Ken Burns has slept in the same bedroom for the past 45 years.
While numerous additions have been made to the original house, he proudly points out that the bedroom, where his first and second daughters were born 42 and 38 years ago, hasn’t changed. (Immediately, he corrects himself to mention that the mattress has changed.)
The white colonial and a barn are flanked by an apple orchard in the electric green hills of New Hampshire in a town called Walpole.
It’s this house and this piece of land that gave him the financial freedom to make the films of his choosing.
He moved here out of necessity: In 1979, Mr. Burns’s landlord raised the rent on his fifth-floor, walk-up apartment in Manhattan from $275 to $325 — a sum now so quaint that it’s hard to imagine how consequential it was for the beginning filmmaker. The increase meant that he would need to get a day job, and he had a vision of himself decades later, returning haggard from the office, the reels of his unfinished documentary atop the refrigerator.
In a move that seemed rash then and remains unconventional now, he rented the white colonial, then heated by a wood-burning stove, and bought it a few years later for $94,000.
The decampment to the small town — a pinprick of a village a 3½-hour drive from Manhattan that then had a population just over 3,000 — allowed Mr. Burns to explore, gave him peace and shut him out from the rest of world so he could see it more clearly.
Once a young filmmaker who had to convince skeptics to invest in his approach to historical documentaries, Mr. Burns, now 71, has been called “America’s storyteller” and “America’s biographer” — even an American Homer. His technique of panning and zooming over still images was immortalized as the “Ken Burns Effect” by Steve Jobs, who named a feature on Apple’s iMovie software after the filmmaker.
His success has long afforded him the ability to move. He owns numerous other properties, including a house on Lake Sunapee in New Hampshire and an apartment in Manhattan. But something has kept him in Walpole, where he now owns 110 acres and is an investor in a local restaurant and a grocery store.
“This place is so central to who I am — to what I do every single day,” he said.
Walpole has given him much more than fame and financial security. Zoom out and go back in time to 1965, when he lived in a tiny two-bedroom, white clapboard home on a cul-de-sac in Ann Arbor, Mich.
‘Scared All the Time’
Ken was 11 and his brother, Ric, was 10, when their mother was on her deathbed. Their father, Robert Kyle Burns Jr., an anthropologist, was mentally ill.
As his mother’s cancer metastasized, Ken overheard conversations — his mother pleading with relatives, asking for someone, anyone, to take her boys in the event of her death. “I remember being scared — scared all the time,” he said.
With their mother in the hospital, the boys were left to wait at home for the inevitable. On the night of April 28, 1965, Ken went to bed with one of the worst stomachaches he had ever had — his body registering what none of the adults would speak about.
The pain disappeared suddenly. The phone rang. His mother was gone.
On a cul-de-sac, the Burns family — once four, now three — sank into the darkness of Robert’s mind. He bought a fish tank. Then he bought another, and another, until their dining room was lined with 13 tanks teeming with tropical fish, said Ric Burns, now 69, who is also a filmmaker.
Their father obsessed over the tanks, cleaning and tending to them even as he failed to care for his sons, the younger Burns brother said. He began to disappear for hours and then days at a time. At night, the boys sat shoulder to shoulder by the window of their white clapboard home, watching the street for signs of his headlights.
Later, when the brothers were teenagers, their father vanished for months, claiming he was doing “field work” leaving cash for them to pay their expenses.
At the age of 15, Mr. Burns got a job at a local record store, which involved memorizing the catalog numbers of records so he could order them — for example, SWBO-101 was the Beatles’ self-titled record, known as the White Album. By the time he was 17, he had memorized hundreds of numbers and been promoted to assistant manager, he said.
Their mother’s death and their father’s absence had created both a deep wound and a deep drive for Ken: “It’s a kind of permanent feeling of vulnerability and loss, and I think Ken responded to it by wanting to forge for himself a world that was so fortified — so that he would never have to suffer that again,” Ric Burns said.
The filmmaker remembers the exact moment when he decided what he wanted to do with his life: He had never seen his father cry — not in all the years his mother had fought an excruciating illness, not even at the funeral — until one night after her death. His family was in the living room in front of their black-and-white TV, watching a movie, and suddenly his father began weeping.
“I just understood that nothing gave him any safe harbor — nothing,” Ken Burns said, except the film, which had created the space for a bereaved widower to express the fraught emotions he had suppressed.
His first goal was to get away. A magazine article about a new experimental university offered him a ticket out in 1971.
‘No One Will Watch This’
Hampshire College, in Amherst, Mass., was in its second year of operation when an 18-year-old Mr. Burns arrived on a scholarship. It was there that he began developing what would become his signature of bringing movement to still images, a way of bringing the past alive.
In the 1980s, he went from meeting to meeting to pitch “The Civil War.” The answer he kept hearing was: “No one will watch this.” It wasn’t just that he was proposing a work of epic length — the series had nine episodes, each more than an hour long. It was also because documentaries were not considered commercially viable.
When “The Civil War” premiered on PBS in 1990, nearly 40 million people watched — it remains the highest-rated program in PBS history, according to a spokeswoman for the public broadcaster.
The week of its premiere, sales of blank cassette tapes on which it could be recorded shot up 40 percent nationwide, according to Adweek. Publishers began churning out Civil War books. Re-enactments and visits to battlegrounds increased. When Mr. Burns toured Gettysburg soon after the release of the series, the park superintendent leaned down to pick up a candy wrapper and then joked: “This is all your fault.”
In the years after, Mr. Burns could have afforded to return to Manhattan — he was commuting back and forth to work on his films. But he decided to stay put and continue to keep his costs down.
Come to Walpole
When she was 9 or 10, his eldest daughter, Sarah Burns, now 42, helped her mother make a “brochure” about the village of Walpole, cutting pictures out of magazines to entice her father’s collaborators to move to the area. The brochure appears to have worked: Paul Barnes, an esteemed editor who became Mr. Burns’s full-time partner and edited some of his best-known works, like “Civil War,” bought a house on the same street.
Initially, they edited films in the garage before outgrowing it, Mr. Barnes said.
Mr. Burns invested in a Victorian in downtown Walpole, where the pair added offices for producers and a photo researcher. Mr. Burns also invested in the town, becoming a silent partner in a local grocery as well as in a restaurant, where the menu includes “Ken’s Salad”: grilled salmon over bibb lettuce.
Numerous other editors and collaborators also moved to the area, some staying for a season, others for years.
The white colonial grew as the Burns family did: Originally three bedrooms, it was expanded to five as each of Mr. Burns’s four daughters was born. He no longer wakes up at 3 a.m. to add wood to the stove, relying instead on the home’s central heating. The kitchen was remodeled. He added the barn in the back over a decade ago — it serves as his office and a home theater, while the stalls act as bedrooms for visiting collaborators and friends. His home is plain, understated — normal — down to the white slipcovers on the chairs.
The décor could be described as Americana. In the barn is his collection of American quilts — rare enough that they have been the subject of a museum exhibition.
The other recurring theme inside his house is Lyla T. Burns — his mother.
Every year, the anniversary of her death would pass in a blur: “4/28,” Mr. Burns said, referring to the date of her death, before making a wincing gesture, like someone ducking to avoid a piece of shrapnel flying overhead.
After his first marriage imploded, when he was in his late 30s, Mr. Burns decided to turn his skills to the hole inside his own family. He realized he didn’t even know where his mother was buried. He and his brother returned to Michigan, where they discovered that their father had failed to pick up their mother’s ashes. Her remains had been sent to a cemetery where she had been buried in a pauper’s grave.
It was there that they discovered a yellowing 3-by-5 index card: “Lyla T. Burns,” it said. “Next of kin unknown.”
They made a plaque and placed it at the head of her collective grave. Mr. Burns returned every year, taking his daughters with him. He said that the ritual released him — now he sees 4/28 everywhere. It’s the time stamp on footage. Or the exact moment when one of his daughters phones him.
In the mornings, Mr. Burns pads down the zigzag turn of the home’s original staircase, past a baby gate that he erected after the birth of his third daughter nearly 20 years ago.
He never took it down, and now it conveniently protects his four grandchildren.
He walks the grounds: The property is at the bottom of a sloping, verdant hill.
For decades, he has taken the same uphill walk — out the door and to the left — a daily meditation that allows him to grapple with a piece of dialogue he is trying to fix. It ends at a gnarly maple tree, the symbol of his filmmaking process: “Everything is subtraction,” he is fond of saying, before describing how it takes 40 gallons of sap to make a single gallon of maple syrup.
In that time, his films have not been without criticism. Some historians have questioned his framing. In 2021, more than 100 documentary filmmakers signed a letter of protest, slamming PBS for allowing a white director to tell the story of Muhammad Ali.
But if you did nothing else, it would take over 232 hours to watch all the documentaries that Mr. Burns has made — a full nine days. All but the first two hours were conceived here, including his most recent film: an eight-hour biopic on the life of Leonardo da Vinci, which he co-directed with his daughter Sarah Burns and her husband, David McMahon, and which began airing on PBS this month.
His focus is on what his associates believe will be his biggest contribution both to documentary film and to America’s sense of itself: A 12-hour epic about the American Revolution, which will be released next year.
It’s what he is working on now in the barn, after returning from his morning walk.
Years ago, a psychologist finally gave him an answer to the meaning of his work. “Look what you do for a living — you wake the dead,” the psychologist told him.
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