 His wife Mary, who like her husband was still distraught over the death of the couple's five-year-old son a year or so earlier, had insisted that any such property had to have a spring-fed babbling brook, evergreen forest and be near the railroad.The Chappaqua property met two of those conditions, with a small bog standing in for the spring and brook.In order to maximize the benefit of living in the countryside and escaping the hot city, Greeley built what his family came to refer to as the "House in the Woods" in what is still a wooded area southeast of the Church of Saint Mary the Virgin that his daughter Gabrielle had built early in the 20th century.