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This is mainly here just for me, since our week is so damned full, I want to be able to remember in what order we saw stuff. We arrived at our house on Judith Point on Saturday, midafternoon. We went up the road to the Stop and Shop to buy food for the week to fill the refrigerator. Ate dinner on the deck watching the tide come it. Stayed out on the deck all evening. Basically, a very calm and relaxed evening. We kicked around the idea of going to Providence to see the waterfire, but decided the view from the balcony was really too good to leave.
The house is a cute three-bedroom, with WiFi. So I can post from the deck, watching the tide come in and go out.
Woke with the sun pouring through the house as we face directly east.
Sunday we began our travels by going northish to Smith's Castle. We did not tour the house, as it was closed until later in the day. But the grounds were lovely, if possessing a slightly morbid bent as there was a "grave marker" for forty men who were buried in a mass grave on the site. They all fell during the "Great Swamp Fight" of 1675 (King Philip's War).
Second stop was the General Nathaniel Greene House. Which we found with the assistance of the Garmin one of us had along, and without it we would never have found it, because we have discovered Rhode Island doesn't believe in historical marker signs. Nathaniel Greene was a revolutionary war general, and his house is on ten acres, and they are slowly restoring it. One of his cannons is set in front of the house, and the caretaker, who spent an hour with us taking us through the house, talked fairly excitedly about the period "junk" they keep digging up from midden heaps.
Then we went on to look at the Varnum House, since our tour guide at the Greene house mentioned the Varnum house as a house built around the same time in a completely different style - much more ornate than Greene's aesthetic.
Again with Garmin we found, down a rocky steep dirt road, Step Stone Falls. Which was a lovely little bug-ridden walk in the woods. I startled a very pretty toad as I was scrambling over some of the massive granite slabs (that make the "step stones").
Back to the house for dinner (yum, roast beast).
Today we woke with the sun (again, seems to be the theme here). After stopping by the Narragansett Indian Monument in Narragansett. This is a 23 foot tall sculpture carved from a single Douglas fir by Peter Toth. Very odd, but kind of cool to see. Short stop at the post office and we went off to Newport.
We started at Kingscote and we had the docent to ourselves, and she was terrific with just answering off the cuff questions, and showing the house. Of course, Stanford White did some of the renovating to the original house, and I had Ragtime running through my head for the rest of the day (as he was mentioned about eight more times). With the Kingscote ticket we also got to see the Isaac Bell House for "free". This is a Shingle Style summer cottage. The preservation society is currently restoring meticulously, and the house has very few bits of furniture in it. But even if the walls are fairly bare, you can see where they are working on getting reproduction materials to bring it back. I loved the "sleeping porch" the best os all of the house. It was bigger than the bedroom, but it was an open air covered area. I've read about sleeping porches, but even then, it is difficult to imagine with no point of reference. This house has given me my point of reference. Why don't we have sleeping proches any more?
Then we walked up to The Elms and took the first of three audio tours- each of which we only did the "basic" tour of each property. The Elms was built in 1899-1901, and was the summer home of the Berwind family. They were in coal - and their fortune was fairly new for the time. The dining room impressed me as being bigger than my whole house.
From The Elms we drove to Marble House, which was a monument to Alva Vanderbilt's vision. Oddly, the family only spent three summers at their $11 million dollar summer "cotage (with $7 million dollars of imported marble) before Alva divorced her husband, and moved down the street into her second husband's home, Belcourt. Strangely, for a woman who was so concerned with getting women the vote and having a woman's right to have a say in her own life, she gave her daughter Consuelo none of the freedom to choose in her own life. Consuelo was forced into an arranged marriage with a Duke (a marriage which was later annulled). The house is more a showplace, and not really a "home" by any stretch of the imagination. It is completely over-the-top, and by the end it was a relief to go downstairs to the fabulous, obviously lovingly kept (and enormous) kitchen, just to get away from the gilded tschochkies.
Then, a bit late in the day, and growing tired, we stopped at The Breakers. Cornelius and Alice Vanderbilt built this stone, brick and marble summer home (boasting seventy rooms). This mansion is still opulescent, and over-the-top, but this Vanderbilt family imbued in the house a sense of home missing in Marble House.
What is interesting to note in all these properties, the husbands and wives have seperate bedrooms. One of the audio tours mentioned that this was because the wives would entertain their friends in their bedrooms and it would be awkward for the husband to come in to change his clothing to see his wife hosting tea. They also mentioned that the women would change clothing a number of times a day - almost from the skin out - because a lady of the time would be embarrassed to be seen in her morning gown in the afternoon. Can you imagine changing clothing up to seven times a day? Yeah. Ridiculous.
So the Gilded Age mansions were built at a time before income taxes, and each of the mansions we saw had staffs of about forty people who lived on site, with more who came in to do day labor. Also interestingly, the only servants seen in the "living areas" by family and guests were men. Valets, footmen, and butlers. One fun factoid from Marble House was in the formal dining room, the chairs were made of bronze, and each chair weighs seventy pounds. Footmen were required to assist guests in moving the chairs close enough to the table to eat. And the end chairs weighed a hundred pounds each.
After these last couple of properties (and as the day went on the houses got more and more crowded, until by The Breakers we were having to dodge tourists and elbow our way though.
If the weather cooperates, tomorrow we will have our boating tour of the coast line, and we'll try to see a few things we missed today. I will say the Garmin devce has been incredibly helpful (most of the time).
The house is a cute three-bedroom, with WiFi. So I can post from the deck, watching the tide come in and go out.
Woke with the sun pouring through the house as we face directly east.
Sunday we began our travels by going northish to Smith's Castle. We did not tour the house, as it was closed until later in the day. But the grounds were lovely, if possessing a slightly morbid bent as there was a "grave marker" for forty men who were buried in a mass grave on the site. They all fell during the "Great Swamp Fight" of 1675 (King Philip's War).
Second stop was the General Nathaniel Greene House. Which we found with the assistance of the Garmin one of us had along, and without it we would never have found it, because we have discovered Rhode Island doesn't believe in historical marker signs. Nathaniel Greene was a revolutionary war general, and his house is on ten acres, and they are slowly restoring it. One of his cannons is set in front of the house, and the caretaker, who spent an hour with us taking us through the house, talked fairly excitedly about the period "junk" they keep digging up from midden heaps.
Then we went on to look at the Varnum House, since our tour guide at the Greene house mentioned the Varnum house as a house built around the same time in a completely different style - much more ornate than Greene's aesthetic.
Again with Garmin we found, down a rocky steep dirt road, Step Stone Falls. Which was a lovely little bug-ridden walk in the woods. I startled a very pretty toad as I was scrambling over some of the massive granite slabs (that make the "step stones").
Back to the house for dinner (yum, roast beast).
Today we woke with the sun (again, seems to be the theme here). After stopping by the Narragansett Indian Monument in Narragansett. This is a 23 foot tall sculpture carved from a single Douglas fir by Peter Toth. Very odd, but kind of cool to see. Short stop at the post office and we went off to Newport.
We started at Kingscote and we had the docent to ourselves, and she was terrific with just answering off the cuff questions, and showing the house. Of course, Stanford White did some of the renovating to the original house, and I had Ragtime running through my head for the rest of the day (as he was mentioned about eight more times). With the Kingscote ticket we also got to see the Isaac Bell House for "free". This is a Shingle Style summer cottage. The preservation society is currently restoring meticulously, and the house has very few bits of furniture in it. But even if the walls are fairly bare, you can see where they are working on getting reproduction materials to bring it back. I loved the "sleeping porch" the best os all of the house. It was bigger than the bedroom, but it was an open air covered area. I've read about sleeping porches, but even then, it is difficult to imagine with no point of reference. This house has given me my point of reference. Why don't we have sleeping proches any more?
Then we walked up to The Elms and took the first of three audio tours- each of which we only did the "basic" tour of each property. The Elms was built in 1899-1901, and was the summer home of the Berwind family. They were in coal - and their fortune was fairly new for the time. The dining room impressed me as being bigger than my whole house.
From The Elms we drove to Marble House, which was a monument to Alva Vanderbilt's vision. Oddly, the family only spent three summers at their $11 million dollar summer "cotage (with $7 million dollars of imported marble) before Alva divorced her husband, and moved down the street into her second husband's home, Belcourt. Strangely, for a woman who was so concerned with getting women the vote and having a woman's right to have a say in her own life, she gave her daughter Consuelo none of the freedom to choose in her own life. Consuelo was forced into an arranged marriage with a Duke (a marriage which was later annulled). The house is more a showplace, and not really a "home" by any stretch of the imagination. It is completely over-the-top, and by the end it was a relief to go downstairs to the fabulous, obviously lovingly kept (and enormous) kitchen, just to get away from the gilded tschochkies.
Then, a bit late in the day, and growing tired, we stopped at The Breakers. Cornelius and Alice Vanderbilt built this stone, brick and marble summer home (boasting seventy rooms). This mansion is still opulescent, and over-the-top, but this Vanderbilt family imbued in the house a sense of home missing in Marble House.
What is interesting to note in all these properties, the husbands and wives have seperate bedrooms. One of the audio tours mentioned that this was because the wives would entertain their friends in their bedrooms and it would be awkward for the husband to come in to change his clothing to see his wife hosting tea. They also mentioned that the women would change clothing a number of times a day - almost from the skin out - because a lady of the time would be embarrassed to be seen in her morning gown in the afternoon. Can you imagine changing clothing up to seven times a day? Yeah. Ridiculous.
So the Gilded Age mansions were built at a time before income taxes, and each of the mansions we saw had staffs of about forty people who lived on site, with more who came in to do day labor. Also interestingly, the only servants seen in the "living areas" by family and guests were men. Valets, footmen, and butlers. One fun factoid from Marble House was in the formal dining room, the chairs were made of bronze, and each chair weighs seventy pounds. Footmen were required to assist guests in moving the chairs close enough to the table to eat. And the end chairs weighed a hundred pounds each.
After these last couple of properties (and as the day went on the houses got more and more crowded, until by The Breakers we were having to dodge tourists and elbow our way though.
If the weather cooperates, tomorrow we will have our boating tour of the coast line, and we'll try to see a few things we missed today. I will say the Garmin devce has been incredibly helpful (most of the time).