SEPTEMBER 2006 »  book review

Plutocrats at Play

Houses of the Berkshires, 1870-1930
by Richard S. Jackson Jr. and Cornelia Brooke Gilder
Acanthus Press, New York, NY; 2006
312 pp.; hardcover; 300 b&w duotones; $75
ISBN 0-926494-35-X

Reviewed by Eve M. Kahn

Across a few hundred square miles of foothills in Western Massachusetts, an insular group of rich people – including many cousins married to one another – commissioned mansions from the A-list architects of the Gilded Age. Eminent designers in their primes, such as Bruce Price and Peabody & Stearns, built alongside then- whippersnappers like Stanford White and Delano & Aldrich. Unpretentious shingled cottages mingled with sophisticated Beaux Arts-style brick essays and bombastic Palladians and Tudors. The Berkshires thus ended up with a nearly unrivaled collection of estates overlooking landscapes by Frederick Law Olmsted or Beatrix Jones Farrand.

"There are not many places in America that combine architecture, ambition and nature in such abundance," writes Samuel G. White, a great-grandson of Stanford, in the foreword to this insightful volume. The authors, Berkshires-based historians Richard S. Jackson Jr. and Cornelia Brooke Gilder, have combed through family diaries, guest books, correspondence and period newspapers to illuminate how a dense concentration of majestic buildings arose and how it has aged fairly well.

The book focuses on 35 properties, almost all in Lenox and Stockbridge. The resort area’s pioneer visitors, in the 1840s, were intellectuals like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the actress Fanny Kemble and the painter Thomas Cole. The culturati’s patrons followed, apparently desperate for good conversation they couldn’t find in posher places. Newport, RI, in particular, was notorious for what Edith Wharton called "watering place trivialities." By the time she fled Newport for Lenox in 1902, Jackson and Gilder point out dryly, Wharton "was, after all, merely moving from one resort full of cousins and peers to another."

Still, vacationing in the Berkshires never became as stultifying as Newport’s summer high season. Berkshires aristocrats earnestly called themselves "cottagers," they ran farms that functioned year-round, and they didn’t waste much land on formal gardens. Their house parties tended to center on sports – hunting, golf, cricket (coached by the English servants), plus sledding and skating in winter – rather than tea served under parasols. The architecture likewise never quite reached the off-putting splendor of Newport. But Jackson and Gilder have nonetheless found many examples of vast construction budgets in the Berkshires.

For a widowed railroad heiress named Mary Frances Sherwood Hopkins, McKim, Mead & White quarried her 229-acre property for enough blue dolomite to clad a 68,000-sq.ft. castle. Electricity magnate George Westinghouse built himself a power plant to fire up thousands of bare light bulbs, posted every foot or so under his Queen Anne mansion’s dentil moldings. Investment banker Anson Phelps Stokes had to give up his 20-bedroom half-timbered pile after just a few years in residence because he’d lost a leg in a riding accident and had trouble maneuvering around the 400-ft.-long building.

Gilder and Jackson have arranged their case histories chronologically, and their building descriptions and quotes from primary source material can be memorably vivid. Stanford White’s 1886 "wildly eclectic" Naumkeag, for instance, "features a faux-thatched roof folding over the dormers, irregular chimneys, shards of broken glass in the mortar, and two round, vaguely Norman towers with conical roofs." The children who grew up amid such design marvels had to scrounge up ways to amuse themselves. A lawyer’s daughter named Georgette Folsom wrote at length in her memoirs about life in a rambling 1884 Tudor called Sunnyridge. She liked to slide around on the front hall’s bearskin rug or sit on the bear’s head, and each night en route to bed she tiptoed past creepy portraits: "You passed at the turn of the stairs a terrifying, surely more than life size, painting of Salome with John the Baptist’s head. You tried not to look at it but there was a fascination about that white and bloody head being on the platter…"

In 1925, Sunnyridge was devastated by fire and never rebuilt: "artworks, including John the Baptist’s dripping head, were consumed," Jackson and Gilder report. Surprisingly, only eight other white elephants profiled in this book have been demolished. The others proved adaptable for use as schools, resorts, museums or concert venues (most famously Tanglewood). The authors carefully note the present-day condition of each site, even mentioning which fieldstone gateways or Doric pillars remain visible through undergrowth and which golf courses have "reverted to wilderness."

The high caliber of scholarship only falters in the illustrations and appendices. For some buildings, only three or four grainy photos seem to have survived. Floor plans (often low resolution) are supplied for only half of the projects. Captions are minimal and mostly undated. No street addresses or maps are given, although 20 of the 26 extant buildings are not private homes.

The dozen museums or hotels on the roster would have especially welcomed the publicity. It’s easy enough, though, to input the authors’ sometimes cryptic data into Google. Some tony resort websites quickly pop up, with URLs like elmcourt.com, eastover.com or blantyre.com. This largely well-executed and thorough book will surely inspire architectural tourists to track down accessible period rooms or driveway glimpses, or perhaps just the ghosts of gateposts and putting greens. 

«BACK TO SEPTEMBER 2006 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Have something to say about this article? Feel free to comment!

Comments feed