Can't get enough of HBO's new show "The Gilded Age," which airs Monday nights on the streaming service? There's plenty of Gilded Age history to be found, right here in our own backyard.
Learn more about some of the Berkshire Cottages that were designed by the same American architect Stanford White depicted in the first episode of the series. You can just imagine Aunt Agnes turning up her nose at all this "new money" building homes in the Berkshires in the late 1800s.
LENOX — It is said that the last of the Gilded Age gentlemen did not leave the Berkshires until 1945.
On Sept. 22, 1945, Giraud Foster, 94, died from a heart attack at his beloved estate Bellefontaine.
For 50 years, he had called the Berkshires home, beginning in 1896 as a summer cottager and later making it his legal residence.
Just prior to his death, he was elected to his 30th term as president of the Lenox Club and was still active on many boards. He also was president of the Mahkeenac Boat Club at the Stockbridge Bowl, a senior warden of Trinity Church, and a director of the Lenox Library.
According to his obituary in the Berkshire Eagle, his demise was unexpected, as a week prior he had been seen making the three-mile walk from his estate to Trinity Church, with only the assistance of two canes.
Meanwhile, the New York Times reported that Foster had already planned his birthday celebration — an annual event that had become a prominent feature of the social season.
But by January 1946, his son, Giraud Van Nest Foster, had sold the 35-room mansion with all its furnishings, along with 182 acres, four brick buildings and its greenhouses to Tobias-Fischer Inc., New York auctioneers from a mere $80,000.
Giraud Foster and his wife, Jane Van Nest, built the mansion for a reported $2.5 million in 1896.
The mansion made of brick and marble, quarried in Lee, was designed by architects Carrere and Hastings in the style of Marie Antoinette's Petit Trianon at Versailles. However, as noted in "Houses of the Berkshires, 1870 - 1930," by Richard S. Jackson Jr. and Cornelia Brooke Gilder, "a second look reveals a wholly original confection of 18th-century elements and strict axial planning of facades, driveways and formal training of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts."
Foster, who had inherited his wealth from his shipping family, and his wife, who inherited hers from a family that grew wealthy making harnesses, filled their beloved estate with items that were hand-crafted and imported from France.
An extensive library contained 5,000 volumes. Statues in the gardens were imported from Italy.
In 1946, the estate was sold to the William B. Cooke Holding Co. for $100,000. Cooke, a prominent funeral director from New York, said he intended to make Bellefontaine his home, but over the next two years carved up the property, selling off parcels individually.
He also sold off most of the furnishings and statues before selling the mansion and 96 acres to the Society of the Fathers of Mercy in Brooklyn in for $45,000.
The order opened the Our Lady of Mercy Preparatory School at the mansion in 1948. On Feb. 13, 1949, 22 individuals fled the mansion as it went up in flames. All but a rotunda and the library, containing the 5,000 volumes, were destroyed. The order rebuilt the inside of the mansion and reopened the seminary in December 1949.
By 1975, the seminary and preparatory school, known as Immaculate Heart of Mary Seminary, run by the Roman Catholic Order of the Sacred Heart, had begun to see its enrollment figures decline.
In 1981, the property again changed hands, this time being sold for $1 million to Boston developer Martin Isenberg. He invested another $500,000 in the property, opening it as a resort in 1983. It was closed after a season. In 1987, Bellefontaine was sold for $6 million to Mel and Enid Zuckerman, founders of Canyon Ranch, which at the time had a single location in Tuscon, Ariz.
On Oct. 1, 1989, Canyon Ranch in Lenox opened its doors. A two-story inn, with 126 guest rooms, and a 100,000-square-foot spa connect to the mansion, which hosts a solarium, dining rooms, guest lounges and the library.
On a recent visit to Canyon Ranch, I was astounded by the beauty of the Bellefontaine mansion, which outwardly appears unchanged, as it presides over open lawns and views that reach as far as the eye can see.
Inside, as expected, the opulence of the Fosters is found only in the rotunda and library that were spared by flames. But upon passing through the rotunda, into the sumptuous warmth of the library, the former grandeur of the rest of the estate can only be imagined, as one soaks in the carved walnut bookcase trims and the beauty of the Italian-rose marble fireplace. It is also here that it is clear, that despite what very little of this once-grand estate remains unchanged, it is with great thanks to the Zuckermans — who chose to keep it intact — we are lucky to have this tiny glimpse into its past.
- By Jennifer Huberdeau, The Berkshire Eagle
- 4 min to read
Harry K. Thaw waited patiently for the milk to be delivered on the morning of Aug. 17, 1913.
A bell sounded, signaling the arrival of the milk cart. As the gate opened to allow the cart passage onto the property, Thaw was waiting, squeezing between the gate and the milk cart as it passed by.
Thaw broke into a sprint as he made his way to a black six-cylinder Packard touring car that was waiting for him. The car sped off, racing for the Connecticut border.
Thaw had escaped from Matteawan State Hospital, an asylum for the criminally insane in Fishkill, N.Y.
Thaw was no ordinary prisoner. He was from a prominent wealthy family in Pittsburgh, Penn. In short, he was a millionaire.
And he was also a murderer. Seven years earlier, on June 25, 1906, Thaw had murdered famed architect Stanford White, of McKim, Mead and White, during a performance of "Mamzelle Champagne" at Madison Square Garden. He had been tried twice for the murder. The first trial ended in a hung jury. The second found him not guilty by reason of insanity.
A short while after Thaw's escape, police were hunting him down. His destination was without doubt Canada, but the authorities disagreed on how he would get there. Some thought he would travel north by car; others thought he would leave Connecticut by boat. The escape by boat was the heavily favored theory, as an article in the New York Times stated, "He would find good roads by way of Great Barrington and Pittsfield, Mass., but he would also find them well policed. Because of the heavy automobile traffic, especially on Sunday, in the Berkshires, a sharp watch is kept for speeders, and the most certain way for him to get into trouble would be to pass through there at great speed."
But Thaw would pass through the Berkshires, where the name of Stanford White was associated with several Gilded Age homes and buildings, including Searles Castle in Great Barrington, Naumkeag, the Stockbridge railroad station and the Stockbridge Casino, now the Berkshire Theatre Group's Fitzpatrick Stage, in Stockbridge. In fact, the fugitive millionaire dined in Lenox before proceeding on to New Hampshire and then Canada.
Thaw's family, thought to have orchestrated the escape, was sure he would not be extradited, but Canada wanted no part of the man. His doctors and lawyers arrived, prepared to challenge the country's immigration law.
"In the middle of the night, four police officers and an immigration inspector broke into his hotel room, force him to get dressed and drag him into an awaiting car. They drive to to border and literally threw him back into the U.S.," said Simon Baatz, author of "The Girl on the Velvet Swing: Sex, Murder and Madness at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century," during a recent Tea and Talk at Ventfort Hall Mansion and Gilded Age Museum.
The story of Thaw and White begins with one of the first "It Girls," Evelyn Nesbit.
Nesbit, one of the original "Gibson Girls," was a popular model among artists and photographers. Her face was on the covers of the top magazines. She was supporting her mother and brother, when she landed the role of a chorus girl in the hit musical "Florodora." In 1901, at the age of 16, she met White, 47. He soon became a patron of the Nesbit family.
While her mother was away, Evelyn, under the suggestion of White was photographed in a kimono by the photographer Rudolf Eickemeyer, Jr. The next night, Evelyn went to White's apartment after performing in "Florodora," for a dinner party. She was the only guest and by the end of the evening, Evelyn would pass out. She would awake naked and aware that she had lost her virginity.
The friendship between White and Nesbit would continue for another year. When other men were smitten with her, White would intervene. One suitor, Harry Thaw, would prompt White to pay to send Evelyn to a finishing school in New Jersey.
It seemed her budding relationship with Thaw was cut short, Evelyn in New Jersey and Thaw headed to Europe. But Evelyn would have an acute attack of appendicitis, forcing her to leave school. During her hospital stay, Thaw, back from Europe would dote on her.
Evelyn would later travel to Europe with Thaw, where he would purpose and she would refuse, telling him that she had been raped by White and was unworthy. White learning of Evelyn's new relationship would warn her of Thaw's sordid deeds — it was rumored he lured young actresses to an apartment, where he would beat them with whips.
Despite his warnings, Evelyn would marry Thaw in 1905. Her marriage was ill-matched, as Thaw's mother disapproved of her new daughter-in-law. She abhorred the thought her daughter-in-law had been an actress and was more distressed when the 1901 photos of Evelyn began appearing in advertisements and calendars.
Meanwhile, her husband's obsession with White was growing day-by-day. He hired private investigators to follow White.
Then, on June 25, 1906, Thaw, along with Evelyn and a friend, dined in New York City, before heading to the rooftop of Madison Square Garden for a show. They were seated at a table, where Thaw spent a few moments before getting up to talk to an acquaintance. White entered at 10:55 p.m. Thaw made his way to White's table, pulled out a gun and fired three shots. White slumped over and Thaw raised his gun in the air to indicate he was done. He turned himself into the first police officer who arrived.
"Then he added the man had ruined his life — or wife — I couldn't distinctly make it out," the officer told the New York Times.
Evelyn and Thaw would divorce in 1915. Thaw was arrested in 1917 for the kidnapping and whipping of a young man. He was declared insane and heavily guarded during his stay in the asylum. He would eventually be released.
White, a celebrated architect, went to his grave an accused rapist. His reputation would suffer even further during Thaw's two trials.
But did the rape even happen? Nesbit recanted the rape in her autobiography. Then what was Thaw's motive?
"Thaw believed White kept him from becoming a member of the right social clubs in New York," Baatz said. "Thaw wasn't a member of the New York social scene. He was an outsider. But, White was a member of every club he applied to. He was obsessed with Stanford White."
The Cottager is an award-winning column that runs biweekly in Berkshires Week and the Shires of Vermont. Reach Jennifer Huberdeau at jhuberdeau@berkshireeagle.com
PHOTO GALLERY | Gilded Age Fashions
LENOX — How many outfits do you pack when planning for a four-day trip?
Depending on your plans, it's probably one to two outfits per day. But in the late 1800s, packing for a four-day trip to the Berkshires would require a steamer trunk or two to fit the necessary 16 to 20 outfits needed to survive the weekend.
"Any woman traveling to be a guest would have to bring trunks and a maid to help her with them," Betsy Sherman, retired executive director of the Berkshire Historical Society, said in a recent interview.
"The Historical Society has a large collection of clothing, strongly focused on 1870 to 1930 or 1940. We have two different Victorian and Gilded Age collections," Sherman said. "When Kelly [Blau, a member of Ventfort Hall's board of directors] and I began this collaboration, the thought was to put up big beautiful gowns. We then began talking about what it was like to travel during that time period and what a woman would have to bring for a four-day visit to the Berkshires. The list was just huge, with all the different outfits and the different undergarments to go with them."
Among the outfits needed daily for a woman of stature during the Gilded Age were: a morning dress, a day dress, a tea gown, a dinner gown and a combing jacket. Other daily items included corsets, bodices, corset covers, undergarments and numerous petticoats.
"These are all items Sarah Morgan [owner of Ventfort Hall] and her guests would have worn," said Linda Rocke, marketing coordinator at Ventfort Hall.
Among the items on display are a cream-colored silk satin with lavender silk chiffon insets decorated with a lace overlay and a seafoam green silk tea gown with ecru lace trim.
"The cream-colored dinner gown was donated by Cooley Crane, a long-time board member and historical society member," Sherman said. "All of the clothing in the collection comes from local families."
She added, "The tea gown is a very interesting piece because most of the silk items in our collection are robes. Tea gowns are in their own class. The tea gown let a woman out of her corset. You could wear it to a quiet dinner at home and still be elegantly dressed."
Other items on display include a traveling costume and a maid's uniform as well as two traveling trunks. The trunks, which belonged to George Morgan and his daughter-in-law, Josephine Perry Morgan, were donated to Ventfort Hall by Daniel Popkin of Princeton, N.J.
"The trunks still have the stickers from where they traveled," Rocke said, pointing out the original Louis Vuitton makers label on George Morgan's trunk.
Reach Online Editor Jennifer Huberdeau at 413-496-6229 or on Twitter @BE_DigitalJen.
"On a slope over-looking the dark waters and densely wooded shore of Laurel Lake we built a spacious and dignified house, to which we gave the name of my great-grandfather's place, the Mount "
So wrote Edith Wharton in her autobiography, "A Backward Glance," some 20 years after she had last seen the house she designed and built in 1902. Situated on nearly 150 acres in Lenox, the 42-room "Berkshire Cottage" would provide literary inspiration for the author of more than 40 works, including "Ethan Frome," "The House of Mirth," and "The Age of Innocence."
Although Wharton and her husband, Teddy, lived at The Mount for only 10 years, she would write that she was happiest at the home, a scaled back version of the British estate Belton House with heavy classical Italian and French influences, where she was able to hone both her writing and gardening skills.
The Mount is not the oldest of the Berkshire Cottages, nor is it the largest. However, it is one of the best known Gilded Age mansions in the Berkshires, thanks, in part, to the fact that it has had many lives and many masters.
Edith, who was born into "old money," removed herself to the Berkshires because she wanted to escape the gilded homes of Newport, R.I., and its crop of socialites. So she fled to the Berkshires, an area nicknamed "inland Newport," to set up a writers' retreat of sorts, among the mammoth cottages of the social circles she was fleeing.
"One of the reasons [The Mount] wasn't as large as the other cottages, is that she wasn't as wealthy as some of her neighbors at that point. Her literary fortune doesn't begin until 'House of Mirth.' They sold their house in Newport, 'Land's End,' to pay for this house," Anne Schuyler, visitor services and group tour manager, said.
Although Edith removed herself from Newport, she did not fully remove herself from the social scene. Schuyler points out the Whartons did entertain on a smaller scale and attended many functions of their neighbors, as well.
After the Whartons sold to Mary and Albert Shuttuck, The Mount was known as "White Lodge" until about 1938. In the following years, it would serve as the home of New York Times Managing Editor Carr V. Van Anda and his wife, Louise; as Foxhollow School and Shakespeare & Company's performance space.
With my husband and two children in tow, I arrived at The Mount on Memorial Day — a day after isolated storms pelted Lenox and Stockbridge, with thunder, rain and hail. Large white tents with wooden floors lined with folding chairs, metal lanterns and streams of water — the remnants of a wedding the previous evening — greeted us on the front lawns of the estate. As we walked the quarter-mile to the house on its white gravel driveway, the need for privacy became apparent in the design. Our first brush with history was very close to the house, where hidden on a rise in grove of trees the gravestones for several dogs lie, including Edith's pet Toto.
Nearby, the house waited to greet us, its white facade and black shutters, beckoning us to enter and explore. We opted for a self -guided tour and stepped into a world of light pastels, marble statues, hand-carved wood treatments, barrel-vaulted ceilings, and rooms that flow endlessly into one another. In Teddy's white-walled den, we learned of his slow mental break-down, while the charities created by Edith during Word War I were explored in another suite. In another corridor we learned of her friendships with other literary giants and of the fights that ensued during the building of The Mount.
We ended our tour in the great outdoors, passing other families in the formal gardens, where bubbling fountains once played host to writers and politicians alike.
Although Edith Wharton spent less than a decade at her beloved Mount, one can see why its serene charms stayed with her for decades to come.
Step back in time and enjoy the merriment of what was once considered a must for any Berkshire socialite at the 18th annual Pleasure Carriage Driving Show, hosted by the Colonial Carriage & Driving Society and Orleton Farm. The carriage driving show will feature tests of reinsmanship and more. Carriage drivers from more than seven states, along with their equine partners, drive not for cash prizes, but for coveted ribbons and trophies.
More information: edithwharton.org or 413-551-5111
- By Jennifer Huberdeau, The Berkshire Eagle
- 3 min to read
LENOX — On a clear day, with the aid of a telescope, it is said that the view from the top of Hotel Aspinwall stretched as far as Worcester in one direction and to Albany, N.Y., and the Hudson River in the other.
Five stories tall and 1,400 feet above sea level, Hotel Aspinwall offered views that stretched for miles. From its perch above Lenox, surrounded by the Woolsey Woods, it also offered privacy for the elite who stayed there — ambassadors, statesmen, movie stars, foreign dignitaries and royalty, the country's elite and at least one president.
It's lofty seat would also save the surrounding woods and homes during the early hours of April 25, 1931, when a police officer on his front porch a mile away, spotted flames rising from the hotel. Officer Timothy Dunn would raise the alarm that would bring firefighters from Lenox, Lee, Stockbridge, Great Barrington and Pittsfield to battle a blaze that would leave a $1 million loss in its wake.
Early beginnings
Three decades earlier, 410 acres that once belonged to the Aspinwall and Woolsey families would be sold to New York attorney and financier Gen. Thomas A Hubbard and his partners who had plans for a grand hotel. The land had previously been sold to three businessmen, who had intended to carve it up into a community similar to Tuxedo Park, N.Y.
Built over the course of 15 months, the hotel was designed by Allen & Vance of Pittsfield and built by a local company out of Lenox. It first opened its doors to the press in late June 1902, just ahead of the summer season and the nuptials of Lila Vanderbilt Sloane to W. B. Osgood Field. According to reports in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the hotel had 250 guest rooms, a total of 310 rooms in all and could accommodate up to 400 guests.
A ballroom at the south end of the building was said to seat 500 guests and a 28-foot wide piazza extended on three sides to allow for extra dance floor. A rotunda at the end of the main corridor was host to concerts by the hotel orchestra. But perhaps the most written about feature of the hotel was its veranda, a total of 11,000 feet that wrapped around the building on all four sides.
The grounds, which remained open to the public as they were during the time of the Woolsey family, were filled with 10 miles of motor and riding trails. Golfing was possible at the nearby Lenox Country Club and the hotel also had a boat house.
The Last Days
As the Gilded Age came to a close and vacations at resorts in Catskills and Adirondack mountains became more fashionable, the era of places like Hotel Aspinwall began to wane. New managers came and went, as did plans to extend the hotel season into the winter months. For the final 16 years of its existence, the hotel had been managed by Leo A Tworoger and his son-in-law, John Stanley. On the fateful morning of April 25, 1931, Tworoger and Stanley were in Hamilton, Bermuda, where they managed the Princess hotel during the winter season.
The pair had just renewed their lease for three additional years and had ordered $12,000 worth of work for the property, including a private golf course and additional horse and car trails.
It was 1 a.m. when Officer Timothy Dunn spotted the flames that would signal the end of the hotel with its fine maple floors and expensive oriental rugs.
"The hilltop seemed to be completely enveloped in flames — shooting upwards and licking the ebony heavens with their carmine tongues. The sparks flew in all directions, showering the town and threatening hundreds of homes," an Eagle reporter on the scene wrote. "In the crowd who watched were noctambulists who had not gone to bed, out to parties and dances, they were homeward bound when attracted by the spectacular blaze."
Although Hotel Aspinwall was built with its own water supply, the lines up to the hostelry had been emptied to avoid a winter freeze. By the time firefighters made it to the top of the hill, connecting hoses together to pump water to the top, the blaze had consumed the entire structure and had moved on to the servant dormitories. Their efforts were spent on saving two cabins and the garage and stables from burning, as well as making sure the dry timber woods did not go up in flames.
Although an official cause was never determined, it was reported the fire, which started on the veranda, was most likely caused by a smoldering cigarette left behind by "parkers" — young couples who would seek out the isolated hotel grounds for trysts.
The Ruins of Aspinwall
Hotel Aspinwall was never rebuilt. The land was sold off and logged for a time. Then in 1956, some 360 acres, including the ruins of the hotel were offered to the town for $12,000. The woods would once again welcome the public, this time as Kennedy Park. Here, today, the remains of the grand hotel can be found — walls covered in vines; bricks and marble slabs coated in dust and dirt; water pipes poking out of moss and grass mounds — ghosts of a time of grandeur.
The Cottager is an award-winning column that runs biweekly in Berkshires Week and the Shires of Vermont. Reach Jennifer Huberdeau at jhuberdeau@berkshireeagle.com
LENOX — On the evening of Sept. 15, 1893, Sarah Spencer Morgan and her husband, George H. Morgan, celebrated their new "cottage," Ventfort Hall with a gathering of their closest friends and neighbors — about 150 in all.
Although the 28-room Jacobean Revival brick and sandstone mansion, designed by architects Roche & Tilden had been completed earlier that year and opened in June for the start of the summer season, the Morgans did not hold their housewarming party, called an "at home," until that fall. One can speculate the delay may have been due to the opening of the 1893 World's Fair that May, which drew many of the "Summer Colony" members to Chicago for part of the summer. A few months after its opening, the fair had lost its luster and the Cottagers had returned to their normal summer and fall haunts.
A society column published in the New York Times on Sept. 17, 1893, reported on the start of the fall festivities in Lenox, including the largest entertainment of the week: the Morgan's housewarming party.
"The cottagers delight in having house parties in October and November, because of the beauties of the late fall here," the society column begins. "The Morgans are rather quiet people, and while they entertain considerably, they do not care to have any great amount of gossip about it outside. This occasion brought together nearly all the cottagers and their guests, many of whom visited this residence for the first time. It is complete in every detail in furnishings and fittings, and it makes one of the finest summer homes in the town. The rooms and halls are very large and the house is so arranged that the first floor opens into one large room, so that the 150 or more people who were there on Friday evening had no difficulty in moving about and there was no crowding."
Among those in attendance were Emily Thorne Vanderbilt Sloane and William D. Sloane of Elm Court; Anson and Helen Louisa Phelps Stokes, who were in the process of building Shadow Brook; Count Carlos de Heredia and Countess Georgie Bruce Cook de Heredia of Wheatleigh; Baron Pavel L'vovitch Schilling and Prince Mikhail Mikhailovich Cantacuzene, also known as Count Speransky, a Russian general and ambassador who would marry Julia Dent Grant, granddaughter of President Ulysses S. Grant, in 1899.
Other guests included: Dr. and Mrs. Richard C. Greenleaf of Windyside; Hannah Minthorne Tompkins Lydig and David Lydig of Thistlewood; Mr. and Mrs. Henri Braem of Ethelwyn; Mr. and Mrs. John S. Barnes of Coldbrook; Joseph and Harriette Burden of Underledge; Mr. and Mrs. Richard S. Dana, who resided in what is now known as the Birchwood Inn; Gen. Francis C. Barlow and his wife of Sunny Bank; Mr. and Mrs. J. Searle Barclay; and George and Lili Higginson of The Corners.
While details on the actual party are limited, we know the Morgans continued to celebrate the fall season with a series of "open houses" well into November.
On Nov. 11, the Buffalo Evening New's society column reported: "Ventfort, the lovely new Lenox home of Mr. and Mrs. George H. Morgan, has been for the last month, and is still, the scene of a merry house party, the chief amusement of which is the rides and drives around the picturesque Berkshire during the day, and the evening dances, which the cold weather makes agreeable."
GREAT BARRINGTON — Upon her death in July 1891, Mary Frances Sherwood Hopkins Searles would be remembered as a philanthropist who shunned ostentation and the notorious social gatherings of America's elite. But by September, her sanity and her second marriage would be called into question as her adopted son, Timothy Hopkins, appealed her will.
In September 1891, Hopkins, along with a few other would-be heirs, appealed the will in the Probate Court of Salem, arguing that the will had been changed and she would not intentionally leave everything to her second husband, Edward F. Searles. At one point it was alleged Searles had spirited his ill wife away to their Metheun estate to seize control of her fortune. It was also alleged that Searles wormed his way into the marriage on false pretenses, even posing as a medium to win both her heart and her fortune.
On Sept. 8, 1891, the son of a former family physician testified in court that during his time as a border of the Widow Hopkins he had once posed as a medium for her (under the best of intentions). A spiritualist, she frequently held mystical circles at the Nob Hill house, which Searles would soon become a devoted attendee of and eventually serve as a medium himself.
The man, identified as Cook, testified that he thought Searles had his eye on the widow's estate. He said this became apparent when the widow asked if she should give support to her adopted son in the present or wait until her death to bestow fortune upon him. As recorded in the New York Times, Cook said the answers from the spirits were typically delivered by "table tipping," with the table lifting in one direction for one answer and in another for the other. On this particular evening, he said he struggled with Searles who was trying to tip the table in the opposite direction. It was his opinion that Searles was looking to cut the son out of the will.
Widowed in 1878 after the untimely death of her husband, Central Pacific Railroad magnate Mark Hopkins, Mary Frances (reportedly called Ellen by her parents and Frances by friends) soon found herself the heir to a fortune of about $23 million, much of which was heavily invested in railroad stocks. She owned 40-room Gothic mansion on San Francisco's Nob Hill.
It was there that she became smitten with the decorator sent by the firm she hired to dress the estate. Soon after she would hire Searles, who was 22 years her junior, to furnish the new chapel and parish rooms of the First Congregational Church in Great Barrington, where she owned Kellogg Terrace. She had once attended school on the grounds of the estate at an academy owned by her two aunts.
In 1885, work commenced on the French Chateau-style mansion, designed by the architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White. Blue dolomite was quarried off of East Mountain Road for the building, which has seven towers and a total of six stories. Solid bronze doors, cast in Munich, Germany, would be guarded by marble sphinxes. Another set of double doors, leading into the Great Hall were said to have come from Windsor Castle. It was also rumored that the hand-polished English oak walls were taken from two ancient ships that were towed to America for the specific purpose of lining the rooms. The largest home pipe organ in the country was said to grace the home's music hall and marble from around the world made up the floors, walls and pillars on each level. Among its 40-plus rooms were 36 fire places, dozens of bedrooms dressed in silks and satin, a library, an atrium, two secret passages and a Louis XIV drawing room. In the sub-basement, a dungeon-like catacomb was constructed to hold bins of coal for the furnace. A power plant was located in a nearby house for the castle's electrical needs. The house cost $2.5 million to build and even more to decorate.
The Searles, who married in a quiet ceremony in 1887, also owned estates in Methuen, Manhattan, Block Island and Paris.
By March 1892, Timothy Hopkins, dropped the appeal and settled for a few million outside of court. But during this time, rumors had swirled about Searles and his wife's relationship. He would soon abandon their home in Great Barrington and move many of the castle's treasures to his Methuen estate. The great organ was cut out and removed to the Congregational Church in Methuen.
As time passed, the property once again became a school, with the castle first hosting the Barrington School for Girls. In 1950, the property was sold to James J. Joyce and his wife, Margaret, who owned the Berkshire Inn. In 1951, they sold it to the Home Insurance Co. It changed hands several times in the late ''70s, before being purchased in 1984 by the founders of John Dewey Academy, which opened in 1985.
As in the days of the Searles, few are invited inside the castle, now John Dewey Academy, a year-round co-education college preparatory therapeutic school for bright adolescents, ages 15 to 21, who have not been successful in other schools.
"Our students are highly-gifted and bright," Andrea Nathans, executive director, said during a recent tour. "Our academics are well-known for being rigorous and meaningful."
As we enter the castle, a pair of white marble lions stands guard at the main entrance. Ghastly door knockers, straight out of a Dickens novel, stare back from the heavy front doors. Inside, another set of lions rise up in the Great Hall, where English oak still panels the walls.
The atrium, the centerpiece of the over 54,000-square-foot residence, sits behind the doors, where soft light bathes the marble columns. Off of the atrium are a dining hall and offices, including the restored Louis XIV drawing room with its gilded leaf decorations.
We travel through the butler's pantry, where call buttons from the rooms above are still present, to a lower kitchen and servants quarters reminiscent of Downtown Abbey. Two ancient ice boxes remain in a hallway near a non-functional dumbwaiter. On the upper floors, the structure mimics those below. The maze of rooms off of it opens into dorm rooms for the girls, living quarters for the house parent and classrooms. (The boys stay in the nearby carriage house.)
Our visit was brief, as classes were still in session, but as students hurried to their next class, it seemed fitting that the castle is home to school.
- By Jennifer Huberdeau, The Berkshire Eagle
- 6 min to read
LENOX — The survival of Ventfort Hall is a tale of intervention — by a group of local preservationists and perhaps a ghost or two.
Built by Sarah Spencer Morgan and her husband George Hale Morgan in 1893 at a cost of $900,000, the 28-room Jacobean brick and sandstone mansion was in shambles when the Ventfort Hall Association rescued it from the wrecking ball in 1997.
"When it was purchased by the association, there was a hole in the roof and holes in the floor. A fireplace from the second floor had fallen through two floors and was in the basement," Linda Rocke, marketing coordinator for Ventfort Hall and Gilded Age Museum, said during a recent tour of the historic home. "It was the sheer will and determination of the people who founded the Ventfort Hall Association that saved and restored this house.
"For those of us who work here, volunteer here, or serve on the board, there's just something about this house that we love," she added. "It's not like the other homes ... It was meant to be enjoyed."
And enjoyed it was by its original owners, who, according to some, may still linger in the house. Whether or not Sarah and George Morgan still visit the home was the subject of an episode of "Ghost Hunters" in 2012.
As I arrived at Ventfort Hall on a sunny Tuesday morning, I realized that even though I've twice walked the halls of this estate during paranormal investigations, I've never been on the grounds before sunset. Seeing the red stone home in daylight brings a new appreciation.
Upon entering the foyer, I was in awe of how bright and airy the great hall is, as light filtered through stained-glass windows above me, brightening the large area where dark-colored carved oak panels line the walls. It's here I met Rocke and soon learned of how Ventfort Hall is the second house with that name to sit in this location.
The first house, an Italianate villa named Vent Fort, meaning "Strong Wind," was built by New Yorkers Ogden and Elizabeth Haggerty in 1853. The summer home would remain in the location of the present house nearly 40 years, entertaining a variety of notable guests. Among them would be Col. Robert Gould Shaw, leader of the Massachusetts 54th, the north's first regiment of free African-American soldiers in the Civil War, and the Haggerty's son-in-law. Shaw and his wife, Annie Kneeland Haggerty Shaw, would honeymoon at the home in May 1863. The couple was married for 77 days before he died in battle.
During the 1880s, Flora Payne Whitney, wife of U.S. Secretary of the Navy William C. Whitney, rented the home, where she often entertained first lady Frances Folsom Cleveland.
In 1891, the Morgans purchased the Haggerty estate for $120,000, moved the house across the street and renamed it "Bel Air." It remained intact until 1965, when it was destroyed by fire.
"George and Sarah Morgan were seventh cousins. George was not from the financial side of the family, as Sarah was," Rocke said, noting that Sarah's brother was the banker J.P. Morgan. "In 1891, Sarah inherited $3 million. Her father had died in an accident in Monte Carlo. They opened the house in 1893. Sarah would only enjoy it for three years before she died. She left the estate to their three adult children, granting George lifetime rights to it."
After George Morgan died in 1911, the children sold off the contents of the home and rented it out first to a Vanderbilt heir and then to the Bonsal family. The Bonsal family rented the estate for seven years before purchasing it for $103,000 in 1925 and renaming it "Pembroke House." In 1945, it was sold to Arthur J. Miller for $22,500 and was used as a dorm for Tanglewood students. In the 1950s, the home, known as "Festival House," was owned by Bruno Aron and his wife.
"It was described as a bohemian hotel. Peter Seeger was the artist-in-residence," Rocke said. "It was a summer camp for grown-ups. Two adults could rent a private room with a private bath, with two meals a day for an entire week during the height of Tanglewood season for $70."
From 1965 to 1976, the house was home to The Fokine Ballet Camp. It then came under the ownership of The Bible Speaks, a religious community that eventually abandoned the property. In 1991, developer Arthur Ivey purchased the mansion with the intention of turning it into a nursing home. When he decided the property was too far gone for renovations, he began stripping the house of its fixtures and woodwork to sell them. When it became public that his intention was to raze the mansion, the Venfort Hall Association was founded.
Since the mansion was reopened in 2001 as Ventfort Hall Mansion and Gilded Age Museum, the home has been slowly restored, with new rooms opening every few years.
"A lot of the woodwork had been taken off of the walls, but was still in the building," Rocke said. "It was a matter of figuring out what went where. We were also very lucky that relatively none of the stained glass windows were broken."
When built, the 28,000-square-foot house had 15 bedrooms, 17 fireplaces, a billiard room, a library, a bowling alley, central heating, an elevator and a burglar alarm. The grounds featured two gate houses, an ice house, six greenhouses and a view of the Stockbridge Bowl.
"It has both gas and electric lighting," Rocke said. "George Westinghouse was a neighbor and friend. He had private generators."
It's not hard to imagine Ventfort Hall's elegance in its day. In the great hall, a gigantic stone fireplace with large lions adorning its mantle, greet those who enter. To the right, a white-walled salon, which functions as a gift shop, is filled with antique couches and plants. The airy room once had its walls draped in French silk, as was the custom.
A little farther down the hall, a wood-paneled library is used for tour groups and lectures. The bookcases lining the walls are permanent fixtures and once had ballet barres attached to them.
"We've learned this from the former students, now in their 50s, who are returning to take tours of the mansion," she said.
In a nearby dining room lined with Cuban mahogany, a table set for a Victorian tea service sits under a chandelier in the center of the room, under the watchful eye of Sarah and George Morgan's portraits. A trip down a hallway takes us past the morning and writing rooms, which are used as offices, to the billiard room, where the richly carved wood on the fire place and walls was imported from Europe.
During a short stop on the covered porch, which runs the length of the house, Rocke pointed out the remaining trees planted by George Morgan — a Gingko biloba and a few Japanese maples.
"See the lawn," she said, pointing to the massive yard before us. "That's the lawn that Michael Caine and Toby Mcguire walk up to get to the orphanage in 'The Cider House Rules'."
"And this is the door they enter through," she said, putting her hand on the door as we make our way back inside.
For me, the most exciting part of the tour is the second floor. As we climbed its massive stairwell, Rocke pointed out the minstrel's galley, an open space overlooking the great hall, where musicians sat and played for the guests below. It is from here that you can view the plaster Scottish pendant ceilings, much of which was restored by master craftsman Jeffrey Gulick. (In other areas, woodwork was restored by master craftsman Michael Costerisan.)
At the top of the staircase, a small alcove filled with sumptuous chairs and couches is tucked underneath the stairwell leading to a third floor that is closed to the public. Here the main bedrooms belonging to Sarah and George Morgan exist. George's room is not presented as a bedroom, but as a dining room. The furniture and china, on loan from Giraud Foster's granddaughter, Jane Foster, are from the nearby Bellefontaine estate, which is now Canyon Ranch.
"We like to say that we have a house with no possessions and [Bellefontaine] has possessions without a house," Rocke said. "It allows us to give a sense of what the furniture and possessions of an estate from this time would look like."
The exhibit, "Treasures of Bellefontaine," includes Royal Worcester china, gilded Venetian glass, American and European silver. A display of fans are found in the rooms connecting the rooms with Sarah's suite, where Carl Sprague has recreated her boudoir.
"While we didn't have the original furniture, we did have an inventory of what was in the room. We knew there were two brass beds. We knew there was a writing desk and an armoire," she said. "We did find the original wallpaper and had it recreated for this room."
Although a reproduction, it is easy to imagine spending hours in this room, writing letters, planning parties and preparing for afternoon outings.
The floor has several additional rooms that are restored, including two bedrooms and a nursery. Although the second floor's east wing remains closed to the public as it is slowly prepped for renovations, it is possible to view those rooms through a window in the door that opens into the additional space.
We made our way back downstairs, where I stopped in the great hall one last time to marvel at the artistry that surrounded me.
As I prepared to leave this grand home, I stopped by the front desk, where for a $1, I picked up a copy of "Mrs. Morgan's Neighbors," a self-guided driving tour of the Gilded Age homes of Kemble Street and Old Stockbridge Road, which I tuck away for another day.
Jennifer Huberdeau, the Berkshire Eagle's online editor, is exploring the Berkshire Cottages, one by one this summer. She can be reached by email at jhuberdeau@berkshireeagle.com.
By Jennifer Huberdeau
jhuberdeau@berkshireeagle.com @BE_DigitalJen on Twitter
Editor's note: This is the second of three columns about the Gilded Age Cottages that make up the present day campus of Tanglewood.
The history of Lenox and of Tanglewood might be slightly different today had a young Samuel Gray Ward never met Margaret Fuller while staying with his Harvard Professor John Farrar in the late 1830s.
Fuller, a well-known intellectual of her own right and colleague of Ralph Waldo Emerson, would be responsible for introducing Ward not only to Emerson and the Transcendental movement, but also to his wife, Anna Hazard Barker. Those introductions would both be instrumental in shaping the future of Lenox as a society resort sought out by the "Berkshire Cottagers."
When Ward met Fuller, he was a poet who wanted nothing to do with his father's line of work. Fuller, then editor of Emerson's "The Dial," would publish his poetry, while he taught her about the world of art. Following in the footsteps of his father, Thomas Wren Ward, the esteemed American representative of London's Baring Brothers bank, was the furthest thing from his mind. He planned to remain a member of Emerson's Transcendentalist Circle, writing poetry and analyses for "The Dial" until he met Anna during the summer of 1836. In 1837, just home from his European trek, Ward put aside his poetry and went to work as a banker. He also courted Miss Barker for the next three years, traveling often to her family home in New Orleans, before marrying her in 1840.
"By 1843, he made up his mind that trade was not compatible with his disposition, that country life would be more suitable to him, a scholarly and intellectual man," May Callas writes in "Profiles of Tanglewood Families" of Ward's decision to move his young family to the Berkshires. If there was a place to become a gentleman farmer at the time, it was in the Berkshires, where a 'hive' of intellectuals was buzzing about the Sedgewick clan.
In "Hawthorne's Lenox: The Tanglewood Circle," author Cornelia Brooke Gilder writes of the young family's Berkshire beginnings: "It all began in 1844 on a dreary day in the third week of March, when a handsome, well-heeled 27-year-old Samuel Gray Ward (1817-1907) strode across Daniel Barnes' brown, tufted meadow with a glorious view of Lake Mahkeenac and pronounced it 'very good.' "
Wards's guide at the time was the esteemed Berkshire Clerk of Courts Charles Sedgewick, who arranged for the family's lodging while their three-story home was built. That October, the couple's third child, Thomas, was born in Lenox.
The home, Highwood Manor, completed in 1845, is credited to architect Richard Upjohn, known best for New York City's Trinity Church, who was building a church for the Episcopal congregation in Stockbridge at the time. Upjohn would later design the Tappen house, which still sits within walking distance of Highwood.
Whether or not Upjohn, whose signature was Gothic Revival manses and churches, designed the house is somewhat controversial, as the house's original design is more of an Italianate country house. Of this Callas wrote, "... but there is correspondence between Ward and his father, which mentions construction of Highwood done by the firm of Upjohn. Since Richard Michael Upjohn joined his father's firm the same year that Highwood was completed, it may be the younger Upjohn, assisting his father, added his own design incentives. There are design details in the Tappan house that are similar to those at Highwood, i.e., window soffits and apron benches."
What is for certain about Highwood Manor are two things: It is considered to be the first of the Gilded Age cottages and it, not the Tappan house, was the inspiration for the porch in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Tanglewood Tales." We also know that despite Ward's affection for his adoptive "Lenox valley," the house and its 220 acres sat on the Stockbridge side of the town line.
The Wards lived at Highwood year round and became part of their adopted society, while keeping close ties with those in Boston. Guests would stay at a little red house (later inhabited by Nathaniel Hawthorne's family) at a nearby farm. Many of those guests, including the Tappans and Higginsons, would become inspired to build their own country cottages.
But the snow-filled winters and long spring thaws at Highwood would not last long for the family, as Ward was soon recalled to Boston to aid his father. Of Ward's recall to Boston, Edward Waldo Emerson wrote in "The Early Years of the Saturday Club: 1855 to 1870": "As Samuel Ward was working in his Lenox garden, he saw, like an apparition approaching, his father's factotum, and on the moment foresaw his own doom."
Ward was to become a banker like his father after all. The Wards didn't give up on returning to Lenox. They rented out Highwood to their friends, William and Caroline Tappen, who were living in the Red House at the time, and boarded their three oldest children with a clergyman and his wife. It was during the Tappens occupation of Highwood that their friends, Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne, took up residence in the Red House. The Tappans now owned the house and the farm adjacent to Highwood. It was on the long-gone porches of Highwood that Hawthorne would be surrounded by children, a setting he reproduced in his children's books, "A Wonder-Book," and "Tanglewood Tales."
"The house and situation are described with particulars that identify it closely with the Tappans' Highwood ... In the summer of 1851, Mrs. Hawthorne wrote to her mother: 'On Sunday, Mr. Samuel G. Ward came to us. He gave me an excellent drawing of Highwood Porch, for 'A Wonder-Book,' which he said he asked Burrill Curtis to draw. We have sent it to Mr. Fields," author M. A. DeWolfe Howe wrote in "The Tale of Tanglewood: Scene of the Berkshire Music Festivals."
It is Hawthorne who is given credit for coming up with the names Tanglewood and Shadow Brook, which would become the name of another nearby grand estate overlooking the Stockbridge Bowl.
In 1857, the Wards realized their time at Highwood had come to an end and sold the beloved Highwood. A year later, following the death of his father, Ward would be the sole agent for Barings. Nine years later he would orchestrate the financing of the United State's $7.2 million purchase of Alaska from Russia. (The Wards would later build a cottage in Newport, R.I., which they sold to Edith Wharton, before building another cottage in Lenox. Ward's second cottage would be the grand Oakwood, which he later sold to Anson Phelps Stokes. Stokes turned the home into a stable for his grand, 100-room estate, Shadow Brook.)
The Wards sold Highwood to another Boston couple, William Story Bullard and his wife, Louisa Norton Bullard, who had rented the house for two years. Bullard, a merchant who made his fortune in the East India trade, sold his company when new protective tariffs were introduced. A rich man, the couple who had four sons and a daughter, settled into their new home, which they were not afraid to alter.
"The Bullards appreciated and enjoyed the magnificent property and they continued to develop and maintain it for more than 100 years it remained in the family. Inevitably changes were made to the house, including, and most obviously, the removal of the porches on the first and second floors and the removal of the chimney pots. A more formal, smaller single-story porch was added to the garden entrance," Callas wrote of the Bullards. A driveway, which passed through a porte cochère on the house's south side, was installed along the lake side of the house sometime after 1900 by Dr. Norton Bullard, a neurologist, who inherited the property from his parents.
Upon his death in 1931, Dr. Bullard left part of his estate to establish the salary for the Bullard Professor of Neuropathology at Harvard.
An amateur botanist, he wanted to leave Highwood to Harvard as a wildflower sanctuary. His wife, Mary Reynolds Bullard, continued to live at the manor house, and in 1954 bequeathed the estate's 70 acres along Lake Mahkeenac to the Stockbridge Bowl Association. Upon her death in 1960, she honored her husband's wishes and left Highwood to Harvard, which it in turn put the property that it could not afford to maintain on the market.
The Boston Symphony Orchestra, which now owned the Tanglewood estate, turned down the chance to acquire Highwood and it was instead purchased in 1961 by a Harvard alumnus, New York lawyer Mason Harding and his wife, Mary Riker Harding. Harding, whose father maintained a second home in Lenox, was deeply involved in the Berkshires and was trustee of both the Lenox Library and the Hancock Shaker Village.
The couple and their five children spent the summers and holidays at the house in Lenox, while maintaining their permanent residence in New York City.
"Idyllic summers did not last long. In the late 1970s, Tanglewood and the BSO sponsored rock concerts at various times throughout the season ... Mr. Harding complained that he didn't expect to have Woodstock in his backyard and brought suit against the BSO to limit the length and noise level of the concerts. Adjustments were made and eventually the suit was withdrawn," Callas states of the Hardings.
The Hardings made the last alterations to Highwood in 1982, when the kitchen was renovated among major interior renovations. The back of the house was also extended at this point.
In 1986, after requiring open heart surgery, the Hardings ended their tenure at Highwood Manor, selling the estate to the Boston Symphony Orchestra for $1.7 million.
•••
Nestled behind a grove of trees, on a hill between the Koussevitzky Music Shed and Seiji Ozawa Hall, Highwood Manor House still presides over a breathtaking view of the Stockbridge Bowl. It's green lawn, now devoid of wildflowers stretches down to the road, where another grouping of trees, with twisted boughs, stand sentinel as patrons dine or read at tables up above.
I meet my guide, Mary Lincoln, one of Tanglewood's many volunteers, at the back of the house, where an extension, known as the "press porch" during the summer months, juts out from the main building. She describes how the house was scrubbed of its more typical Italianate markings over its many renovations and additions, as we move inside the house, which now hosts the organization's administrative offices and practice rooms on its second and third floors. The house is also used for private functions and hosts fixed price buffet-style dinners of Friday and Saturdays, and Sunday brunch, during the BSO's summer season.
While neither my guide or I are sure what interior renovations were made by the Hardings in 1982, it is quite obvious that only a few original design elements still exist on the first floor. The remnants of a wide front entry hall can be seen near a stairwell leading to the upper floors, while rooms that were obviously a parlor and dining room still exist near the lake side entrance. I'm reminded of Linwood, now part of the Norman Rockwell Museum campus, an early cottage built around the same time period. Only here, the walls have been stripped of all paper and color and painted a crisp white or subtle gray. The history and architecture peek out infrequently, when a shuttered fireplace or set of French doors are seen.
"The Bullard family was here from 1855 to 1961," Lincoln says as we make our way up to the second and third floors. "In 1920, Katherine Bullard [sister to Dr. Norton Bullard] built her own Italianate villa on the property at a cost of $300,000. She died in Boston shortly after it was built. She left it to her siblings, but no one wanted to live in it. It was torn down [all except for a small ell (wing) that was moved off the property] without being occupied."
The second floor is similar to the first, only more of the rooms have been painted in slightly brighter colors. It is here, on the second floor that a ghost, that reportedly spooked BSO conductor Leonard Bernstein, is supposed to roam. While not mentioned by my guide, tales of cold spots, and the feeling of being shoved or having hot breath on the back of one's neck, have made their way into ghost guide books about the Berkshires. If there is a ghost, it does not make its presence known to us.
On the third floor, we peek in the five or six rooms that once made for stuffy summer servants quarters, where interns and staff are busy tapping on keyboards or answering phones.
On our way out, we stop on the lawn to take in the views and take a moment to figure out just where, in days long ago, on a long-forgotten porch, before the concerts and cars, Nathaniel Hawthorne spent hours dreaming up tales of Tanglewood.
- By Jennifer Huberdeau, The Berkshire Eagle
- 4 min to read
LENOX, MASS. — "We've had three or four presidents and three or four queens, but never a king."
At its social height, Elm Court, the 106-room, 55,000-square-foot summer cottage of Emily Vanderbilt Sloane White, was host to a variety of notable figures, including the financier John Pierpont "J.P." Morgan and her niece, Consuelo Vanderbilt Spencer-Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough.
In a 1948 North Adams Transcript article, Alphonse Chague, veteran superintendent of the estate, recalled meeting many notable diplomats during his tenure, including French military leader Marshal Ferdinand Foch. Foch was one of several foreign dignitaries said to visit the estate in 1919, as the guests of Emily Vanderbilt Sloane's soon-to-be husband, Henry White, a former ambassador to Italy and France, for the so-called "Elm Court Talks," one of a series of preliminary conferences that would shape the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations.
Elm Court
When construction began on Elm Court, so named for the towering American elm that once graced the property, its owner was known as Emily Vanderbilt Sloane. She began building the American shingle-style estate in 1885 with her husband, William D. Sloane. Sloane and his brother John, of Wyndhurst, owned W. & J. Sloane and made their fortune importing oriental rugs and selling home furnishings.
The Sloanes, who had five children, aimed to build a modest summer cottage with the aid of architects Peabody and Stern. However, at the end of 1885, Emily's father, railroad tycoon William Henry Vanderbilt, died suddenly, leaving each of his eight children $10 million. With money no longer a factor, the plans for the home changed before it was completed.
Over the next 15 years, as the other Vanderbilt children built their mansions in Newport and Ashville, N.C., Elm Court grew in size and prestige. It would take 13 months and some 70 designs for Frederick Law Olmsted, the architect of New York City's Central Park, to plan the estate's gardens. The estate would also house 23 greenhouses, including one large enough to house palm trees, a butler's house, gardener's house, several barns, stables and carriage houses. The estate was reported to have 4,000 chickens, produce 40,000 pounds of hay a year and have 25 coaches and horse teams.
Following William Sloane's death in 1915, Emily continued to summer in Lenox. In 1920, at the age of 68, Emily Vanderbilt married Henry White, 70. White, a diplomat, died at the estate in 1927 after an unsuccessful surgery. Emily would live almost another 20 years, dying at Elm Court in the summer of 1946 at the age of 94.
In 1947, Elm Court was sold to the owners of High Lawn Farm, White's granddaughter, Marjorie Field Wilde and her husband, Helm George Wilde. A year later it reopened as an inn. After 12 years, the family mothballed the inn and boarded up the home. Over the next 40 years the once grand estate fell into ruin, as vandals and thieves stripped it bare, spray painted walls, and ripped out fixtures and paneling.
In 1999, Elm Court, then owned by great-granddaughter Lila Wilde Berle via a real estate trust, was sold for $947,380 to White's great-great-grandson Robert Berle and his wife, Sonya. The couple would spend three years renovating and restoring the home, turning it into a luxury bed-and-breakfast. The couple sold the estate in 2012 for $9.8 million to Travaasa Experiential Resorts, a collection of destinations resorts and spas, ending its 137-year history with the family of Emily Vanderbilt Sloane White.
Despite Travaasa securing special permits from both Lenox and Stockbridge, plans to invest $50 million to turn the 90-acre estate into luxury resort and spa, with 112 guest rooms (96 rooms in a new addition) and a 60-seat restaurant, are on hold pending a case which will be heard in Massachusetts Land Court on Aug. 16.
•••
Entering the Elm Court estate through iron gates and driving down its white, crushed-gravel driveway is a surreal experience, as the Gilded Age cottage slowly rises in the distance behind a second gateway of marble pillars. The estate's fountain, a replica of the Fontana delle Tartarughe (Fountain of Turtles) in Rome, languishes on the lawn. Unlike its twin in the gardens of The Elms at the Vanderbilt estate, the Breakers, in Newport, the fountain has seen better days. Long gone are the bronze turtles and male figures riding dolphins — ravaged by both time and thieves.
My worries that this is yet another cottage that no longer glitters are fleeting, as I'm greeted at the door by Les Freeman, the estate's general manager. He warns me that the billiards wing of the house has not been restored, as he ushers me into the entrance hall where I'm entranced by the carvings of birds, vines and trees on the brownstone fireplace. It's here that Freeman shares an estate secret with me.
"Emily Vanderbilt had servant call buttons placed all around the house. Her great-great-grandson told met that she not only put them in the walls, but also on the floor. Only she knew the locations of them," he says, stepping on a button to demonstrate. "If she was at a party and she didn't want to talk to someone, she'd stroll around the room, push a button with her foot and a servant would come out to get her."
I'm told the rug in the library was found in storage by the Sloane family's descendents, as we pass through to see breath-taking views of Stockbridge Bowl. Beneath the windows, a fountain is waiting to be restored and gardens planted.
"Olmsted left the plans for the gardens with the family," Freeman said. "It's the intention of the new owners to phase them in over several years."
I marvel at the restoration efforts as we walk through rooms with plaster ceilings filled with laurel and wreath reliefs. At the same time I'm saddened as Freeman relates how silk tapestries were literally cut out of the dining room's walls, mahogany paneled walls were kicked in and spindles from the staircase railings were burnt in the fireplaces. But for every bit of destruction I hear about, there seems to be a glint of Gilded Age that survives.
Freeman has high hopes for the estate. He talks of plans to restore the closed wing and to restore the greenhouses, where fresh fruits and vegetables will be grown for the restaurant. You can see him imagine what was and what is to come — perhaps he'll get to entertain the king that never arrived during Mr. Chague's time.
ELM COURT ESTATE
310 Old Stockbridge Road, Lenox, Mass.
Information: http://elmcourt.com
When the bachelor Frederick Schermerhorn died in March 1919, he left the widow who summered across the street from his Lenox estate, Pinecroft, a sum of $750,000.
Hannah Minthorne Tompkins Lydig, was originally poised to inherit Pinecoft and $500,000. Schermerhorn changed his will in 1918, following the death of his good friend, David W. Lydig, who bequeathed his entire estate to his wife.
Schermerhorn wrote in the will's codicil that he felt the maintenance of two estates and the eventual disposal of one of the two would be too much of an expense.
Mrs. Lydig was more than a neighbor and "my lifelong and dearest friend" as described by Schemerhorn in his will. It was rumored the two were lovers and planned to marry.
At the time, he was 74, and the widow, whom it was said he planned to marry that fall, was 75.
"When efforts were made at the time to reach Mrs. Lydig in relation to the report, she sent out word from her palatial villa the she was ill and preferred 'not to answer any questions'," a Berkshire Eagle article reported.
However, various accounts state that up until the time of her death in December 1930, Mrs. Lydig's Lenox friends often admired her exquisitely cut diamond solitaire, which she continued to wear on her "engagement" finger.
The Lydigs were longtime friends of Schemerhorn, each man naming the other executor of his will. Prior to building their estate, Thistlewood, across the street from Pinecroft, the Lydigs would rent a villa in Lenox and spend countless hours visiting their dear friend.
In 1888, the city of New York condemned a number of old-family estates along the Bronx River and took hundreds of acres for what was to become the Bronx Park, known today as the Bronx Zoo. David Lydig was paid $234,860 for his family's estate, often referred to as West Farms, which was originally purchased by his grandfather of the same name.
It was also that year that David Lydig and his wife, Hannah Minthorne Tompkins Lydig, purchased the "White Cottage" opposite Pinecroft. The "White Cottage" would be short lived, as the couple would soon hire Rotch and Tilden to build them a two-story Colonial Revival house in its place.
In July 1890, the Lydigs would open their new Lenox Cottage for the first time. A New York Times social column detailed the house on July 5: "The finest cottage completed this season is that of David W. Lydig. ... The carving on the exterior is exceptionally fine, especially that over the windows of the second story, which consists of gracefully-entwined leaves."
It goes on to describe the house, noting a winding stairway with wainscoting, made of hardwood, inlaid with a diamond pattern and finished in white ivory. The second floor boasted five bedrooms.
"All of the rooms on the first floor can be thrown together into one vast room, so that the house is especially convenient for large gatherings," the writer noted.
In 1931, the Berkshire Eagle detailed the long relationship of Hannah and Frederick, which seems to have naturally developed over the years and come to fruition following the death of David Lydig in 1917: "Over the trails of his charming sylvan forest Mr. Schemerhorn and Mrs. Lydig rode horseback in their younger days. Often they were accompanied by Mr. Lydig. They were often together on lake drives. They were generally among the guests at the smart and exclusive parties and luncheons."
Hannah Lydig would continue to summer in Lenox until her health prevented it. She stayed in New York in 1929 and 1930. She was 86 at the time of her death in 1930.
The house was rented out for the next six years until it was purchased in 1936 by John James Robinson, president of the New England Telephone & Telegraph Co. It would pass between several owners before it was sold in 1957 to W.E.D. Stokes Jr. In 1990, it was sold to Steven Rufo and his partner Dan Dempsey, who put in the 13 acre estate's pool and pool house and did extensive indoor restoration work before selling it in 2002. In 2003 it was acquired by Boston financier Lee Munder and his wife.
***
Recently, I was invited to visit Thistlewood by Dan Alden of William Pitt Sotheby's International Realty, which has the house listed at $4,250,000.
As we entered the house through where the porte-coch re once stood, it was immediately apparent that the house, as I had been told, had been redesigned throughout.
"The prior owners did a lot of modernizing," Alden said as we toured the house, which has its own server room to control the computerized house and a backup generator.
But not all of the house's history has been stripped from it. In the main hallway and along the stairwell, the diamond inlaid wainscoting still exists. And the flow of the first floor continues to keep the flow of one room unfolding into the next: a formal dining room, living room, private study, gourmet kitchen and a naturally lit conservatory.
"This house was definitely built to entertain," Alden said as we entered the kitchen, which now has a pizza oven, double ranges and dishwashers.
On the second floor, the original five bedrooms have been converted into two bedroom suites and a private library leading into the master suite, which also has two walk-in closets and a 20-foot by 17-foot bathroom.
A third floor, once the servants quarters, has four children's bedrooms and an office.
The carriage house, with its dark brown woods, was remodeled, as well. It includes a great room with a pool table and kitchenette, a full kitchen, two guest suites and two bedrooms.
"Today it would be perfect for a diplomat or someone traveling with a large number of people," Alden said. "It's a mix of that old estate charm with the modern conveniences of today. It's a world class property in a class all by itself."
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LENOX — It is said that the last of the Gilded Age gentlemen did not leave the Berkshires until 1945.
On Sept. 22, 1945, Giraud Foster, 94, died from a heart attack at his beloved estate Bellefontaine.
For 50 years, he had called the Berkshires home, beginning in 1896 as a summer cottager and later making it his legal residence.
Just prior to his death, he was elected to his 30th term as president of the Lenox Club and was still active on many boards. He also was president of the Mahkeenac Boat Club at the Stockbridge Bowl, a senior warden of Trinity Church, and a director of the Lenox Library.
According to his obituary in the Berkshire Eagle, his demise was unexpected, as a week prior he had been seen making the three-mile walk from his estate to Trinity Church, with only the assistance of two canes.
Meanwhile, the New York Times reported that Foster had already planned his birthday celebration — an annual event that had become a prominent feature of the social season.
But by January 1946, his son, Giraud Van Nest Foster, had sold the 35-room mansion with all its furnishings, along with 182 acres, four brick buildings and its greenhouses to Tobias-Fischer Inc., New York auctioneers from a mere $80,000.
Giraud Foster and his wife, Jane Van Nest, built the mansion for a reported $2.5 million in 1896.
The mansion made of brick and marble, quarried in Lee, was designed by architects Carrere and Hastings in the style of Marie Antoinette's Petit Trianon at Versailles. However, as noted in "Houses of the Berkshires, 1870 - 1930," by Richard S. Jackson Jr. and Cornelia Brooke Gilder, "a second look reveals a wholly original confection of 18th-century elements and strict axial planning of facades, driveways and formal training of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts."
Foster, who had inherited his wealth from his shipping family, and his wife, who inherited hers from a family that grew wealthy making harnesses, filled their beloved estate with items that were hand-crafted and imported from France.
An extensive library contained 5,000 volumes. Statues in the gardens were imported from Italy.
In 1946, the estate was sold to the William B. Cooke Holding Co. for $100,000. Cooke, a prominent funeral director from New York, said he intended to make Bellefontaine his home, but over the next two years carved up the property, selling off parcels individually.
He also sold off most of the furnishings and statues before selling the mansion and 96 acres to the Society of the Fathers of Mercy in Brooklyn in for $45,000.
The order opened the Our Lady of Mercy Preparatory School at the mansion in 1948. On Feb. 13, 1949, 22 individuals fled the mansion as it went up in flames. All but a rotunda and the library, containing the 5,000 volumes, were destroyed. The order rebuilt the inside of the mansion and reopened the seminary in December 1949.
By 1975, the seminary and preparatory school, known as Immaculate Heart of Mary Seminary, run by the Roman Catholic Order of the Sacred Heart, had begun to see its enrollment figures decline.
In 1981, the property again changed hands, this time being sold for $1 million to Boston developer Martin Isenberg. He invested another $500,000 in the property, opening it as a resort in 1983. It was closed after a season. In 1987, Bellefontaine was sold for $6 million to Mel and Enid Zuckerman, founders of Canyon Ranch, which at the time had a single location in Tuscon, Ariz.
On Oct. 1, 1989, Canyon Ranch in Lenox opened its doors. A two-story inn, with 126 guest rooms, and a 100,000-square-foot spa connect to the mansion, which hosts a solarium, dining rooms, guest lounges and the library.
On a recent visit to Canyon Ranch, I was astounded by the beauty of the Bellefontaine mansion, which outwardly appears unchanged, as it presides over open lawns and views that reach as far as the eye can see.
Inside, as expected, the opulence of the Fosters is found only in the rotunda and library that were spared by flames. But upon passing through the rotunda, into the sumptuous warmth of the library, the former grandeur of the rest of the estate can only be imagined, as one soaks in the carved walnut bookcase trims and the beauty of the Italian-rose marble fireplace. It is also here that it is clear, that despite what very little of this once-grand estate remains unchanged, it is with great thanks to the Zuckermans — who chose to keep it intact — we are lucky to have this tiny glimpse into its past.
- By Jennifer Huberdeau, The Berkshire Eagle
- 4 min to read
Harry K. Thaw waited patiently for the milk to be delivered on the morning of Aug. 17, 1913.
A bell sounded, signaling the arrival of the milk cart. As the gate opened to allow the cart passage onto the property, Thaw was waiting, squeezing between the gate and the milk cart as it passed by.
Thaw broke into a sprint as he made his way to a black six-cylinder Packard touring car that was waiting for him. The car sped off, racing for the Connecticut border.
Thaw had escaped from Matteawan State Hospital, an asylum for the criminally insane in Fishkill, N.Y.
Thaw was no ordinary prisoner. He was from a prominent wealthy family in Pittsburgh, Penn. In short, he was a millionaire.
And he was also a murderer. Seven years earlier, on June 25, 1906, Thaw had murdered famed architect Stanford White, of McKim, Mead and White, during a performance of "Mamzelle Champagne" at Madison Square Garden. He had been tried twice for the murder. The first trial ended in a hung jury. The second found him not guilty by reason of insanity.
A short while after Thaw's escape, police were hunting him down. His destination was without doubt Canada, but the authorities disagreed on how he would get there. Some thought he would travel north by car; others thought he would leave Connecticut by boat. The escape by boat was the heavily favored theory, as an article in the New York Times stated, "He would find good roads by way of Great Barrington and Pittsfield, Mass., but he would also find them well policed. Because of the heavy automobile traffic, especially on Sunday, in the Berkshires, a sharp watch is kept for speeders, and the most certain way for him to get into trouble would be to pass through there at great speed."
But Thaw would pass through the Berkshires, where the name of Stanford White was associated with several Gilded Age homes and buildings, including Searles Castle in Great Barrington, Naumkeag, the Stockbridge railroad station and the Stockbridge Casino, now the Berkshire Theatre Group's Fitzpatrick Stage, in Stockbridge. In fact, the fugitive millionaire dined in Lenox before proceeding on to New Hampshire and then Canada.
Thaw's family, thought to have orchestrated the escape, was sure he would not be extradited, but Canada wanted no part of the man. His doctors and lawyers arrived, prepared to challenge the country's immigration law.
"In the middle of the night, four police officers and an immigration inspector broke into his hotel room, force him to get dressed and drag him into an awaiting car. They drive to to border and literally threw him back into the U.S.," said Simon Baatz, author of "The Girl on the Velvet Swing: Sex, Murder and Madness at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century," during a recent Tea and Talk at Ventfort Hall Mansion and Gilded Age Museum.
The story of Thaw and White begins with one of the first "It Girls," Evelyn Nesbit.
Nesbit, one of the original "Gibson Girls," was a popular model among artists and photographers. Her face was on the covers of the top magazines. She was supporting her mother and brother, when she landed the role of a chorus girl in the hit musical "Florodora." In 1901, at the age of 16, she met White, 47. He soon became a patron of the Nesbit family.
While her mother was away, Evelyn, under the suggestion of White was photographed in a kimono by the photographer Rudolf Eickemeyer, Jr. The next night, Evelyn went to White's apartment after performing in "Florodora," for a dinner party. She was the only guest and by the end of the evening, Evelyn would pass out. She would awake naked and aware that she had lost her virginity.
The friendship between White and Nesbit would continue for another year. When other men were smitten with her, White would intervene. One suitor, Harry Thaw, would prompt White to pay to send Evelyn to a finishing school in New Jersey.
It seemed her budding relationship with Thaw was cut short, Evelyn in New Jersey and Thaw headed to Europe. But Evelyn would have an acute attack of appendicitis, forcing her to leave school. During her hospital stay, Thaw, back from Europe would dote on her.
Evelyn would later travel to Europe with Thaw, where he would purpose and she would refuse, telling him that she had been raped by White and was unworthy. White learning of Evelyn's new relationship would warn her of Thaw's sordid deeds — it was rumored he lured young actresses to an apartment, where he would beat them with whips.
Despite his warnings, Evelyn would marry Thaw in 1905. Her marriage was ill-matched, as Thaw's mother disapproved of her new daughter-in-law. She abhorred the thought her daughter-in-law had been an actress and was more distressed when the 1901 photos of Evelyn began appearing in advertisements and calendars.
Meanwhile, her husband's obsession with White was growing day-by-day. He hired private investigators to follow White.
Then, on June 25, 1906, Thaw, along with Evelyn and a friend, dined in New York City, before heading to the rooftop of Madison Square Garden for a show. They were seated at a table, where Thaw spent a few moments before getting up to talk to an acquaintance. White entered at 10:55 p.m. Thaw made his way to White's table, pulled out a gun and fired three shots. White slumped over and Thaw raised his gun in the air to indicate he was done. He turned himself into the first police officer who arrived.
"Then he added the man had ruined his life — or wife — I couldn't distinctly make it out," the officer told the New York Times.
Evelyn and Thaw would divorce in 1915. Thaw was arrested in 1917 for the kidnapping and whipping of a young man. He was declared insane and heavily guarded during his stay in the asylum. He would eventually be released.
White, a celebrated architect, went to his grave an accused rapist. His reputation would suffer even further during Thaw's two trials.
But did the rape even happen? Nesbit recanted the rape in her autobiography. Then what was Thaw's motive?
"Thaw believed White kept him from becoming a member of the right social clubs in New York," Baatz said. "Thaw wasn't a member of the New York social scene. He was an outsider. But, White was a member of every club he applied to. He was obsessed with Stanford White."
The Cottager is an award-winning column that runs biweekly in Berkshires Week and the Shires of Vermont. Reach Jennifer Huberdeau at jhuberdeau@berkshireeagle.com
PHOTO GALLERY | Gilded Age Fashions
LENOX — How many outfits do you pack when planning for a four-day trip?
Depending on your plans, it's probably one to two outfits per day. But in the late 1800s, packing for a four-day trip to the Berkshires would require a steamer trunk or two to fit the necessary 16 to 20 outfits needed to survive the weekend.
"Any woman traveling to be a guest would have to bring trunks and a maid to help her with them," Betsy Sherman, retired executive director of the Berkshire Historical Society, said in a recent interview.
"The Historical Society has a large collection of clothing, strongly focused on 1870 to 1930 or 1940. We have two different Victorian and Gilded Age collections," Sherman said. "When Kelly [Blau, a member of Ventfort Hall's board of directors] and I began this collaboration, the thought was to put up big beautiful gowns. We then began talking about what it was like to travel during that time period and what a woman would have to bring for a four-day visit to the Berkshires. The list was just huge, with all the different outfits and the different undergarments to go with them."
Among the outfits needed daily for a woman of stature during the Gilded Age were: a morning dress, a day dress, a tea gown, a dinner gown and a combing jacket. Other daily items included corsets, bodices, corset covers, undergarments and numerous petticoats.
"These are all items Sarah Morgan [owner of Ventfort Hall] and her guests would have worn," said Linda Rocke, marketing coordinator at Ventfort Hall.
Among the items on display are a cream-colored silk satin with lavender silk chiffon insets decorated with a lace overlay and a seafoam green silk tea gown with ecru lace trim.
"The cream-colored dinner gown was donated by Cooley Crane, a long-time board member and historical society member," Sherman said. "All of the clothing in the collection comes from local families."
She added, "The tea gown is a very interesting piece because most of the silk items in our collection are robes. Tea gowns are in their own class. The tea gown let a woman out of her corset. You could wear it to a quiet dinner at home and still be elegantly dressed."
Other items on display include a traveling costume and a maid's uniform as well as two traveling trunks. The trunks, which belonged to George Morgan and his daughter-in-law, Josephine Perry Morgan, were donated to Ventfort Hall by Daniel Popkin of Princeton, N.J.
"The trunks still have the stickers from where they traveled," Rocke said, pointing out the original Louis Vuitton makers label on George Morgan's trunk.
Reach Online Editor Jennifer Huberdeau at 413-496-6229 or on Twitter @BE_DigitalJen.
"On a slope over-looking the dark waters and densely wooded shore of Laurel Lake we built a spacious and dignified house, to which we gave the name of my great-grandfather's place, the Mount "
So wrote Edith Wharton in her autobiography, "A Backward Glance," some 20 years after she had last seen the house she designed and built in 1902. Situated on nearly 150 acres in Lenox, the 42-room "Berkshire Cottage" would provide literary inspiration for the author of more than 40 works, including "Ethan Frome," "The House of Mirth," and "The Age of Innocence."
Although Wharton and her husband, Teddy, lived at The Mount for only 10 years, she would write that she was happiest at the home, a scaled back version of the British estate Belton House with heavy classical Italian and French influences, where she was able to hone both her writing and gardening skills.
The Mount is not the oldest of the Berkshire Cottages, nor is it the largest. However, it is one of the best known Gilded Age mansions in the Berkshires, thanks, in part, to the fact that it has had many lives and many masters.
Edith, who was born into "old money," removed herself to the Berkshires because she wanted to escape the gilded homes of Newport, R.I., and its crop of socialites. So she fled to the Berkshires, an area nicknamed "inland Newport," to set up a writers' retreat of sorts, among the mammoth cottages of the social circles she was fleeing.
"One of the reasons [The Mount] wasn't as large as the other cottages, is that she wasn't as wealthy as some of her neighbors at that point. Her literary fortune doesn't begin until 'House of Mirth.' They sold their house in Newport, 'Land's End,' to pay for this house," Anne Schuyler, visitor services and group tour manager, said.
Although Edith removed herself from Newport, she did not fully remove herself from the social scene. Schuyler points out the Whartons did entertain on a smaller scale and attended many functions of their neighbors, as well.
After the Whartons sold to Mary and Albert Shuttuck, The Mount was known as "White Lodge" until about 1938. In the following years, it would serve as the home of New York Times Managing Editor Carr V. Van Anda and his wife, Louise; as Foxhollow School and Shakespeare & Company's performance space.
With my husband and two children in tow, I arrived at The Mount on Memorial Day — a day after isolated storms pelted Lenox and Stockbridge, with thunder, rain and hail. Large white tents with wooden floors lined with folding chairs, metal lanterns and streams of water — the remnants of a wedding the previous evening — greeted us on the front lawns of the estate. As we walked the quarter-mile to the house on its white gravel driveway, the need for privacy became apparent in the design. Our first brush with history was very close to the house, where hidden on a rise in grove of trees the gravestones for several dogs lie, including Edith's pet Toto.
Nearby, the house waited to greet us, its white facade and black shutters, beckoning us to enter and explore. We opted for a self -guided tour and stepped into a world of light pastels, marble statues, hand-carved wood treatments, barrel-vaulted ceilings, and rooms that flow endlessly into one another. In Teddy's white-walled den, we learned of his slow mental break-down, while the charities created by Edith during Word War I were explored in another suite. In another corridor we learned of her friendships with other literary giants and of the fights that ensued during the building of The Mount.
We ended our tour in the great outdoors, passing other families in the formal gardens, where bubbling fountains once played host to writers and politicians alike.
Although Edith Wharton spent less than a decade at her beloved Mount, one can see why its serene charms stayed with her for decades to come.
Step back in time and enjoy the merriment of what was once considered a must for any Berkshire socialite at the 18th annual Pleasure Carriage Driving Show, hosted by the Colonial Carriage & Driving Society and Orleton Farm. The carriage driving show will feature tests of reinsmanship and more. Carriage drivers from more than seven states, along with their equine partners, drive not for cash prizes, but for coveted ribbons and trophies.
More information: edithwharton.org or 413-551-5111
- By Jennifer Huberdeau, The Berkshire Eagle
- 3 min to read
LENOX — On a clear day, with the aid of a telescope, it is said that the view from the top of Hotel Aspinwall stretched as far as Worcester in one direction and to Albany, N.Y., and the Hudson River in the other.
Five stories tall and 1,400 feet above sea level, Hotel Aspinwall offered views that stretched for miles. From its perch above Lenox, surrounded by the Woolsey Woods, it also offered privacy for the elite who stayed there — ambassadors, statesmen, movie stars, foreign dignitaries and royalty, the country's elite and at least one president.
It's lofty seat would also save the surrounding woods and homes during the early hours of April 25, 1931, when a police officer on his front porch a mile away, spotted flames rising from the hotel. Officer Timothy Dunn would raise the alarm that would bring firefighters from Lenox, Lee, Stockbridge, Great Barrington and Pittsfield to battle a blaze that would leave a $1 million loss in its wake.
Early beginnings
Three decades earlier, 410 acres that once belonged to the Aspinwall and Woolsey families would be sold to New York attorney and financier Gen. Thomas A Hubbard and his partners who had plans for a grand hotel. The land had previously been sold to three businessmen, who had intended to carve it up into a community similar to Tuxedo Park, N.Y.
Built over the course of 15 months, the hotel was designed by Allen & Vance of Pittsfield and built by a local company out of Lenox. It first opened its doors to the press in late June 1902, just ahead of the summer season and the nuptials of Lila Vanderbilt Sloane to W. B. Osgood Field. According to reports in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the hotel had 250 guest rooms, a total of 310 rooms in all and could accommodate up to 400 guests.
A ballroom at the south end of the building was said to seat 500 guests and a 28-foot wide piazza extended on three sides to allow for extra dance floor. A rotunda at the end of the main corridor was host to concerts by the hotel orchestra. But perhaps the most written about feature of the hotel was its veranda, a total of 11,000 feet that wrapped around the building on all four sides.
The grounds, which remained open to the public as they were during the time of the Woolsey family, were filled with 10 miles of motor and riding trails. Golfing was possible at the nearby Lenox Country Club and the hotel also had a boat house.
The Last Days
As the Gilded Age came to a close and vacations at resorts in Catskills and Adirondack mountains became more fashionable, the era of places like Hotel Aspinwall began to wane. New managers came and went, as did plans to extend the hotel season into the winter months. For the final 16 years of its existence, the hotel had been managed by Leo A Tworoger and his son-in-law, John Stanley. On the fateful morning of April 25, 1931, Tworoger and Stanley were in Hamilton, Bermuda, where they managed the Princess hotel during the winter season.
The pair had just renewed their lease for three additional years and had ordered $12,000 worth of work for the property, including a private golf course and additional horse and car trails.
It was 1 a.m. when Officer Timothy Dunn spotted the flames that would signal the end of the hotel with its fine maple floors and expensive oriental rugs.
"The hilltop seemed to be completely enveloped in flames — shooting upwards and licking the ebony heavens with their carmine tongues. The sparks flew in all directions, showering the town and threatening hundreds of homes," an Eagle reporter on the scene wrote. "In the crowd who watched were noctambulists who had not gone to bed, out to parties and dances, they were homeward bound when attracted by the spectacular blaze."
Although Hotel Aspinwall was built with its own water supply, the lines up to the hostelry had been emptied to avoid a winter freeze. By the time firefighters made it to the top of the hill, connecting hoses together to pump water to the top, the blaze had consumed the entire structure and had moved on to the servant dormitories. Their efforts were spent on saving two cabins and the garage and stables from burning, as well as making sure the dry timber woods did not go up in flames.
Although an official cause was never determined, it was reported the fire, which started on the veranda, was most likely caused by a smoldering cigarette left behind by "parkers" — young couples who would seek out the isolated hotel grounds for trysts.
The Ruins of Aspinwall
Hotel Aspinwall was never rebuilt. The land was sold off and logged for a time. Then in 1956, some 360 acres, including the ruins of the hotel were offered to the town for $12,000. The woods would once again welcome the public, this time as Kennedy Park. Here, today, the remains of the grand hotel can be found — walls covered in vines; bricks and marble slabs coated in dust and dirt; water pipes poking out of moss and grass mounds — ghosts of a time of grandeur.
The Cottager is an award-winning column that runs biweekly in Berkshires Week and the Shires of Vermont. Reach Jennifer Huberdeau at jhuberdeau@berkshireeagle.com
LENOX — On the evening of Sept. 15, 1893, Sarah Spencer Morgan and her husband, George H. Morgan, celebrated their new "cottage," Ventfort Hall with a gathering of their closest friends and neighbors — about 150 in all.
Although the 28-room Jacobean Revival brick and sandstone mansion, designed by architects Roche & Tilden had been completed earlier that year and opened in June for the start of the summer season, the Morgans did not hold their housewarming party, called an "at home," until that fall. One can speculate the delay may have been due to the opening of the 1893 World's Fair that May, which drew many of the "Summer Colony" members to Chicago for part of the summer. A few months after its opening, the fair had lost its luster and the Cottagers had returned to their normal summer and fall haunts.
A society column published in the New York Times on Sept. 17, 1893, reported on the start of the fall festivities in Lenox, including the largest entertainment of the week: the Morgan's housewarming party.
"The cottagers delight in having house parties in October and November, because of the beauties of the late fall here," the society column begins. "The Morgans are rather quiet people, and while they entertain considerably, they do not care to have any great amount of gossip about it outside. This occasion brought together nearly all the cottagers and their guests, many of whom visited this residence for the first time. It is complete in every detail in furnishings and fittings, and it makes one of the finest summer homes in the town. The rooms and halls are very large and the house is so arranged that the first floor opens into one large room, so that the 150 or more people who were there on Friday evening had no difficulty in moving about and there was no crowding."
Among those in attendance were Emily Thorne Vanderbilt Sloane and William D. Sloane of Elm Court; Anson and Helen Louisa Phelps Stokes, who were in the process of building Shadow Brook; Count Carlos de Heredia and Countess Georgie Bruce Cook de Heredia of Wheatleigh; Baron Pavel L'vovitch Schilling and Prince Mikhail Mikhailovich Cantacuzene, also known as Count Speransky, a Russian general and ambassador who would marry Julia Dent Grant, granddaughter of President Ulysses S. Grant, in 1899.
Other guests included: Dr. and Mrs. Richard C. Greenleaf of Windyside; Hannah Minthorne Tompkins Lydig and David Lydig of Thistlewood; Mr. and Mrs. Henri Braem of Ethelwyn; Mr. and Mrs. John S. Barnes of Coldbrook; Joseph and Harriette Burden of Underledge; Mr. and Mrs. Richard S. Dana, who resided in what is now known as the Birchwood Inn; Gen. Francis C. Barlow and his wife of Sunny Bank; Mr. and Mrs. J. Searle Barclay; and George and Lili Higginson of The Corners.
While details on the actual party are limited, we know the Morgans continued to celebrate the fall season with a series of "open houses" well into November.
On Nov. 11, the Buffalo Evening New's society column reported: "Ventfort, the lovely new Lenox home of Mr. and Mrs. George H. Morgan, has been for the last month, and is still, the scene of a merry house party, the chief amusement of which is the rides and drives around the picturesque Berkshire during the day, and the evening dances, which the cold weather makes agreeable."
GREAT BARRINGTON — Upon her death in July 1891, Mary Frances Sherwood Hopkins Searles would be remembered as a philanthropist who shunned ostentation and the notorious social gatherings of America's elite. But by September, her sanity and her second marriage would be called into question as her adopted son, Timothy Hopkins, appealed her will.
In September 1891, Hopkins, along with a few other would-be heirs, appealed the will in the Probate Court of Salem, arguing that the will had been changed and she would not intentionally leave everything to her second husband, Edward F. Searles. At one point it was alleged Searles had spirited his ill wife away to their Metheun estate to seize control of her fortune. It was also alleged that Searles wormed his way into the marriage on false pretenses, even posing as a medium to win both her heart and her fortune.
On Sept. 8, 1891, the son of a former family physician testified in court that during his time as a border of the Widow Hopkins he had once posed as a medium for her (under the best of intentions). A spiritualist, she frequently held mystical circles at the Nob Hill house, which Searles would soon become a devoted attendee of and eventually serve as a medium himself.
The man, identified as Cook, testified that he thought Searles had his eye on the widow's estate. He said this became apparent when the widow asked if she should give support to her adopted son in the present or wait until her death to bestow fortune upon him. As recorded in the New York Times, Cook said the answers from the spirits were typically delivered by "table tipping," with the table lifting in one direction for one answer and in another for the other. On this particular evening, he said he struggled with Searles who was trying to tip the table in the opposite direction. It was his opinion that Searles was looking to cut the son out of the will.
Widowed in 1878 after the untimely death of her husband, Central Pacific Railroad magnate Mark Hopkins, Mary Frances (reportedly called Ellen by her parents and Frances by friends) soon found herself the heir to a fortune of about $23 million, much of which was heavily invested in railroad stocks. She owned 40-room Gothic mansion on San Francisco's Nob Hill.
It was there that she became smitten with the decorator sent by the firm she hired to dress the estate. Soon after she would hire Searles, who was 22 years her junior, to furnish the new chapel and parish rooms of the First Congregational Church in Great Barrington, where she owned Kellogg Terrace. She had once attended school on the grounds of the estate at an academy owned by her two aunts.
In 1885, work commenced on the French Chateau-style mansion, designed by the architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White. Blue dolomite was quarried off of East Mountain Road for the building, which has seven towers and a total of six stories. Solid bronze doors, cast in Munich, Germany, would be guarded by marble sphinxes. Another set of double doors, leading into the Great Hall were said to have come from Windsor Castle. It was also rumored that the hand-polished English oak walls were taken from two ancient ships that were towed to America for the specific purpose of lining the rooms. The largest home pipe organ in the country was said to grace the home's music hall and marble from around the world made up the floors, walls and pillars on each level. Among its 40-plus rooms were 36 fire places, dozens of bedrooms dressed in silks and satin, a library, an atrium, two secret passages and a Louis XIV drawing room. In the sub-basement, a dungeon-like catacomb was constructed to hold bins of coal for the furnace. A power plant was located in a nearby house for the castle's electrical needs. The house cost $2.5 million to build and even more to decorate.
The Searles, who married in a quiet ceremony in 1887, also owned estates in Methuen, Manhattan, Block Island and Paris.
By March 1892, Timothy Hopkins, dropped the appeal and settled for a few million outside of court. But during this time, rumors had swirled about Searles and his wife's relationship. He would soon abandon their home in Great Barrington and move many of the castle's treasures to his Methuen estate. The great organ was cut out and removed to the Congregational Church in Methuen.
As time passed, the property once again became a school, with the castle first hosting the Barrington School for Girls. In 1950, the property was sold to James J. Joyce and his wife, Margaret, who owned the Berkshire Inn. In 1951, they sold it to the Home Insurance Co. It changed hands several times in the late ''70s, before being purchased in 1984 by the founders of John Dewey Academy, which opened in 1985.
As in the days of the Searles, few are invited inside the castle, now John Dewey Academy, a year-round co-education college preparatory therapeutic school for bright adolescents, ages 15 to 21, who have not been successful in other schools.
"Our students are highly-gifted and bright," Andrea Nathans, executive director, said during a recent tour. "Our academics are well-known for being rigorous and meaningful."
As we enter the castle, a pair of white marble lions stands guard at the main entrance. Ghastly door knockers, straight out of a Dickens novel, stare back from the heavy front doors. Inside, another set of lions rise up in the Great Hall, where English oak still panels the walls.
The atrium, the centerpiece of the over 54,000-square-foot residence, sits behind the doors, where soft light bathes the marble columns. Off of the atrium are a dining hall and offices, including the restored Louis XIV drawing room with its gilded leaf decorations.
We travel through the butler's pantry, where call buttons from the rooms above are still present, to a lower kitchen and servants quarters reminiscent of Downtown Abbey. Two ancient ice boxes remain in a hallway near a non-functional dumbwaiter. On the upper floors, the structure mimics those below. The maze of rooms off of it opens into dorm rooms for the girls, living quarters for the house parent and classrooms. (The boys stay in the nearby carriage house.)
Our visit was brief, as classes were still in session, but as students hurried to their next class, it seemed fitting that the castle is home to school.
- By Jennifer Huberdeau, The Berkshire Eagle
- 6 min to read
LENOX — The survival of Ventfort Hall is a tale of intervention — by a group of local preservationists and perhaps a ghost or two.
Built by Sarah Spencer Morgan and her husband George Hale Morgan in 1893 at a cost of $900,000, the 28-room Jacobean brick and sandstone mansion was in shambles when the Ventfort Hall Association rescued it from the wrecking ball in 1997.
"When it was purchased by the association, there was a hole in the roof and holes in the floor. A fireplace from the second floor had fallen through two floors and was in the basement," Linda Rocke, marketing coordinator for Ventfort Hall and Gilded Age Museum, said during a recent tour of the historic home. "It was the sheer will and determination of the people who founded the Ventfort Hall Association that saved and restored this house.
"For those of us who work here, volunteer here, or serve on the board, there's just something about this house that we love," she added. "It's not like the other homes ... It was meant to be enjoyed."
And enjoyed it was by its original owners, who, according to some, may still linger in the house. Whether or not Sarah and George Morgan still visit the home was the subject of an episode of "Ghost Hunters" in 2012.
As I arrived at Ventfort Hall on a sunny Tuesday morning, I realized that even though I've twice walked the halls of this estate during paranormal investigations, I've never been on the grounds before sunset. Seeing the red stone home in daylight brings a new appreciation.
Upon entering the foyer, I was in awe of how bright and airy the great hall is, as light filtered through stained-glass windows above me, brightening the large area where dark-colored carved oak panels line the walls. It's here I met Rocke and soon learned of how Ventfort Hall is the second house with that name to sit in this location.
The first house, an Italianate villa named Vent Fort, meaning "Strong Wind," was built by New Yorkers Ogden and Elizabeth Haggerty in 1853. The summer home would remain in the location of the present house nearly 40 years, entertaining a variety of notable guests. Among them would be Col. Robert Gould Shaw, leader of the Massachusetts 54th, the north's first regiment of free African-American soldiers in the Civil War, and the Haggerty's son-in-law. Shaw and his wife, Annie Kneeland Haggerty Shaw, would honeymoon at the home in May 1863. The couple was married for 77 days before he died in battle.
During the 1880s, Flora Payne Whitney, wife of U.S. Secretary of the Navy William C. Whitney, rented the home, where she often entertained first lady Frances Folsom Cleveland.
In 1891, the Morgans purchased the Haggerty estate for $120,000, moved the house across the street and renamed it "Bel Air." It remained intact until 1965, when it was destroyed by fire.
"George and Sarah Morgan were seventh cousins. George was not from the financial side of the family, as Sarah was," Rocke said, noting that Sarah's brother was the banker J.P. Morgan. "In 1891, Sarah inherited $3 million. Her father had died in an accident in Monte Carlo. They opened the house in 1893. Sarah would only enjoy it for three years before she died. She left the estate to their three adult children, granting George lifetime rights to it."
After George Morgan died in 1911, the children sold off the contents of the home and rented it out first to a Vanderbilt heir and then to the Bonsal family. The Bonsal family rented the estate for seven years before purchasing it for $103,000 in 1925 and renaming it "Pembroke House." In 1945, it was sold to Arthur J. Miller for $22,500 and was used as a dorm for Tanglewood students. In the 1950s, the home, known as "Festival House," was owned by Bruno Aron and his wife.
"It was described as a bohemian hotel. Peter Seeger was the artist-in-residence," Rocke said. "It was a summer camp for grown-ups. Two adults could rent a private room with a private bath, with two meals a day for an entire week during the height of Tanglewood season for $70."
From 1965 to 1976, the house was home to The Fokine Ballet Camp. It then came under the ownership of The Bible Speaks, a religious community that eventually abandoned the property. In 1991, developer Arthur Ivey purchased the mansion with the intention of turning it into a nursing home. When he decided the property was too far gone for renovations, he began stripping the house of its fixtures and woodwork to sell them. When it became public that his intention was to raze the mansion, the Venfort Hall Association was founded.
Since the mansion was reopened in 2001 as Ventfort Hall Mansion and Gilded Age Museum, the home has been slowly restored, with new rooms opening every few years.
"A lot of the woodwork had been taken off of the walls, but was still in the building," Rocke said. "It was a matter of figuring out what went where. We were also very lucky that relatively none of the stained glass windows were broken."
When built, the 28,000-square-foot house had 15 bedrooms, 17 fireplaces, a billiard room, a library, a bowling alley, central heating, an elevator and a burglar alarm. The grounds featured two gate houses, an ice house, six greenhouses and a view of the Stockbridge Bowl.
"It has both gas and electric lighting," Rocke said. "George Westinghouse was a neighbor and friend. He had private generators."
It's not hard to imagine Ventfort Hall's elegance in its day. In the great hall, a gigantic stone fireplace with large lions adorning its mantle, greet those who enter. To the right, a white-walled salon, which functions as a gift shop, is filled with antique couches and plants. The airy room once had its walls draped in French silk, as was the custom.
A little farther down the hall, a wood-paneled library is used for tour groups and lectures. The bookcases lining the walls are permanent fixtures and once had ballet barres attached to them.
"We've learned this from the former students, now in their 50s, who are returning to take tours of the mansion," she said.
In a nearby dining room lined with Cuban mahogany, a table set for a Victorian tea service sits under a chandelier in the center of the room, under the watchful eye of Sarah and George Morgan's portraits. A trip down a hallway takes us past the morning and writing rooms, which are used as offices, to the billiard room, where the richly carved wood on the fire place and walls was imported from Europe.
During a short stop on the covered porch, which runs the length of the house, Rocke pointed out the remaining trees planted by George Morgan — a Gingko biloba and a few Japanese maples.
"See the lawn," she said, pointing to the massive yard before us. "That's the lawn that Michael Caine and Toby Mcguire walk up to get to the orphanage in 'The Cider House Rules'."
"And this is the door they enter through," she said, putting her hand on the door as we make our way back inside.
For me, the most exciting part of the tour is the second floor. As we climbed its massive stairwell, Rocke pointed out the minstrel's galley, an open space overlooking the great hall, where musicians sat and played for the guests below. It is from here that you can view the plaster Scottish pendant ceilings, much of which was restored by master craftsman Jeffrey Gulick. (In other areas, woodwork was restored by master craftsman Michael Costerisan.)
At the top of the staircase, a small alcove filled with sumptuous chairs and couches is tucked underneath the stairwell leading to a third floor that is closed to the public. Here the main bedrooms belonging to Sarah and George Morgan exist. George's room is not presented as a bedroom, but as a dining room. The furniture and china, on loan from Giraud Foster's granddaughter, Jane Foster, are from the nearby Bellefontaine estate, which is now Canyon Ranch.
"We like to say that we have a house with no possessions and [Bellefontaine] has possessions without a house," Rocke said. "It allows us to give a sense of what the furniture and possessions of an estate from this time would look like."
The exhibit, "Treasures of Bellefontaine," includes Royal Worcester china, gilded Venetian glass, American and European silver. A display of fans are found in the rooms connecting the rooms with Sarah's suite, where Carl Sprague has recreated her boudoir.
"While we didn't have the original furniture, we did have an inventory of what was in the room. We knew there were two brass beds. We knew there was a writing desk and an armoire," she said. "We did find the original wallpaper and had it recreated for this room."
Although a reproduction, it is easy to imagine spending hours in this room, writing letters, planning parties and preparing for afternoon outings.
The floor has several additional rooms that are restored, including two bedrooms and a nursery. Although the second floor's east wing remains closed to the public as it is slowly prepped for renovations, it is possible to view those rooms through a window in the door that opens into the additional space.
We made our way back downstairs, where I stopped in the great hall one last time to marvel at the artistry that surrounded me.
As I prepared to leave this grand home, I stopped by the front desk, where for a $1, I picked up a copy of "Mrs. Morgan's Neighbors," a self-guided driving tour of the Gilded Age homes of Kemble Street and Old Stockbridge Road, which I tuck away for another day.
Jennifer Huberdeau, the Berkshire Eagle's online editor, is exploring the Berkshire Cottages, one by one this summer. She can be reached by email at jhuberdeau@berkshireeagle.com.
By Jennifer Huberdeau
jhuberdeau@berkshireeagle.com @BE_DigitalJen on Twitter
Editor's note: This is the second of three columns about the Gilded Age Cottages that make up the present day campus of Tanglewood.
The history of Lenox and of Tanglewood might be slightly different today had a young Samuel Gray Ward never met Margaret Fuller while staying with his Harvard Professor John Farrar in the late 1830s.
Fuller, a well-known intellectual of her own right and colleague of Ralph Waldo Emerson, would be responsible for introducing Ward not only to Emerson and the Transcendental movement, but also to his wife, Anna Hazard Barker. Those introductions would both be instrumental in shaping the future of Lenox as a society resort sought out by the "Berkshire Cottagers."
When Ward met Fuller, he was a poet who wanted nothing to do with his father's line of work. Fuller, then editor of Emerson's "The Dial," would publish his poetry, while he taught her about the world of art. Following in the footsteps of his father, Thomas Wren Ward, the esteemed American representative of London's Baring Brothers bank, was the furthest thing from his mind. He planned to remain a member of Emerson's Transcendentalist Circle, writing poetry and analyses for "The Dial" until he met Anna during the summer of 1836. In 1837, just home from his European trek, Ward put aside his poetry and went to work as a banker. He also courted Miss Barker for the next three years, traveling often to her family home in New Orleans, before marrying her in 1840.
"By 1843, he made up his mind that trade was not compatible with his disposition, that country life would be more suitable to him, a scholarly and intellectual man," May Callas writes in "Profiles of Tanglewood Families" of Ward's decision to move his young family to the Berkshires. If there was a place to become a gentleman farmer at the time, it was in the Berkshires, where a 'hive' of intellectuals was buzzing about the Sedgewick clan.
In "Hawthorne's Lenox: The Tanglewood Circle," author Cornelia Brooke Gilder writes of the young family's Berkshire beginnings: "It all began in 1844 on a dreary day in the third week of March, when a handsome, well-heeled 27-year-old Samuel Gray Ward (1817-1907) strode across Daniel Barnes' brown, tufted meadow with a glorious view of Lake Mahkeenac and pronounced it 'very good.' "
Wards's guide at the time was the esteemed Berkshire Clerk of Courts Charles Sedgewick, who arranged for the family's lodging while their three-story home was built. That October, the couple's third child, Thomas, was born in Lenox.
The home, Highwood Manor, completed in 1845, is credited to architect Richard Upjohn, known best for New York City's Trinity Church, who was building a church for the Episcopal congregation in Stockbridge at the time. Upjohn would later design the Tappen house, which still sits within walking distance of Highwood.
Whether or not Upjohn, whose signature was Gothic Revival manses and churches, designed the house is somewhat controversial, as the house's original design is more of an Italianate country house. Of this Callas wrote, "... but there is correspondence between Ward and his father, which mentions construction of Highwood done by the firm of Upjohn. Since Richard Michael Upjohn joined his father's firm the same year that Highwood was completed, it may be the younger Upjohn, assisting his father, added his own design incentives. There are design details in the Tappan house that are similar to those at Highwood, i.e., window soffits and apron benches."
What is for certain about Highwood Manor are two things: It is considered to be the first of the Gilded Age cottages and it, not the Tappan house, was the inspiration for the porch in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Tanglewood Tales." We also know that despite Ward's affection for his adoptive "Lenox valley," the house and its 220 acres sat on the Stockbridge side of the town line.
The Wards lived at Highwood year round and became part of their adopted society, while keeping close ties with those in Boston. Guests would stay at a little red house (later inhabited by Nathaniel Hawthorne's family) at a nearby farm. Many of those guests, including the Tappans and Higginsons, would become inspired to build their own country cottages.
But the snow-filled winters and long spring thaws at Highwood would not last long for the family, as Ward was soon recalled to Boston to aid his father. Of Ward's recall to Boston, Edward Waldo Emerson wrote in "The Early Years of the Saturday Club: 1855 to 1870": "As Samuel Ward was working in his Lenox garden, he saw, like an apparition approaching, his father's factotum, and on the moment foresaw his own doom."
Ward was to become a banker like his father after all. The Wards didn't give up on returning to Lenox. They rented out Highwood to their friends, William and Caroline Tappen, who were living in the Red House at the time, and boarded their three oldest children with a clergyman and his wife. It was during the Tappens occupation of Highwood that their friends, Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne, took up residence in the Red House. The Tappans now owned the house and the farm adjacent to Highwood. It was on the long-gone porches of Highwood that Hawthorne would be surrounded by children, a setting he reproduced in his children's books, "A Wonder-Book," and "Tanglewood Tales."
"The house and situation are described with particulars that identify it closely with the Tappans' Highwood ... In the summer of 1851, Mrs. Hawthorne wrote to her mother: 'On Sunday, Mr. Samuel G. Ward came to us. He gave me an excellent drawing of Highwood Porch, for 'A Wonder-Book,' which he said he asked Burrill Curtis to draw. We have sent it to Mr. Fields," author M. A. DeWolfe Howe wrote in "The Tale of Tanglewood: Scene of the Berkshire Music Festivals."
It is Hawthorne who is given credit for coming up with the names Tanglewood and Shadow Brook, which would become the name of another nearby grand estate overlooking the Stockbridge Bowl.
In 1857, the Wards realized their time at Highwood had come to an end and sold the beloved Highwood. A year later, following the death of his father, Ward would be the sole agent for Barings. Nine years later he would orchestrate the financing of the United State's $7.2 million purchase of Alaska from Russia. (The Wards would later build a cottage in Newport, R.I., which they sold to Edith Wharton, before building another cottage in Lenox. Ward's second cottage would be the grand Oakwood, which he later sold to Anson Phelps Stokes. Stokes turned the home into a stable for his grand, 100-room estate, Shadow Brook.)
The Wards sold Highwood to another Boston couple, William Story Bullard and his wife, Louisa Norton Bullard, who had rented the house for two years. Bullard, a merchant who made his fortune in the East India trade, sold his company when new protective tariffs were introduced. A rich man, the couple who had four sons and a daughter, settled into their new home, which they were not afraid to alter.
"The Bullards appreciated and enjoyed the magnificent property and they continued to develop and maintain it for more than 100 years it remained in the family. Inevitably changes were made to the house, including, and most obviously, the removal of the porches on the first and second floors and the removal of the chimney pots. A more formal, smaller single-story porch was added to the garden entrance," Callas wrote of the Bullards. A driveway, which passed through a porte cochère on the house's south side, was installed along the lake side of the house sometime after 1900 by Dr. Norton Bullard, a neurologist, who inherited the property from his parents.
Upon his death in 1931, Dr. Bullard left part of his estate to establish the salary for the Bullard Professor of Neuropathology at Harvard.
An amateur botanist, he wanted to leave Highwood to Harvard as a wildflower sanctuary. His wife, Mary Reynolds Bullard, continued to live at the manor house, and in 1954 bequeathed the estate's 70 acres along Lake Mahkeenac to the Stockbridge Bowl Association. Upon her death in 1960, she honored her husband's wishes and left Highwood to Harvard, which it in turn put the property that it could not afford to maintain on the market.
The Boston Symphony Orchestra, which now owned the Tanglewood estate, turned down the chance to acquire Highwood and it was instead purchased in 1961 by a Harvard alumnus, New York lawyer Mason Harding and his wife, Mary Riker Harding. Harding, whose father maintained a second home in Lenox, was deeply involved in the Berkshires and was trustee of both the Lenox Library and the Hancock Shaker Village.
The couple and their five children spent the summers and holidays at the house in Lenox, while maintaining their permanent residence in New York City.
"Idyllic summers did not last long. In the late 1970s, Tanglewood and the BSO sponsored rock concerts at various times throughout the season ... Mr. Harding complained that he didn't expect to have Woodstock in his backyard and brought suit against the BSO to limit the length and noise level of the concerts. Adjustments were made and eventually the suit was withdrawn," Callas states of the Hardings.
The Hardings made the last alterations to Highwood in 1982, when the kitchen was renovated among major interior renovations. The back of the house was also extended at this point.
In 1986, after requiring open heart surgery, the Hardings ended their tenure at Highwood Manor, selling the estate to the Boston Symphony Orchestra for $1.7 million.
•••
Nestled behind a grove of trees, on a hill between the Koussevitzky Music Shed and Seiji Ozawa Hall, Highwood Manor House still presides over a breathtaking view of the Stockbridge Bowl. It's green lawn, now devoid of wildflowers stretches down to the road, where another grouping of trees, with twisted boughs, stand sentinel as patrons dine or read at tables up above.
I meet my guide, Mary Lincoln, one of Tanglewood's many volunteers, at the back of the house, where an extension, known as the "press porch" during the summer months, juts out from the main building. She describes how the house was scrubbed of its more typical Italianate markings over its many renovations and additions, as we move inside the house, which now hosts the organization's administrative offices and practice rooms on its second and third floors. The house is also used for private functions and hosts fixed price buffet-style dinners of Friday and Saturdays, and Sunday brunch, during the BSO's summer season.
While neither my guide or I are sure what interior renovations were made by the Hardings in 1982, it is quite obvious that only a few original design elements still exist on the first floor. The remnants of a wide front entry hall can be seen near a stairwell leading to the upper floors, while rooms that were obviously a parlor and dining room still exist near the lake side entrance. I'm reminded of Linwood, now part of the Norman Rockwell Museum campus, an early cottage built around the same time period. Only here, the walls have been stripped of all paper and color and painted a crisp white or subtle gray. The history and architecture peek out infrequently, when a shuttered fireplace or set of French doors are seen.
"The Bullard family was here from 1855 to 1961," Lincoln says as we make our way up to the second and third floors. "In 1920, Katherine Bullard [sister to Dr. Norton Bullard] built her own Italianate villa on the property at a cost of $300,000. She died in Boston shortly after it was built. She left it to her siblings, but no one wanted to live in it. It was torn down [all except for a small ell (wing) that was moved off the property] without being occupied."
The second floor is similar to the first, only more of the rooms have been painted in slightly brighter colors. It is here, on the second floor that a ghost, that reportedly spooked BSO conductor Leonard Bernstein, is supposed to roam. While not mentioned by my guide, tales of cold spots, and the feeling of being shoved or having hot breath on the back of one's neck, have made their way into ghost guide books about the Berkshires. If there is a ghost, it does not make its presence known to us.
On the third floor, we peek in the five or six rooms that once made for stuffy summer servants quarters, where interns and staff are busy tapping on keyboards or answering phones.
On our way out, we stop on the lawn to take in the views and take a moment to figure out just where, in days long ago, on a long-forgotten porch, before the concerts and cars, Nathaniel Hawthorne spent hours dreaming up tales of Tanglewood.
- By Jennifer Huberdeau, The Berkshire Eagle
- 4 min to read
LENOX, MASS. — "We've had three or four presidents and three or four queens, but never a king."
At its social height, Elm Court, the 106-room, 55,000-square-foot summer cottage of Emily Vanderbilt Sloane White, was host to a variety of notable figures, including the financier John Pierpont "J.P." Morgan and her niece, Consuelo Vanderbilt Spencer-Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough.
In a 1948 North Adams Transcript article, Alphonse Chague, veteran superintendent of the estate, recalled meeting many notable diplomats during his tenure, including French military leader Marshal Ferdinand Foch. Foch was one of several foreign dignitaries said to visit the estate in 1919, as the guests of Emily Vanderbilt Sloane's soon-to-be husband, Henry White, a former ambassador to Italy and France, for the so-called "Elm Court Talks," one of a series of preliminary conferences that would shape the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations.
Elm Court
When construction began on Elm Court, so named for the towering American elm that once graced the property, its owner was known as Emily Vanderbilt Sloane. She began building the American shingle-style estate in 1885 with her husband, William D. Sloane. Sloane and his brother John, of Wyndhurst, owned W. & J. Sloane and made their fortune importing oriental rugs and selling home furnishings.
The Sloanes, who had five children, aimed to build a modest summer cottage with the aid of architects Peabody and Stern. However, at the end of 1885, Emily's father, railroad tycoon William Henry Vanderbilt, died suddenly, leaving each of his eight children $10 million. With money no longer a factor, the plans for the home changed before it was completed.
Over the next 15 years, as the other Vanderbilt children built their mansions in Newport and Ashville, N.C., Elm Court grew in size and prestige. It would take 13 months and some 70 designs for Frederick Law Olmsted, the architect of New York City's Central Park, to plan the estate's gardens. The estate would also house 23 greenhouses, including one large enough to house palm trees, a butler's house, gardener's house, several barns, stables and carriage houses. The estate was reported to have 4,000 chickens, produce 40,000 pounds of hay a year and have 25 coaches and horse teams.
Following William Sloane's death in 1915, Emily continued to summer in Lenox. In 1920, at the age of 68, Emily Vanderbilt married Henry White, 70. White, a diplomat, died at the estate in 1927 after an unsuccessful surgery. Emily would live almost another 20 years, dying at Elm Court in the summer of 1946 at the age of 94.
In 1947, Elm Court was sold to the owners of High Lawn Farm, White's granddaughter, Marjorie Field Wilde and her husband, Helm George Wilde. A year later it reopened as an inn. After 12 years, the family mothballed the inn and boarded up the home. Over the next 40 years the once grand estate fell into ruin, as vandals and thieves stripped it bare, spray painted walls, and ripped out fixtures and paneling.
In 1999, Elm Court, then owned by great-granddaughter Lila Wilde Berle via a real estate trust, was sold for $947,380 to White's great-great-grandson Robert Berle and his wife, Sonya. The couple would spend three years renovating and restoring the home, turning it into a luxury bed-and-breakfast. The couple sold the estate in 2012 for $9.8 million to Travaasa Experiential Resorts, a collection of destinations resorts and spas, ending its 137-year history with the family of Emily Vanderbilt Sloane White.
Despite Travaasa securing special permits from both Lenox and Stockbridge, plans to invest $50 million to turn the 90-acre estate into luxury resort and spa, with 112 guest rooms (96 rooms in a new addition) and a 60-seat restaurant, are on hold pending a case which will be heard in Massachusetts Land Court on Aug. 16.
•••
Entering the Elm Court estate through iron gates and driving down its white, crushed-gravel driveway is a surreal experience, as the Gilded Age cottage slowly rises in the distance behind a second gateway of marble pillars. The estate's fountain, a replica of the Fontana delle Tartarughe (Fountain of Turtles) in Rome, languishes on the lawn. Unlike its twin in the gardens of The Elms at the Vanderbilt estate, the Breakers, in Newport, the fountain has seen better days. Long gone are the bronze turtles and male figures riding dolphins — ravaged by both time and thieves.
My worries that this is yet another cottage that no longer glitters are fleeting, as I'm greeted at the door by Les Freeman, the estate's general manager. He warns me that the billiards wing of the house has not been restored, as he ushers me into the entrance hall where I'm entranced by the carvings of birds, vines and trees on the brownstone fireplace. It's here that Freeman shares an estate secret with me.
"Emily Vanderbilt had servant call buttons placed all around the house. Her great-great-grandson told met that she not only put them in the walls, but also on the floor. Only she knew the locations of them," he says, stepping on a button to demonstrate. "If she was at a party and she didn't want to talk to someone, she'd stroll around the room, push a button with her foot and a servant would come out to get her."
I'm told the rug in the library was found in storage by the Sloane family's descendents, as we pass through to see breath-taking views of Stockbridge Bowl. Beneath the windows, a fountain is waiting to be restored and gardens planted.
"Olmsted left the plans for the gardens with the family," Freeman said. "It's the intention of the new owners to phase them in over several years."
I marvel at the restoration efforts as we walk through rooms with plaster ceilings filled with laurel and wreath reliefs. At the same time I'm saddened as Freeman relates how silk tapestries were literally cut out of the dining room's walls, mahogany paneled walls were kicked in and spindles from the staircase railings were burnt in the fireplaces. But for every bit of destruction I hear about, there seems to be a glint of Gilded Age that survives.
Freeman has high hopes for the estate. He talks of plans to restore the closed wing and to restore the greenhouses, where fresh fruits and vegetables will be grown for the restaurant. You can see him imagine what was and what is to come — perhaps he'll get to entertain the king that never arrived during Mr. Chague's time.
ELM COURT ESTATE
310 Old Stockbridge Road, Lenox, Mass.
Information: http://elmcourt.com
When the bachelor Frederick Schermerhorn died in March 1919, he left the widow who summered across the street from his Lenox estate, Pinecroft, a sum of $750,000.
Hannah Minthorne Tompkins Lydig, was originally poised to inherit Pinecoft and $500,000. Schermerhorn changed his will in 1918, following the death of his good friend, David W. Lydig, who bequeathed his entire estate to his wife.
Schermerhorn wrote in the will's codicil that he felt the maintenance of two estates and the eventual disposal of one of the two would be too much of an expense.
Mrs. Lydig was more than a neighbor and "my lifelong and dearest friend" as described by Schemerhorn in his will. It was rumored the two were lovers and planned to marry.
At the time, he was 74, and the widow, whom it was said he planned to marry that fall, was 75.
"When efforts were made at the time to reach Mrs. Lydig in relation to the report, she sent out word from her palatial villa the she was ill and preferred 'not to answer any questions'," a Berkshire Eagle article reported.
However, various accounts state that up until the time of her death in December 1930, Mrs. Lydig's Lenox friends often admired her exquisitely cut diamond solitaire, which she continued to wear on her "engagement" finger.
The Lydigs were longtime friends of Schemerhorn, each man naming the other executor of his will. Prior to building their estate, Thistlewood, across the street from Pinecroft, the Lydigs would rent a villa in Lenox and spend countless hours visiting their dear friend.
In 1888, the city of New York condemned a number of old-family estates along the Bronx River and took hundreds of acres for what was to become the Bronx Park, known today as the Bronx Zoo. David Lydig was paid $234,860 for his family's estate, often referred to as West Farms, which was originally purchased by his grandfather of the same name.
It was also that year that David Lydig and his wife, Hannah Minthorne Tompkins Lydig, purchased the "White Cottage" opposite Pinecroft. The "White Cottage" would be short lived, as the couple would soon hire Rotch and Tilden to build them a two-story Colonial Revival house in its place.
In July 1890, the Lydigs would open their new Lenox Cottage for the first time. A New York Times social column detailed the house on July 5: "The finest cottage completed this season is that of David W. Lydig. ... The carving on the exterior is exceptionally fine, especially that over the windows of the second story, which consists of gracefully-entwined leaves."
It goes on to describe the house, noting a winding stairway with wainscoting, made of hardwood, inlaid with a diamond pattern and finished in white ivory. The second floor boasted five bedrooms.
"All of the rooms on the first floor can be thrown together into one vast room, so that the house is especially convenient for large gatherings," the writer noted.
In 1931, the Berkshire Eagle detailed the long relationship of Hannah and Frederick, which seems to have naturally developed over the years and come to fruition following the death of David Lydig in 1917: "Over the trails of his charming sylvan forest Mr. Schemerhorn and Mrs. Lydig rode horseback in their younger days. Often they were accompanied by Mr. Lydig. They were often together on lake drives. They were generally among the guests at the smart and exclusive parties and luncheons."
Hannah Lydig would continue to summer in Lenox until her health prevented it. She stayed in New York in 1929 and 1930. She was 86 at the time of her death in 1930.
The house was rented out for the next six years until it was purchased in 1936 by John James Robinson, president of the New England Telephone & Telegraph Co. It would pass between several owners before it was sold in 1957 to W.E.D. Stokes Jr. In 1990, it was sold to Steven Rufo and his partner Dan Dempsey, who put in the 13 acre estate's pool and pool house and did extensive indoor restoration work before selling it in 2002. In 2003 it was acquired by Boston financier Lee Munder and his wife.
***
Recently, I was invited to visit Thistlewood by Dan Alden of William Pitt Sotheby's International Realty, which has the house listed at $4,250,000.
As we entered the house through where the porte-coch re once stood, it was immediately apparent that the house, as I had been told, had been redesigned throughout.
"The prior owners did a lot of modernizing," Alden said as we toured the house, which has its own server room to control the computerized house and a backup generator.
But not all of the house's history has been stripped from it. In the main hallway and along the stairwell, the diamond inlaid wainscoting still exists. And the flow of the first floor continues to keep the flow of one room unfolding into the next: a formal dining room, living room, private study, gourmet kitchen and a naturally lit conservatory.
"This house was definitely built to entertain," Alden said as we entered the kitchen, which now has a pizza oven, double ranges and dishwashers.
On the second floor, the original five bedrooms have been converted into two bedroom suites and a private library leading into the master suite, which also has two walk-in closets and a 20-foot by 17-foot bathroom.
A third floor, once the servants quarters, has four children's bedrooms and an office.
The carriage house, with its dark brown woods, was remodeled, as well. It includes a great room with a pool table and kitchenette, a full kitchen, two guest suites and two bedrooms.
"Today it would be perfect for a diplomat or someone traveling with a large number of people," Alden said. "It's a mix of that old estate charm with the modern conveniences of today. It's a world class property in a class all by itself."
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