Transcriber’s Notes
Table of Contents added by Transcriber.
Italics are enclosed in _underscores_.
CONTENTS
Introduction 9
Monticello 17
The Haunted House, New Orleans 29
Doughoregan Manor 43
The Jumel Mansion 55
Mount Vernon 69
The Quincy Homestead 83
The Timothy Dexter Mansion 95
The Kendall House 107
The Longfellow House 121
Cliveden 135
The Wentworth Mansion 145
The Pringle House 159
Appendix 169
[Illustration:
© D.McK
MONTICELLO
“Mr. Jefferson,” said one of Rochambeau’s aides, “is the first American
who has consulted the fine arts to know how he should shelter himself
from the weather.” With no continental travel for background, with only
the meager pictorial record of the period to draw upon, he somehow
responded to the simplicity and useful beauty of the classics, and
translated it to his castle.]
[Illustration]
FAMOUS
COLONIAL
HOUSES
BY
_PAUL M. HOLLISTER_
Illustrated by
_JAMES PRESTON_
With an Introduction by
_JULIAN STREET_
[Illustration]
DAVID McKAY COMPANY, Publishers
_PHILADELPHIA, MCMXXI_
Copyright, 1921, by
DAVID MCKAY COMPANY
_Illustrations especially engraved and printed by the
Beck Engraving Company, Philadelphia_
TO
MARION
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 who put me in the way of finding reliable
information. Several of them are the owners of the houses; some of them
have even read this manuscript.
--_Boston, September, 1921._
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 Vernon, as it were. And it seems to me the change could not
better be exemplified than in this charming, gentle book of Famous
Colonial Houses.
While we were fighting to preserve the heritage and the traditions left
us by Washington, Jefferson, Carroll of Carrollton, and other great
figures of their time, whom we find in these pages, we were too busily
engaged to give much thought to the origins of the things we fought to
save. Not that the forefathers of the nation were forgotten, but that
historic men were, in that time of stress, overshadowed by historic
principles laid down by them. We put them aside tenderly, as books are
put aside when the sword is taken up. Yet now that we have vindicated
in battle the freedom that they gave us, we find them more than ever
with us. For a just war fought through to victory sheds glory not only
upon the men who fought it and the nation for which they fought, but
also upon the nation’s ancient heroes, whose stature is increased with
that of their country. Wherefore this book, telling tales of old houses
in which early American history was made, and of men who made the
houses and the history, is even more welcome today than it would have
been before the Great War.
It is welcome, too, for another partially extrinsic reason.
In the face of mutterings of anarchy--that Russian importation which
is so much less satisfactory than the caviar--there is reassurance
in these sturdy calm old mansions which are the monuments of the
sturdy calm old patriots who raised them--men having a rare sense of
proportion which they exercised not only in building their houses but
in building the nation on lines equally clean, sound and beautiful.
Fancy a shaggy Bolshevik, his mouth full of broken English, his head
full of sophistry, and his heart full of greed for the possessions of
others, being led up Mount Vernon, Monticello or Doughoregan Manor!
Could any contrast make a picture more grotesque? Could there be
conceived a background more serenely sane, more perfectly American,
against which to display the distortion of this foreign madness?
Every stone and brick and timber of such houses preaches a sermon on
Americanism.
It is a sermon not only for aliens, but for all of us. We should all
see these houses, or if we cannot see them, we should know them as some
of them are made known to us in this book. Our land is a better land
for having them within its borders, and we will be better citizens for
an acquaintance with them.
The day on which I went to Monticello was beautiful, yet, save my
companion, no one else was there. I wonder how many of the politicians
who, with the _vox humana_ stop pulled out, acclaim the name of
Jefferson as founder of the Democratic Party, have made the short
pilgrimage from Washington to Charlottesville to visit the house he
lived in and the grave where he is buried.
In curious contrast to the large investment of the nation in National
Parks, is its apparent indifference in the matter of the homes of its
historic figures. Not one of the houses dealt with by Mr. Hollister in
this book is the property of the nation. Two of them are, to be sure,
houses which, though their story is interesting, are not involved
with national history; and some of the others are not of sufficient
importance, from the purely historical point of view, to make them
national monuments of the first order. But two are, on the other hand,
the homes of early presidents, and neither of these is owned by the
nation. For all practical purposes Mount Vernon is as free to the
public as though the nation did own it, but the fact remains that the
title to it is vested in a society; while as for Monticello, it is
owned by a private individual, not a descendant of Jefferson, into
whose hands it came by inheritance from a forebear said to have secured
it in a not too creditable way. It is difficult to understand why the
State of Virginia or the Nation has not bought the place, which, I am
told, the owner has declared his willingness to part with--at a price.
The census of the twelve houses described and pictured in this book is
worth completing. One, Mount Vernon, is, as I have said, owned by an
organization of patriotic women; two are owned by their municipalities
and are cared for by patriotic organizations; one only is the home of
a lineal descendant and namesake of the builder--though three others
belong to persons having in their veins blood of the first masters of
their houses. And one--a most interesting, but not historic house--is
a poor battered tenement. Seven of the houses are situated in Northern
States, one in a Border State, and four are in the South. The builders
of two of the houses, the first and third Presidents of the United
States, are buried on the grounds nearby, and in one case the builder
is buried under the chancel of a private chapel, a part of the house
itself.
These historic houses may well be regarded as taking the place with us
of the crown jewels of an empire. I am thankful to have seen eight of
the twelve. For, like one of Goldsmith’s characters, “I love everything
that’s old--old friends, old times, old manors, old books, old wine.”
Therefore I find myself particularly pleased at being associated
with this book, though in so slight a way. The two men who created
it--for in this case the author and the artist surely stand on equal
footing--are my old friends. Obviously, the book is one of old times
and old manors, and if that does not make it an old book, what could?
Only the old wine is lacking to complete the quintet. And even that may
some day be accessible again. Who knows?
--_Julian Street._
NORFOLK, CONN.,
_September, 1921_.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Monticello _Frontispiece._
Facing Page
The Haunted House, New Orleans 28
Doughoregan Manor 42
The Jumel Mansion 54
Mount Vernon 68
The Quincy Homestead 82
The Timothy Dexter Mansion 94
The Kendall House 106
The Longfellow House 120
Cliveden 134
The Wentworth Mansion 144
The Pringle House 158
MONTICELLO
Famous Colonial Houses
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 proper setting. If his schoolbooks had not been
burned in the fire at Shadwell we might expect to find, on the margins
of his Horace, a sketch of the castle of his dream, for Jefferson drew
rather well and probably sketched just as well during study hour as any
other boy of his age.
He was nineteen when his dream promised to materialize. That summer
and the next, when he was at home for the long holiday, he would cross
the Rivanna in his canoe and climb the slope to see how the workmen
were getting on with the levelling for his castle. As the boy had grown
towards manhood the hill no longer towered into the skies, but whatever
the picture lost in size, it gained in rich associations. It was still
_his_ mountain: _Monticello_--“little mountain”--he called it. “Our
own dear Monticello, where Nature has spread such a rich mantle under
the eye, mountains, forests, rocks, rivers. There is a mountain there
in the opposite direction of the afternoon’s sun, the valley between
which and Monticello is five hundred feet deep.... How sublime to look
down upon the workhouse of Nature, to see her clouds, hail, snow, rain,
thunder, all fabricated at our feet.”
In all weathers, under all trials, his heart took refuge on the hill.
He was admitted to the bar in 1767, made headway in his profession, and
was sent to the House of Burgesses, honors which only quickened his
impatient accomplishment, and his desire for a home upon his mountain.
In 1769 its plans were ready, and work began. Thirty years later it was
finished. During those years he wrote his country’s bill of divorce
from her harsh proprietor, and was nearly captured at Monticello by
British raiders. Monticello saw him ride down the winding road as a
Burgess, to ride up again as a member of the Continental Congress;
honored him as Governor of Virginia, and waved him Godspeed as he left
to succeed Benjamin Franklin as envoy to France; hailed him home as
Washington’s secretary of state, and then reluctantly surrendered him
to eight years in a new White House that stood in a sandy wilderness
somewhere down on the banks of the Potomac. But when his active life
was done, after he had not only written the Declaration of Independence
but prosecuted it, added half a continent to its jurisdiction, and
administered the doctrine that all men are created free and equal, he
came back to the mountain of his memory to gaze down upon the workhouse
of Nature.
“While it is too much to say,” writes Julian Street, “that one would
recognize it as the house of the writer of the Declaration, it is
not too much to say, that once one does know it, one can trace a
clear affinity resulting from a common origin--an affinity much
more apparent, by the way, than can be traced between the work of
Michelangelo on St. Peter’s at Rome, on the ceiling of the Sistine
Chapel, and in his ‘David.’
“The introductory paragraph to the Declaration ascends into the body
of the document as gracefully as the wide flights of easy steps ascend
to the doors of Monticello; the long and beautifully balanced paragraph
which follows, building word upon word and sentence upon sentence into
a central statement, has a form as definite and graceful as that of
the finely proportioned house; the numbered paragraphs which follow,
setting forth separate details, are like rooms within the house, and--I
have just come upon the coincidence with a pleasant start such as might
be felt by the discoverer of some complex and important cipher--as
there are twenty-seven of the numbered paragraphs in the Declaration,
so there are twenty-seven rooms in Monticello. Last of all there
are two little phrases in the Declaration (the phrases stating that
we shall hold our British brethren in future as we hold the rest of
mankind--‘enemies in war; in peace, friends’), which I would liken
to the small twin buildings, one of them Jefferson’s office, the
other that of the overseer, which stand on either side of the lawn at
Monticello, at some distance from the house.”
The house which inspired and witnessed the activities of so prominent a
figure could hardly lack distinction, and this, of course, Monticello
has. What is more, Monticello is a monument of technical architecture
which attracts the eager attention of every student of American
domestic building. The question they all ask, and the question that
cannot be answered, is: “Where could this farmer-lawyer boy have got
his expert training in architecture?” His library might have given us
a clue, but it was burned at Shadwell in 1770. We know he felt this
loss acutely, for, next to his house, Jefferson loved his books. He
asked anxiously of their fate. An old slave answered: “All burnt, my
young master, all burnt. But never mind, sir”--and his wrinkled face
broke into a broad smile--“we saved your old fiddle!” The new house
at Monticello was even then far enough along to take in his mother’s
family, evicted by the fire. The building continued. It was slow work,
on an extensive plan.
“Mr. Jefferson,” said one of Rochambeau’s aides later, “is the first
American who has consulted the fine arts to know how he should shelter
himself from the weather.” With no continental travel for background,
with only the meagre pictorial record of the period to draw upon,
he somehow responded instantly to the simplicity and useful beauty
of the classic, and translated it to his castle. By the Greeks, for
example, it was thought improper that a roof should indicate anything
but a glorification of the heavens; the idea that human feet might
be walking on the upper side of a ceiling was sacrilege. This (and
other more practical engineering reasons) dictated single-story
buildings. Jefferson’s eye for balance caught the pictorial advantages
of one-story construction, but he needed two stories for Monticello,
and by his shrewd planning both the pure classic tradition and pure
American comfort were reconciled.
At the end of a broad lawn, in full relief against the distant sky,
stands a red brick house with a clean, tall portico. The four gleaming
pillars stand guard like peace-time sentinels. A white balustrade
runs along the eaves of the building, tempering the irregularities
in the roof except where the smooth curve of a dome rises above the
center. The feeling is classic, and so suggests a single story, and the
length of the lofty windows flanking the portico seems to confirm the
impression that a single frame has been carried the full height of the
house. Closer examination, however, of the irregularities just remarked
in the roof reveals them as the gabled windows of an upper story.
In cold, unprofessional analysis, the compromise sounds thoroughly
impractical. Just the contrary is true, for Jefferson took up every
challenging problem with enthusiasm, and applied to its solution a
sure sense of balance and a hearty appetite for detail.
Indoors the one-story tradition is quite as respectfully acknowledged,
and as cleverly evaded. The entrance hall is a lofty room of great
dignity, almost so good that a job-lot of Victorian furniture has not
damaged its appearance, and unquestionably so good that even the most
critical architectural eye will not take offense at a balcony which
travels three of its sides. There is the balcony, but where, inquires
your classic eye, are the stairs? Concealed in a passage, where they
cannot break the form of the hall from which visitors are to gain their
first impression of the interior.
If the visitor in Jefferson’s day went further, as his uniform
hospitality required, he may have noticed as he passed to the
drawing-room that the portal between the two rooms had two pairs of
doors. There was a definite reason for them: the wall must be heavy to
support the octagon in which the drawing-room was situated, and over
which rose the dome. A single pair of doors would have made an ugly
recess in either room. Two sets of doors finished both rooms correctly,
but presented just twice as many nice problems of treatment. So the
first set was made of heavily paneled wood, and might be folded back
into an invisible pocket in the passage; the second set was a pair of
light casements, and if the visitor were to press a spring on either
one, both would close by a mechanism concealed overhead.
Throughout the building there were ingenious touches which disclosed
beneath their first impression of simple luxurious comfort the patient
scheming of the builder. The drawing-room was octagonal in order that
five windows might frame clear vistas in as many directions across
the sweeping valleys to the horizon. The floor there is of squares of
cherry wood, each with a liberal border of contrasting beech; both
woods were laid only after Jefferson had made painstaking experiment
in the color and in the wearing and joining qualities of various kinds
of flooring. The same note of formality which one feels in the Pringle
house of Charleston as he passes from room to room through heavily
pedimented doorways is sounded at Monticello; but where Miles Brewton,
in his Charleston house, held strictly to the “egg-and-dart” of the
classic mode, Thomas Jefferson embellished the friezes above the doors
of his drawing-room with a motive of tomahawks, scalping knives and
rosettes! He feared that the dining-room, with only two southerly
windows for ventilation, might become close toward the end of a long
meal, so he gave a slight dome-like concavity to the ceiling, and at
its focal center concealed under a grille the intake of a ventilator
which leads up through the roof. He built a recess for the sideboard
with the double effect of preserving the lines of the apartment and
of displaying a handsome piece of furniture to its best advantage. An
exquisite Adam mantel, with Wedgwood panels, stands between two of
the windows, and you would never guess that in one of its sides is
a door, and behind that door a dumb-waiter leading from the service
rooms below. He wanted his body-servant’s room conveniently near his
own, so a staircase to the valet’s quarters ascends through a spacious
closet off the master’s chamber. None of the liaison between art and
artifice would be remarkable today, perhaps. There are modern houses
as honestly built as men of taste can plan and men of wealth can buy,
to match Touraine for splendor, Italy for gilt, a highly organized
railway terminal for convenience and Sybaris for comfort. But given the
workmanship, the materials and the engineering of any period in our
domestic architecture, Monticello challenges them all to show a better
plan.
Long balustraded walks reach out to right and left from the house.
Someone has likened them to two friendly outstretched arms, holding
in each hand not a jewel, but a dainty summer-house. They are more
than decorative promenades--each is the roof of a subterranean arcade,
passing from the main building to the servants’ quarters. All of the
strictly domestic affairs were in the cellar-story, made habitable by
the fact that it was just a step down the hillside, and made by no
means the least interesting portion of the building by further evidence
of Jefferson’s genius. It is a veritable catacomb. He built there a
kitchen ventilated by long ducts which carried cooking odors to distant
outlets; he built cisterns, a large carriage court, cold-rooms, bins
for fruits, and wood, and cider; servants’ quarters so placed that they
were cool in summer and warm in winter. Like Mount Vernon, and every
other colonial estate of any size, Monticello was a self-maintaining
establishment, which supported the labor of several trades. But the
tailor-shop, the distillery, the smithy, the dye-house, the cobblery,
the weaver’s shop--all were set apart from the main house and concealed
from the general eye. Later architects thought enough of the treatment
of the arcade passages to the servants’ quarters to copy them for the
subterranean barracks at Fortress Monroe.
One wonders where Thomas Jefferson found the time for all this labor
and supervision. The answer must be that his house was his one
consuming avocation. It is almost a truism that the men upon whom are
made the heaviest demands find time to invite the greatest number of
demands. As Roosevelt loved his natural history, and made affectionate
excursions into botany, so Jefferson knew every tree and shrub on his
estate, and watched over it. Each week during his presidency a letter
was despatched from the White House to Captain Bacon, his overseer in
charge, directing transplanting, grading, repairs, improvements. Many
of the workmen on the estate were men whom he himself had trained in
their crafts. Some were slaves, whom he later freed to practise the
trades he had given them. Before he had stone cut and measured for
the building he tested the stone; he weathered various woods; he made
experiments in brick-laying which in some cases led him to strange
conclusions, but which, like everything else he undertook about the
building, had practical reasoning behind them. And yet, during all the
patient hours he spent in drafting and directing, the miles he walked
in surveying and landscaping, he never let the cloud of details eclipse
the artist’s star.
Jefferson has been much idolized for his directness, his logic, his
practicality. He undoubtedly gave the country what today would be
termed “a good business administration.” It is tempting to leave him
to posterity with that reputation, and with the Louisiana Purchase
as its brightest testimonial, the shrewdest real estate deal in our
history. But Monticello is so obviously the product of an artist and a
scholar that we learn with no hint of damage to his commoner reputation
that the man who had spent his life upon this estate had also spent
much more money than he possessed; that his generosity approached
extravagance; that his library of some seven thousand volumes, the best
then in America, was sold after his death to the government (to replace
the library the British destroyed at Washington in 1814) because it
had to be sold to meet his debts; and that Monticello itself finally
passed out of the hands of his family. With Jefferson gone Monticello
could never be wholly itself again. It must stand always as the finest
exposition of the heart of the artist who conceived the plan for the
University of Virginia at Monticello’s skirts, who found when he
visited Nîmes a Roman Temple which so fascinated him that he said the
peasants thought him a mad Englishman contemplating suicide in its
ruins, who copied that same temple for the Capitol of Richmond, and who
wrote to a Paris acquaintance: “Here I am gazing whole hours at the
_Maison Quarrée_ like a lover at his mistress.”
When Jefferson died he was buried on the estate. An army of human
rodents came to see to his grave and to nibble away most of the
memorial shaft, and it was only through the persistent efforts of his
grand-daughter, Miss Randolph, that the United States stepped in and
restored it. Meanwhile the estate had been sold under questionable
circumstances to a Captain Uriah Levy. In justice to him be it said
that he felt the responsibility of his charge, and bequeathed it at his
death to the people of the United States. But the Supreme Court decreed
that this definition was too vague, and after a prolonged debate among
Levy’s heirs, his nephew, Jefferson Levy, acquired for $10,500 the
title to the buildings and 218 acres of the little mountain.
Sporadic efforts have been made to buy the estate and rescue it from
the casual upkeep which is carrying Monticello steadily towards the
shadows of oblivion; one such movement, under the leadership of Mrs.
Martin W. Littleton, bade fair to succeed, and there were patriotic
women ready to assume its care as they have so admirably done at Mount
Vernon. The Governor of Virginia is silent on the subject, and the
Wilson government, which owed more perhaps to Jefferson than to any
other single preceptor, was otherwise engaged. With the return of peace
the renewal of the project is, to say the least, appropriate. Whether
it contains an appeal to the honor of citizenship in a nation in which
all men are free and equal, is for its citizens--and one of them is the
owner--to decide.
THE HAUNTED HOUSE,
NEW ORLEANS
[Illustration:
© D.McK
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 banished.]
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 debut, departed this life only last year--a gay life, marked
by amours and appointments, triumphs and disappointments, dances and
duels. Presently there will be gaps in the circle of musicians who
always settle about the focal point of an opera house, and you will
hear no more the manifold outpourings of their several souls, throats
and fiddles.
Their passing will deepen the twilight of an antiquity which New
Orleans has cherished with more sympathy than all the rest of our
American cities. Rigid modern buildings with Louis XVI fronts and
O’Shaughnessy backs will rear their ventilators, tanks and pent-houses
where, once upon a time, warm walls and climbing cupolas, odd contours
and vine-like wrought-iron railings melted into a strangely complex and
beautiful composition. Even now, as the fitful trolley-car clanks past
the corner of Hospital and Royal, a tremor shakes a few more crumbling
grains from the arches of the old Spanish Barracks. Soon they will be
returned to earth. You will forget that France gave New Orleans to
Spain to pay for her help in the English wars; that Napoleon, sitting
in his bath-tub and quarreling with his brothers, maintained stoutly
that since he had just forced Spain to give Louisiana back to him, he
had a perfect right to re-sell; that he splashed them into agreement;
and that he did re-sell the territory to the new United States. But
Napoleon’s legions have followed Andrew Jackson’s Kentucky riflemen
into the twilight.
The passing of the old order has a hundred conspicuous manifestations
in New Orleans, perhaps because there is a legend for every old house,
a tragedy for every shadow, a romantic blood-stain on every pavement.
The Absinthe House takes in lodgers. The Cabildo, the ancient Spanish
city hall, is a museum. An order of Catholic sisters now occupies the
building which once witnessed the quadroon balls. There is African
ragtime in New Orleans, as there is in every city and town where
squeals the talking-machine, but in Beauregard Square you will not hear
today the thumping of the voodoo chant, nor see the _bamboula_ danced,
as you might have in the days when it was Congo Square. Ashes unto
ashes, dust to--reinforced concrete.
Nowhere, perhaps, is there more graphic evidence of the change than
right here at Hospital and Royal Streets. Inspect the house before
you. The days of its grandeur are past. The concièrge says a hundred
and eighty people live there now--surely it was not intended for so
many. But it is a lodging-house, and the task of cleaning up after the
lodgers must make them seem to the concièrge like a hundred and eighty
or more.
From the street corner diagonally opposite your eyes take in a spacious
square building, three stories high, of cement-colored stucco. It
has a flat roof, and its architecture suggests that the daughter of
a Florentine palace became the bride of a small but snappily dressed
United States Post Office. It stands flush with the _banquette_, and
wears a frill of balcony clear round its two street sides, under whose
tempering shade you may distinguish the faded red of the lower story,
and the entrance to a mysterious tunnel which is in reality a deeply
arched doorway.
Under its modern exterior you will detect hints of its great age. There
is, for example, a note of caprice in the red wrought-iron railings
of the balcony. They may have been made, as were many in the _vieux
carré_, at the very forge of Jean Lafitte, the pirate-blacksmith who
commanded the marauders of Barataria, and whose pirate four-pounders
helped out the rifles at the battle of New Orleans. Generations of
idlers have worn smooth and rusty brown the peacock tints on the iron
columns that support the balcony. There are touches of vermilion and
lavender in the sharp green of the shutters at the second-floor windows.
The architecture is Italo-American, and so are the urchins popping from
the doors to stare at you as you wait for admittance. Their faces are
soiled, and so is the black-and-white marble floor behind the heavy
spiked gates. Note, above you, the coffered and embossed ceiling,
appraise the graceful fan-light over the door, examine the elaborate
carving of the door itself, for these are relics which indicate the
grand manner in which this house once welcomed its guests. Forget
that the ceiling is blistered, that two panes are gone from the side
windows, and that night-blooming lodgers have kicked the haunches off
the carved steeds of Phoebus Apollo on the door. A century ago a slave
would have swung wide the portal with great ceremony, and you would
have mounted the winding stair to an upper hall which was notable for
its elegance; today you find it dingy, uninspiring and forlorn. Not a
ghost in sight anywhere.
Comes the concièrge and swears and deposes that in the year of Our
Lord 1919 she did see with her own eyes a headless man march up these
stairs, and that she has accordingly caused the house to be sprinkled
with holy water. Did he look like Louis Philippe? Well, he looked
something like him, and yet differed from him--the light wasn’t good,
and besides (and this _was_ a happy thought) the figure had no head,
and resemblances are hard to establish under those conditions. Louis
Philippe is believed to have slept here, though Mr. George W. Cable
doubts this, on the ground that in 1798, the year of the royal visit,
no such high buildings were erected for fear they would sink into the
soft ground. No, the headless man was not Louis Philippe, but some
other character in the lurid history of the building.
That history began in the first year or two of the century, when the
Baron de Pontalba, a stanch old Bonapartist who did as he pleased,
did it with exceptionally good taste and built this mansion. Soft
ground or no soft ground, the Pontalbas were a vigorous family, who,
when they wanted houses, built them. Gossip said the Baron and his
daughter-in-law never got on well together. There may have been some
truth in it, for years later they found the Baron dead in his room at
Mont l’Eveque, and daughter-in-law in her own room badly wounded by
pistol shots. True, however, to the tradition of hardihood which ran in
the family, she recovered, and lived through the Franco-Prussian War,
carrying the bullets in her body to her grave.
The Baron had earnestly advised Napoleon to sell Louisiana to
Jefferson. Oddly enough, the Purchase which he advocated brought about
a change in New Orleans which attacked the very identity of such
families as the Pontalbas. An invasion of uncultured Americans from the
north swept down the valley, settled in the city, and beat against the
social barriers of the French and Spanish circles in the _vieux carré_.
Hitherto they had dictated the life of the city, and it was disturbing
to those who dated from the “_filles de la cassette_” and the grandees
of the Spanish Main to contemplate this immigration of a new race,
unancestored and, from a Latin standpoint, uncivilized. It was more
than disturbing, it was electro-chemical, and although there was at
first little fraternity between the races, it produced shortly a lively
society.
The Duke of Saxe-Weimar is responsible for an interesting picture
of its customs and habits in 1825. During a visit to New Orleans
he was entertained at the home of a famous gambler, the Baron de
Marigny (he who had entertained the princes of Orleans in ’98), where
he admired, not without cause, a set of chinaware decorated with
portraits of the French royal family and its palaces. The winter
was gay, and he made the rounds of dances, masques and theatres. He
frequented coffee-houses, he danced with the ladies, whom he found
“very pretty, with a genteel French air,” and when “the gentlemen,
who were far behind the ladies in elegance, did not long remain, but
hastened away to other balls,” he was among those also-hastening,
for the naughty young gentlemen were on their way to a quadroon
ball. On another occasion he called upon the august lawyer Grymes,
who figured prominently in the notorious case of Salome Mueller, a
white slave-girl. Grymes was a “foremost citizen” in that society, so
was Miller, Salome’s claimant, who probably knew she was white and
therefore entitled to freedom. A foremost citizen, even in our own
enlightened and prohibited day, can do no wrong--if he has the right
lawyer. The Duke found the city magnificent in her unbridled emotion,
charming in her graces, attractive if perverse in her ethics, and
altogether capable of making a stranger’s head spin.
Thus, when there came to New Orleans in 1825 a benevolent middle-aged
gentleman of France, the Marquis de Lafayette, the city gave him a
superlative welcome. In the light of recent Franco-American exchanges
it is pleasant to think of him as the recipient of every token of
hospitality the city could offer, from triumphal arches to dinners
of state. It suits our specific purpose to watch him chatting in the
drawing-room of the Pontalba house, to peep through the shutters of the
great windows and see the street below filled with bobbing lanterns
of the crowd that has collected to see the great man step into his
carriage, to turn back again into the drawing-room and see that he has
no intention of leaving, for he is the center of a sparkle of wit that
matches the crystal chandelier for brilliance. Here he discoursed, up
yonder he passed the night. With his departure in the morning, the
chronicled glory of the house ends, and its tragedy begins.
Among the old court records there is an entry which establishes the
fact that at the height of the interesting social period marked by
Lafayette’s visit the Pontalba house changed hands. On August 30,
1831, it was bought by Madame McCarty-Lopez-Blanque-Lalaurie, a woman
of more than ordinary magnetism and the wife of Dr. Louis Lalaurie.
Her establishment was quite up to the standards of Créole society. The
touch of her expert hand was evident in the decoration of the house,
and the choice and disposition of the furniture and paintings were a
compliment to her taste. Her ten slaves were more than enough to care
for its needs. She drove out along the Bayou road of an afternoon
behind fine horses, her coachman was coveted as a correct and desirable
servant. What the world calls fine people came to her house with as
keen an appetite for the intellectual cocktails of the hostess as for
the creature hospitality they anticipated at her table.
Like most ladies of social pursuits she had pronounced likes and
dislikes, and she got herself talked about. Being a pure-blood Créole
she resented the nouveau-riche American invasion of the city. “Let
them come,” she said. “There are some things they cannot buy”--and her
good opinion was one, her invitations another. Some of “them” resented
the fact that they would never be bidden to enter the deep-arched
vestibule, nor see the ponderous door swing wide to them as guests, nor
ascend the graceful winding stair. So they railed, and Madame Lalaurie
tossed her head. They muttered unpleasant things, and she sniffed. Then
they cried scandal, to which she was deaf.
A susceptible young Créole attached to the office of the district
attorney was sent one day to call upon Madame Lalaurie and to bring
to her attention the annoying rumor that she had been unkind to her
slaves. He went away with his copy of Article XX of the Old Black Code
unrecited, and his addled young head full of impatience that such
slander could have been perpetrated against a person so obviously
kindly as Madame Lalaurie had just shown herself to be. He had been, in
fact, charmed, and he admitted it.
There is no telling how long the matter might have carried on if it had
not been for a chance glimpse through a window. The unsubstantiated
scandal persisted. But there happened to be a small staircase window in
a neighbor’s house which gave on Madame Lalaurie’s courtyard, and which
commanded not only the screened courtyard-galleries of the house itself
but those of the slave quarters, which stood at right angles to the
house.
The neighbor was going upstairs when she heard a piercing shriek.
From the window she saw a little negro girl fly screaming across the
courtyard, with Madame Lalaurie in close pursuit, the lady armed with a
whip. Into the shelter of the house fled the child, then out again upon
the lower latticed balcony. Although the neighbor could not penetrate
the lattice, she followed the progress of the chase by a crescendo of
terrified cries, as the child raced up the outside stairs to the next
gallery, then to the next. In a moment she emerged upon the roof, her
last frantic bid for sanctuary. There were seven different angles of
pitch to that roof, and it was covered with shiny tiles. The child
slipped, clutched, fell to the courtyard and was killed.
Madame Lalaurie buried her that night in a shallow grave in the
courtyard. The neighbor saw that, too. Then, and not until then, she
reported the whole episode. The authorities came and found the grave,
corroborated the story, and punished Madame Lalaurie by selling all her
slaves. The purchasers were her relatives, and she promptly bought all
her slaves right back.
“She starves them,” said Rumor, sitting on the eaves of a house across
the way. “She whips them, she beats them,” the story ran, gaining
momentum.
“But see how fat and cheerful is her coachman,” replied Reason. “Does
he look like the victim of cruelty?” “He is a spy upon the others,”
hissed Rumor. “_Eh, bien_,” said New Orleans, and yawned lightly, “She
serves such dinners!”
The slave who cooked those dinners was a radical. She tired of
practising her arts with a twenty-four-foot chain clamped to her ankle.
On the afternoon of April 10, 1834, after extraordinary provocation,
she became desperate and set fire to the house.
The townsfolk swarmed to the fire, and were greeted at the door by the
gracious Madame Lalaurie. She directed her friends in their efforts
to remove her costly furniture from the house. When someone suggested
seeing that there was no human life still endangered in the building
she said that it was quite empty, and that there was no necessity of
visiting the slave quarters. Judge Canonge took it upon himself to
investigate, but the smoke drove him back. There were some in the
crowd, however, who were neither her friends nor her well-wishers,
and who insisted that the slaves had not been removed. In the face of
swelling clouds of blinding smoke and the lady’s angry remonstrances,
a man finally groped his way into the slave wing which stood at right
angles to the house.
Within a few moments he was outside, shouting. Volunteers ran back
with him into the slave quarters. In the tiny cubicles which served as
living-space for those humble lives were seven negroes, some locked in
while the fire crept toward them, others chained to the walls. Their
emaciated bodies bore witness to famishing hunger, and cruel sores told
the story of their confinement. They were carried to the street, and
the crowd, having helped to put out the fire in the house, took fire
itself and charged the door. Madame Lalaurie deftly slammed it in their
faces.
Her resourcefulness rose to the situation. By subtle management her
carriage picked its way through the crowd a few hours later and drew
up at the entrance. Before the growing throng of people detected the
maneuver, she and her husband were inside the equipage and rattling
round the corner, “driven up Chartres Street in a close carriage which
I saw speeding at a furious rate” (so Henry C. Castellanos wrote in
1895). The afternoon parade of society was idling along the Bayou Road;
her skilful driver wove his way through the stream of carriages and
gained fast on the pursuit which had risen, howling at her flight. The
Lalauries gained the shore of Lake Pontchartrain, put off in a skiff,
boarded a schooner for Mandeville--up sail, and safe away!
The coachman began his return journey to town, and ended it when he met
the pack of pursuers, for they destroyed him. The chase was deferred
just long enough for the lady to effect her escape to Mobile, and
thence to Paris. There rumor followed, and she was avoided by society.
Three years later word came back in the ships that Madame Lalaurie was
dead of wounds received in a boar-hunt. She had probably hunted as hard
as she had lived.
We cannot surrender her to the savage credulity of the ages, however,
without suggesting that the story of her life, although generally
regarded as authentic, may have been gilded here and there by
intervening generations of highly-colored imagination. A New Orleans
man writes:
“I happen to know one of the descendants of Madame Lalaurie very well,
and I have seen a marble bust of this self-same lady whose alleged
record as a slave murderer is indignantly repudiated by the self-same
descendants. As a matter of fact, those stories are pretty much of a
piece with those which were in vogue in regard to throwing negro slaves
into the furnaces of the Mississippi River steamboats and feeding
piccaninnies to alligators. This would be pretty much as if you or
I stood at the foot of the Battery and chucked _all_ of our money,
_diamonds_, and worldly possessions into New York Bay.”
That April-day crowd in New Orleans had no such sober judgment. After
the coachman had been murdered they returned to Hospital and Royal
Streets and sacked the house from hall to belvedere, ripped the silk
curtains, slashed the paintings, tore out the chandeliers, dug up two
slave skeletons from the courtyard, pitched Madame Lalaurie’s precious
possessions out of the windows and made bonfire of the wreckage in the
street. They drank and looted and terrorized the neighborhood until a
detachment of regulars appeared under the sheriff’s command and put an
end to the orgy.
The shell of the house stood abject and battered for a number of years,
its broken windows telling its ugly story to all who came that way.
On a moonlight night an impressionable girl passing the house could
readily have seen the ghost of a woman’s form leaning imploringly from
the belvedere--one girl did see it, and not even her later confession
that the ghost was a fabric of moonbeams has been sufficient to rid the
building of its name--The Haunted House. 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 easily banished. We shall hear
one more story--a brief one--and then we may judge.
The war came and passed and left New Orleans dominated politically
by those who had been their slaves. The pendulum swung so far to the
extreme that a public school for both white and black children was
ordained and, by coincidence or cunning design, was established in
the Haunted House. It was of course an unfortunate move, and served
no purpose except to whet racial antagonism. There came, finally,
the breaking point. A white political organization which had been
recuperating in strength sent a delegation one afternoon to call
at the school. They were met by the teachers, to whom they issued
a command to muster the school for roll-call. One of the pupils, a
girl of exceptional beauty, heard the commotion from the upper hall,
and peering over the banisters realized the significance of the
roll-call--that the white pupils were to be segregated from the black.
She leaned far over, to catch every word, when a shell comb fell from
her hair and shattered on the marble floor below. She burst into tears
and fled to an upper room.
The roll-call ended. All pupils who had negro blood were ordered from
the house. When the slight flurry had subsided, and the delegation had
left, the principal and one of the teachers found Marguerite upstairs
in a paroxysm of grief. “The comb was my mother’s,” she sobbed, and
when the teacher tried to comfort her, became hysterical. The principal
drew the teacher outside. “It is not on account of the comb,” she said.
“Marguerite’s mother was an octoroon; she married a white sea-captain.
He loved her so much that in order to marry her he opened his wrist
and let a few drops of her blood into his own, so that he might swear
that he had African blood in his veins and get a marriage license. Only
Marguerite and I and one or two others knew her story--and no one would
have suspected, for she is so beautiful. She is engaged to be married,
and her fiancé didn’t know. But the roll-call--now she will leave
school, and he must learn of it.”
Which was the greater tragedy--the brutality of slave torture, or the
death of the exquisite school-girl’s romance? It may be you will find
the answer from the ghost, if ten years of children’s lessons, and the
arpeggios and trills of a conservatory of music, and subsequent vapors
of lodging-house cooking have not frightened the ghost herself away. Go
and see. Far and down in the old quarter of New Orleans, where Hospital
Street meets Royal, you will scarcely hear the drone of the modern city
at work. In the _vieux carré_ one may converse easily with ghosts. You
will find no answer here.
DOUGHOREGAN MANOR
[Illustration:
© D.McK
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_.”]
DOUGHOREGAN MANOR