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FAMOUS COLONIAL HOUSES
FAMOUS COLONIAL HOUSES
BY PAUL M. HOLLISTER Illustrated by JAMES PRESTON With an Introduction by JULIAN STREET DAVID McKAY COMPANY, Publishers PHILADELPHIA, MCMXXI Copyright, 1921, by David McKay Company Copyright, 1921, by David McKay Company Illustrations especially engraved and printed by the Beck Engraving Company, Philadelphia TO MARION...
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Foreword
Foreword
There is no bibliography in this book. I confess freely to a snapping-up of ill-considered trifles where I found them. Those that rang true are here, those that proved false upon closer examination are not. Some were gifts, some purchases, some thefts—the latter are now shamelessly confessed, on the plea that as a citizen I have the right of eminent domain to the story of my country. I cannot put the volume out to shift for itself without blanket acknowledgment of the generosity of the people wh
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Introduction
Introduction
As I read in Mr. Hollister’s chapter on Mount Vernon of Washington’s long absence from the home he loved and of the eagerness with which he returned to it after the tumultuous years of the Revolutionary War, I was caught by the fancy that lovers of books have recently gone through a somewhat parallel experience. Dragged away by the Great War from the books they cared for, plunged into continual war reading, they now find, to their infinite relief, that they are getting home again—back to Mount V
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Monticello
Monticello
In Thomas Jefferson’s boyhood imagination the hill had seemed to climb like Jack’s beanstalk to the infinite clouds. The view from his Father’s dooryard across the Rivanna registered each day through the clear lenses of his eyes upon the sensitive plate of his memory, and so upon his heart. As a lad he staged mental melodrama upon its symmetrical slopes and built an air-castle upon its summit. Every engagement of Caesar’s conquests, every adventure of the pious Aeneas found on Monticello a prope
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The Haunted House,New Orleans
The Haunted House,New Orleans
© D.M c K THE HAUNTED HOUSE That April-day crowd returned to Hospital and Royal Streets and sacked the house from hall to belvedere, ripped down silk curtains, slashed paintings, wrenched out chandeliers, dug up two skeletons from the courtyard, pitched Madame Lalaurie’s precious possessions out of windows and made bonfire of the wreckage in the street. Nor when inside the stout old walls a new and finer residence was built in cheerful defiance of the ghost, could the spirit of tragedy be banish
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The Haunted House, New Orleans
The Haunted House, New Orleans
Far down in the vieux carré , the old French quarter of New Orleans, where Hospital Street meets Royal, the drone of the modern city at work comes faintly through the morning air. Back yonder, above Canal Street, there are motor trucks, profanity and clangor; here there is hardly a street-car, and if you hear loud voices they are filtered through the shutters of a shabby dwelling where a hopeful candidate for the Opera is practising her topmost. The old French Opera House, the scene of Patti’s d
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Doughoregan Manor
Doughoregan Manor
© D.M c K DOUGHOREGAN MANOR There are three ghosts at Doughoregan Manor. One is the shade of an ancient housekeeper, whose quiet tread may be heard in the corridors, and whose keys tinkle faintly when the house is still. Another is the spectral coach—its wheels grind on the driveway when death rides to claim a member of the household.... The third is no gruesome phantom, but the warm lively pervading spirit of the Signer himself, Charles Carroll “ of Carrollton .”...
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Doughoregan Manor
Doughoregan Manor
You may come up a long straight aisle of locust trees, or you may wind through Gothic arches of elms along a skilfully engineered road which picks its way through the estate for a half-mile or more. Either course will bring you before a wide low house of yellow brick, with green blinds and white woodwork and English ivy. Directly ahead of you, across the circle of the driveway, the square main section of the house, capped by a tower, rises above a bright portico. To left and right the house thro
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The Jumel Mansion
The Jumel Mansion
© D.M c K THE JUMEL MANSION Alone in its brittle modern neighborhood, this lovely anachronism stands on the highest point of Manhattan, untroubled, unruffled, and undisturbed except by Sunday idlers to whom its orchards are just another breathing spot. Though it was Heath’s headquarters, then housed Washington, later was captured by Howe, and was one of the smartest suburban estates of Colonial New York, it will never be forgotten as the home of a person of no military or aristocratic consequenc
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The Jumel Mansion
The Jumel Mansion
A little over a hundred years have passed. Much sea-water has pressed up the Harlem on the incoming tide, boiled and eddied in the narrow pass of Spuyten Duyvil, and slipped away again to the Atlantic, diluted by the contribution of mountain streams in the Catskills and Adirondacks, tainted by the factory waste of busy cities up the Hudson and the Mohawk. Men threw giant bridges across its ebb and flow, tunneled under its current, bit and blasted and scratched at its Hell Gate channel. The placi
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Mount Vernon
Mount Vernon
© D.M c K MOUNT VERNON Here on a hill in Fairfax County, Virginia, we may catch glimpses of the man George Washington liked to be....
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Mount Vernon
Mount Vernon
The First President once wrote a letter to a Charleston gentleman named Thomas Pinckney, who was then American ambassador at the British court. His words were for Thomas Pinckney, not for posterity, so posterity finds it refreshing to see a president writing a specific letter to his envoy under the pitiless light of publicity. Its chief interest here is not his report of the Senate’s action on a proposed treaty with Great Britain, nor his anxiety over Lafayette’s imprisonment in Olmutz, though b
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The Quincy Homestead
The Quincy Homestead
© D.M c K THE QUINCY HOUSE which sheltered, among other delicate ornaments, three successive Dorothy Quincys. There are ever so many things in the house today to call up a Quincy tradition, for if you scratch almost any chapter of New England history you will find a Quincy tradition underneath. Take away its Hoars, Lowells, Holmeses, Adamses, Wendells, Hancocks, Sewalls—to mention only a few of the Quincy connections—and what, indeed, becomes of New England?...
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The Quincy Homestead
The Quincy Homestead
It is perhaps impolite to compare a Massachusetts family tree to a banyan instead of the conventional elm, but no prowler among her old houses can come away without a feeling that almost everything in New England is related to almost everything else. Chicago glances over Boston’s shoulder and finds her reading the Monday Transcript’s genealogy page; Chicago howls with laughter and turns to Vanity Fair to see what is going on in New York. Boston is momentarily interrupted, doesn’t know quite what
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The Timothy Dexter Mansion
The Timothy Dexter Mansion
© D.M c K THE TIMOTHY DEXTER MANSION Over in a corner of the garden stood an Indian chieftain, next to him William Pitt, and beyond the two the martial figure of General Morgan. The Goddess of Fame, Louis XVI, John Jay, the King of Russia, Solomon, Venus, the Governor of New Hampshire—these were a few of the forty “immortals” in his garden of celebrities. In a prominent position stood a portrait in pine of Lord Dexter himself, labeled “I am the greatest man in the EAST.”...
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The Timothy Dexter Mansion
The Timothy Dexter Mansion
Yes, Jonathan Plummer wrote that jingle. It is from the only survivor of a gross of eulogies he wrote of Lord Dexter. And quite proper that he should. He was Lord Dexter’s poet laureate, hired, clothed and fed to produce eulogies on demand. His poetry was awful, and the tragedy is that he knew it. Said he didn’t like to read too much good verse because it made his own look sorry. But when a man has given up peddling fish and racy European pamphlets in order to study for the ministry, and neither
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The Kendall House
The Kendall House
© D.M c K THE KENDALL HOUSE Here Washington and Rochambeau planned the Yorktown campaign. From the upper windows you may look over the roofs of the town where André and Arnold plotted to betray the United States. Across the Hudson you may see the faint outlines of the village of Tappan, where André was held prisoner, and where Washington shared his breakfast with the convicted spy. At the foot of the hill below you is the landing where British dignitaries came to plead for André’s life....
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The Kendall House
The Kendall House
A white house with solid vertigris blinds stands comfortably beside the Post road. There is a little old cannon on the lawn, a sad bell-mouthed field piece with its jaw jutted fiercely out to bark at any British man-o’-war that presumes to come back up the Hudson. A green ridge rises behind the house, setting it off like Wedgwood ware, and a gentle brook idles down the slope toward the river. Set in a jog of the stone wall at the highway is a memorial tablet which has evidently gone unnoticed by
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The Longfellow House
The Longfellow House
© D.M c K THE LONGFELLOW HOUSE It has the requisite dignity of its poet and its general, the well-dressed air of its Tory merchant, the scholarly simplicity of its lexicographer, the open-armed hospitality of its rich apothecary-general, and the grace of the lady who is its present chatelaine....
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The Longfellow House
The Longfellow House
“The moonlight poet,” a clever Frenchman called him, “having little passion, but a calmness of attitude which approaches majesty.” In a single deft pass of verbal legerdemain he conjures about the venerable head of Longfellow all the cool alluring mystery that veils a far-away mountain peak at night. He waves the magic word “moonlight” and the sun puffs out. In one stroke he has drawn a caricature which is not a character. The brightness of words tempted him into an error of drawing at which he
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Cliveden
Cliveden
© D.M c K CLIVEDEN One of Maxwell’s six-pounders spoke, and a ball passed in the front window of the Chew house, through four partitions and heaven knows how many British, and out a rear window. The battery hammered at the steps, the windows and the door, while snipers fired at the flash of a rifle from the upper stories. Infantry charged across the lawn and was beaten back, artillery punctured but did not dislodge. Reed was all for chasing the rest of the retreating British toward the city, but
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Cliveden
Cliveden
A daughter of the Quincy house saw the beginning of the Revolution. Mount Vernon was the home of its chief figure. From the Jumel Mansion he retreated to Westchester when the Continental army suffered its first major reverse. In the Kendall house at Dobbs Ferry he conceived the campaign which was to end the war, and there finally he saw the British evacuate the United States. Five houses in America punctuate the Revolutionary career of Washington, and the fifth is the house where the cause of fr
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The Wentworth Mansion
The Wentworth Mansion
© D.M c K THE WENTWORTH MANSION I like to think of the house as a family group of all the Wentworths, each little excrescence on the original nucleus being one of the useful but obscure members posed kneeling or sitting on the outskirts of the family as it pyramids up to the bulk of the council-room Benning Wentworth built, the council-room being in my mind’s eye none other than the formidable, homely, well-fed and hard-drinking Benning himself....
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The Wentworth Mansion
The Wentworth Mansion
It was almost as original in Colonial New Hampshire to be a Wentworth as it is today to be a Biddle in Philadelphia. The descendants of Samuel Wentworth, the first of his name in the province, were conspicuously numerous in the small population of their community. As individuals they were energetic, persevering, and not without a certain amount of dignity. To say that they were politicians is to say that they were business men. Individually they were better than average citizens, collectively th
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The Pringle House
The Pringle House
© D.M c K THE PRINGLE HOUSE Royal governors have visited here; invading generals have made the house headquarters in two wars; it was twice besieged; a famous beauty left its doors and was lost at sea; and even Josiah Quincy was impressed by its hospitality. But there are new roses every springtime on the garden wall.......
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The Pringle House
The Pringle House
If tradition has any influence upon its own children, your true Charlestonian should be a violently proud person, who votes with a flourish, as a Signer would vote; who looks aloft—not at the sun—but at the spires of St. Michael’s and St. Philip’s, and seeing them in their proper places in Charleston’s profile, knows that the world again revolves; who makes horrid faces regularly in the direction of Fort Sumter; who cheers “Huzza!” at the lightest mention of General Francis Marion; in short, who
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Appendix
Appendix
Those who find in the stories of Mount Vernon and The Quincy Homestead a stimulus for the preservation of other famous American residences will naturally inquire into the successful methods of the organizations of patriotic women who now carry on that work in a manner so perfectly suited to the charge. To answer those inquiries, and more particularly to record the identity of those who are now “carrying on,” there follows a list of the current officers of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of
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