Newport, before the Revolution, was a most important seaport. When
Dean Berkeley was there it had about forty-five hundred inhabitants,
and they had grown to twelve thousand when the Revolution began. The
preceding half-century was the era of its greatest maritime
prosperity, when Newport ships circumnavigated the globe. The
salubrity of the climate and advantages of the harbor providing safe
anchorage but a few miles from the ocean attracted many merchants and
a large trade, and in those days the Quakers and the Hebrews were the
leading citizens. In 1770 Boston alone surpassed Newport in the extent
of its trade, which then was much greater than that of New York. It
was about this time that a visitor to New York wrote back to the
_Newport Mercury_ that "at its present rate of progress, New York will
soon be as large as Newport." The Revolutionary War, however, almost
ruined the town, and annihilated its commerce. The port was at first
held by the English, and afterwards by the French, both battering and
maltreating it, so that it emerged from the conflict in a dilapidated
condition, with the population reduced to barely five thousand. The
French learned to love the attractive island, and sought earnestly
after the war to have it annexed to France, in return for the aid
given the Americans, but Washington strongly opposed this and
prevented it. The trade was gone, never to return, the merchants went
away to Providence, New York and Boston, and it existed in quiet and
uneventful neglect until the nineteenth century had made some
progress, when people began seeking its pleasant shores for summer
recreation. In 1840 two hotels were built, and this began the
_renaissance_. The Civil War made vast fortunes, and their owners
sought Newport, and it has since become the great summer home of the
fashionable world of America, where they can, in friendly rivalry,
make the most lavish displays possible for wealth to accomplish at a
seaside resort.
Unlike most American watering-places, Newport is not an aggregation of
hotels and lodging-houses, but it is pre-eminently a gathering of the
costliest and most elaborate suburban homes this country can show.
Built upon the extensive space surrounding the older town, and between
it and the ocean, south and east, modern Newport is a galaxy of large
and expensive country-houses, each in an enclosure of lawns,
flower-gardens and foliage, highly ornamental and exceedingly well
kept. Many of them are spacious palaces upon which enormous sums have
been expended; and in front of their lawns, for several miles along
the winding brow of the cliffs that fall off precipitously to the
ocean's edge, is laid the noted "Cliff Walk." This is a narrow
footpath at the edge of the greensward that has the waves dashing
against the bases of the rocks supporting it, while inland, beyond the
lawns, are the noble palaces of Newport. Each is a type of different
architecture, and no matter how grand and imposing, each is called a
"cottage." The greatest rivalry has been shown in construction, and
the styles cover all known methods of building--Gothic, Elizabethan,
Tudor, Swiss, Flemish, French, with every sort of ancient house in
Britain or Continental Europe, imitated and improved upon, and in some
cases widely varying systems being condensed together. Some of these
"cottages" have thus become piles of buildings, with all sorts of
porticos, doorways, pavilions, dormers, oriels, bow-windows, bays and
turrets, towers, chimneys, gambrel roofs and gables, the whole being
charmingly elaborated into wide-spreading, imposing and sometimes
astonishing houses. Occasionally the villa is elongated into the
stable, in an extended house, which includes the family, horses,
hounds, domestics and grooms, all living under the same roof. A low
and rambling style of architecture, with many gables and prominent
colors, is the favorite for various Newport cottages. To the southward
of the town are the Ocean Avenue and Ocean Drive, skirting the whole
lower coast of the island for some ten miles, and displaying fine
marine views.
There have been lavished upon these palaces of Newport, in
construction and decoration, large portions of the greatest incomes of
the multi-millionaires of New York and Boston, and hither they hie to
enjoy the summer and early autumn in a sort of fashionable
semi-seclusion, mingling only in their own sets, and rather resenting
the excursions occasionally made by the plebeian folk into Newport to
look at their displays. These princes of inherited wealth have made
Newport peculiarly their own, and, their expenditures being on a scale
commensurate with their millions, the growth and improvement of the
newer part of the place have been extraordinary. Land in choice
locations is quoted above $50,000 an acre, and a Newport "cottage"
costs $500,000 to $1,000,000 to build, with more for the furnishing.
Once, when I asked what was the qualification necessary to become a
director of one of the great banks of New York, I was told that it was
the ownership of ten shares of stock and a cottage at Newport. The
sense of newness is sometimes impressive in gazing at these Aladdin
palaces, for while the architecture reproduces quaint and ancient
forms, the ancestral ivy does not yet cling to the walls, and the
trees are still young. But there are older sites in Newport, back from
the sea-front, where some of the estates, existing many years, have
smaller and more subdued houses with signs of maturity, where the ivy
broadly spreads and the trees have grown. Some of the foliage-embowered
lanes, leading through the older suburbs, are charming in leafy
richness and make scenes of exquisite rural beauty.
The Casino is the fashionable centre of Newport, a building in Old
English style, fronting on Bellevue Avenue, having reading-rooms, a
theatre, gardens and tennis-court, and here the band plays in the
season, and there are concerts and balls. During the fashionable
period, Bellevue Avenue is the daily scene of a stately procession of
handsome equipages of all styles, as it is decreed that the great
people of Newport shall always ride when on exhibition, and they thus
pass and repass in the afternoons in splendid review. In the earlier
times the town's chief benefactor was Judah Touro, who gave it Touro
Park. His father was the rabbi of Newport synagogue, which now has no
congregation. Judah spent fifty years in New Orleans amassing a
fortune, which was bequeathed to various charities. He also liberally
aided the fund for building Bunker Hill Monument. The synagogue, with
the beautiful garden adjacent, the Jewish Cemetery, is maintained in
perfect order. Touro Park is a pretty enclosure in the older town,
containing statues of Commodore M. C. Perry and William Ellery
Channing, who were natives of Newport, and a statue of the former's
brother, Commodore Oliver H. Perry, the victor of Lake Erie, is also
at the City Hall, not far away. In Touro Park is the great memorial
around which the antiquarian treasures of this famous place are
clustered, the "Old Stone Mill," a small round tower, overrun with ivy
and supported on pillars between which are arched openings. Its origin
is a mystery, and this is the antiquarian shrine at which Newport
worships. Longfellow tells weirdly of it in his _Skeleton in Armor_,
and some of the wise men suggest that it was built by the Norsemen
when they first came this way and found Vinland so long ago. But the
more practical townsfolk generally incline to the belief that an early
colonist put it up for a windmill to grind corn, the weight of the
evidence appearing to favor the theory that it was erected by Governor
Benedict Arnold, of the colony, who died in 1678, and described it in
his will as "my stone-built wind-will." It is, however, of sufficient
antiquity and mystery to have a halo cast around it, and is the great
relic of the town. The seacoast rocks that make the Newport Cliffs
show some wonderful formations of chasms and spouting rocks. A fine
fleet of yachts is usually in Newport water, and it is a favorite
naval rendezvous, having the Training Station, War College and Torpedo
Station, and a new Naval Hospital. This most famous of American
seaside watering-places has a permanent population approximating
twenty-five thousand, considerably increased by the summer visitors.