is no will. When Mildred’s daughter died – without a will – the state had to step in and deal with it and find heirs – quite a few people with little or no association got a “windfall” and some was sold in a public auction back in 2013 that some of us attended, but some historical items may not have fared well. 

Here’s the important info to clue you all in – there are proper places to donate with existing archives including the University of Iowa: The Iowa Women’s Archive – which has a large collection of Mildred Wirt Benson’s papers and other historical items. Also, the Toledo Public Library – Rare Book Room at the downtown branch – has historical documents and items related to Mildred Wirt Benson housed in their Rare Book Room archive. These are the two big locations for MWB related materials. These archives are where my archive of original documents and papers are headed.  

There are collectors from around the 1980s and 1990s when in a series of interesting transactions (made even more intriguing by reading behind the scenes letters in regard to this process) some of Mildred Wirt Benson’s papers and effects were sold to collectors through certain people and Yellowback Library. It’s time we start to get these documents (or copies of them) back to where they should go, to one of those archives.  I know quite a few of you who purchased items and will be contacting you personally as well in due time. But there are some who are not known amongst us here or some people that some of you know who are not on Facebook and I’d ask you to reach out to these collectors and get them in touch with me if you know anyone with documents. That would be most appreciated not just by me, but the series book community at large.

I am currently helping several collectors get their historical items into these archives and it’s been very rewarding to help facilitate that. Not only for me but for the collectors who are relieved to be able to do something with what they have had for decades, sitting in bins or in file boxes, waiting to find a proper place and use.

I can be of help in getting you in touch with these archives and facilitating donations now or donations later. Or selling options. Please take what I’m posting to heart and consider the future of the items you have and what it would mean to the community and the preservation of the history behind all these books we love and hold dear to our hearts for future generations so that their legacy lives on. You can get in touch with me at jennatlaw@aol.com or send copies (or originals) for me to get to these archive institutions at my PO box – Jennifer Fisher, P.O. Box 511, Higley, AZ, 85236. If you wish to send something anonymously, feel free.

As Indiana Jones once said, it belongs in a museum! Or, archive, as Indiana "Drew" might say.