Next door at the Hut, rusticity reigns.  A fisherman's cottage, this Hut started out as a single room and was added to over the years.  Creaky - and in some places, downright bouncy -  wood floors show traces of several generations of paint.  Tom considered painting then, but his sister, wife, and daughters have overruled him.  "I guess we'll leave them distressed," he says.  In the 1930's the family built a coquina fireplace in the cottage's living area, with Tom and Helen's grandmother directing placement of each stone.

Their mother, Helen "Patsy" Mellon Schmidt, turned 89 last November and still visits Summer Haven. She regularly fished and hunted here, though her generation would come back to the Lodge and dress for dinner. As recently is a few years ago, Patsy took her great-granddaughter for a turn around the river in their small boat. The family compound is precious to her. "She loves it more than anybody, " Tom says. Each of his daughters took memorable one-on-one trips from Pittsburgh to Summer Haven with Patsy as young teens.

"We drove down in her big black Buick convertible," recalls Helen Schmidt, the middle child. She remembers a restaurant meal on that trip when she told a waiter that she was done. "A roast is done," her grandmother told her." You are finished."

Now, Tom and Susan spend their winters in the Hut, and Toni's sister visits regularly. "I travel a lot around the world," Helen says, "and there's no place I'd rather come back twice than here." The pressure to sell the property, though, is intense, Tom says. "The land is so valuable, and the taxes are horrendous," he says. Renting the houses to vacationers doesn't cover taxes and improvements, but Tom is determined to hang on to them. Even now, his daughters feel the weight of the decision. "We'd like to keep it if at all possible", says Helen Schmidt, whose two small daughters, Maeve and Tula, already seem right at home. "Of course we'd like to keep it in the family."

The Mellons used coquina stones from their beach to build both the Hut's fireplace and a nearly identical one in the Lodge, Center: A back bedroom in the Hut opens to the porch, which overlooks the Summer Haven River. Far left: The small yellow bath was the first one added to the Lodge in the 1920s. Left., An old pew on the porch serves as a stepstool for 5-year-old Maeve Campman. Hats and fishing poles await takers.