Remembering Ralph Hostetter

I was sad to learn of the death of Ralph Hostetter, in 2019, something that escaped my attention at the time.

Ralph was a Maryland newspaper publisher who had a summer place in French River, here on PEI, a piece of bold architecture for the village, an A-frame high on the hill overlooking New London Bay.

I knew Ralph through my work as Executive Director of the L.M. Montgomery Land Trust, of which Ralph was a generous patron. I always found him gracious and straightforward, qualities his obituary expounds upon:

Hostetter was blessed to have loving family members, friends and caregivers around him in person and he enjoyed connecting with others using today’s technology during his final time at his beloved home that he called the Fourth Estate. He freely shared his quick wit, political opinions and talent as a storyteller.

That might be the end of the story, had I not been chatting with Lisa’s mother Karen and Aunt Dianne last week about the houses their father—Lisa’s grandfather—Eddy MacLeod had built over the years. 

One of those houses: Ralph Hostetter’s.

Here’s an artist rendering of the house from family files:

And here’s what the house looks like from the road in French River:

One of the best pieces of advice I got, on moving to PEI 31 years ago, was to be careful about burning bridges: the Island, I was told, is enormously interconnected, and if you offend someone, you’re likely offending, by association, vast swaths of people you don’t yet know.

In this case, no offence occurred. But if you’d told me 20 years ago, when I first met Ralph, that I’d eventually be dating the granddaughter of the man who built his summer home, I would have thought you mad.