Gore House

“ Gore House.—In 1808, Mr. Wilberforce took this mansion (which had previously been the residence of a Government contractor) for his home. He found it, he says, more salubrious p. 137than his house at Clapham; and writes further, “We are just one mile from the turnpike at Hyde Park Corner, having about three acres of pleasure-ground around our house, or rather behind it, and several old trees, walnut and mulberry, of thick foliage. I can sit and read under their shade, with as much admiration of the beauties of nature as if I were two hundred miles from the great city.” ”

“ On the 10th of May, 1849, I visited Gore House for the last time. The auction was going on. There was a large assemblage of people of fashion. Every room was thronged; the well-known library-saloon, in which the conversationes took place, was crowded, but not with guests.... People, as they passed through the room, poked the furniture, pulled about the precious objects of art and ornaments of various kinds that lay on the table.... ”

“ The farm-house, the spacious farm-yard and group of irregular, shadowy, thatched buildings, and the surrounding rookery elms, all on a gently-sloping ground next to the road—this is the finest modern thing on the Plain. The farm itself is but a small, slated house, gray-white in colour, with a porch and five front windows, half hid among elm trees; but the whole group probably resembles a Saxon chief’s homestead. The trees make a nearly continuous copse with the elms and ashes that stand around and above the thatched cart lodges and combined sheds and cottages at Joan-a-Gore’s Cross. ”

“ Her machinery was ponderous enough to shatter the morale of a finer man than Dick. It was like shooting rabbits with a field-gun. Dick was that not uncommon flower of our civilisation—a thoroughly charming fellow. Just the man for a dance at your house, a rubber at your club, a week-end at your partridges. Good-looking, well-dressed, well-mannered, it was impossible not to like him at sight.
Alas! the forest cares nothing for looks, clothes, or manners. ”

“ The mansion is a distinct pattern of the English country house, such as was built by Sir Christopher Wren, the great eighteenth century architect. It is of brick construction. In the interior many of the original features have been retained, such as the remarkable "Bird of [76] Paradise" paper in the drawing-room. All the apartments are very high ceiled, spacious and richly furnished. Some of Governor Gore's old pieces of furniture, silver and china are still in use. ”

“ But however well the suffering wife might succeed in disguising the bitterness of wounded affection from her inquiring family, she could not conceal it from herself. She had devoted herself, in the pride of youthful beauty, to the most secluded retirement, through romantic attachment for one who had appeared to return her love with at least an equal fervour. Her father's house—her own opening and brilliant prospects—her numerous family connexions and “troops of friends,”—she had deserted all for him, in her generous confidence in his future kindness. ”

“ The banners were waved back and forth against the sky and I saw everywhere the theatrical hand of Paul Himmell.
The scene shifted to the House of Representatives entrance to the Capitol. Cave wearing an overcoat but bareheaded, stepped out of the limousine. He was alone. Neither Paul nor Iris was in sight. It was most effective that he should come like this, without equerries or counselors. He stood for a moment in the pillared entrance, aware of the crowd outside; even through the commentator’s narrative one could hear, like the surf falling: Cave! Cave! Cave! ”

“ As she crossed the portal, a sensation of terror ill-defined, but painful and overwhelming, smote upon her heart, such as we feel in the presence of a secret enemy, and Lord Greville's increasing uneasiness and abstraction since he had returned to the mansion of his forefathers, did not tend to enliven its gloomy precincts. The wind beat wildly against the casement of the apartment in which they sat, and which although named “the lady's chamber,” afforded none of those feminine luxuries, which are now to be found in the most remote parts of England, in the dwellings of the noble and wealthy. ”

“ But, before I describe it to you, let me recall a certain architectural detail of the Greene mansion. There is a Tudor fireplace, with carved wooden panels, in Ada’s room, and another fireplace—a duplicate of Ada’s—in Rex’s room; and these two fireplaces are back to back on the same wall. The Greene house, as you know, is very old, and at some time in the past—perhaps when the fireplaces were built—an aperture was made between the two rooms, running from one of the panels in Ada’s mantel to the corresponding panel in Rex’s mantel. ”

“ The doors are often beautiful in themselves: their panels of true proportions framed in delicately moulded pilasters with a line of glazing to light the tiny hall; frequently a pediment above protects the whole from the dripping of eaves. And before paint was used to mask the wood, the whole structure, played upon by sun and storm, wore to a tone of silver-gray that made a house as familiar to the soil as a lichen-covered rock. The square Georgian mansions came later, with the prosperity of reviving trade after the Revolution. ”

“ At every open door and window he looked in eagerly, noting less the sagging panels and broken shutters than the dark interiors. Many roofs had fallen, many walls were down, many buildings were but rectangular heaps of ruins grown over grass. But other houses, builded solidly of great logs, with sturdy steep roofs, stood defiantly.
“There was a time when hundreds of men lived here,” he thought as he hastened on. “Men and women, maybe, and perhaps children! Why did they go like this? Even a town may die like a man, even its name be forgotten in a generation or two.” ”

“ Two small windows, destitute of glass, permitted us to peer into the interior of this dilapidated old structure, and we saw within, a floor of beaten earth, a rough stone fireplace, and a few rude horse-stalls. We felt sure that this tumble-down building had been neither a dwelling-house nor a stable, but a noon-house; and the occupants of a neighboring farm-house confirmed our decision. Too worthless to destroy, too out of the way to be of any use to any person, that old noon-house, through neglect and isolation, has remained standing until to-day. ”

“ Days ago Stephen Gore had searched out a hiding-place for himself, and his choice had lighted on nothing cleaner and more distinguished than the chimney in the kitchen. He had climbed up by the chain, despite the soot—he who could hardly wear the same shirt twice in a week—till the throat of the chimney narrowed so that he could use his hands and feet. About fifteen feet from the ground he had discovered a little recess in the brickwork where a man might stand and not be seen by any one looking upward. ”

“ Bethel dozed in the tepid shade. Trade was not. It was so still that Goree, reclining in his chair, distinctly heard the clicking of the chips in the grand-jury room, where the “court-house gang” was playing poker. From the open back door of the office a well-worn path meandered across the grassy lot to the court-house. The treading out of that path had cost Goree all he ever had—first inheritance of a few thousand dollars, next the old family home, and, latterly the last shreds of his self-respect and manhood. ”

“ You may have learned that life is a succession of compromises. Building in New England certainly is. No sooner do we get nicely fortified with furnaces, storm-porches, double windows, and forty tons of anthracite, than June bursts upon us with ninety degrees in the shade. Then how we despise our contrivances for keeping warm, and bless the ice-man! We wish the house was all piazza, and if it were not for burglars and mosquitoes, would abjure walls and roof and live in the open air. ”

“ The man was mere carrion, and John Gore sprang up the stairs, finding the lantern still burning, though the grease from the candle had guttered through upon the stones. He picked it up, and was about to push forward into the room when a black square in the flooring caught his eye. A flagstone had been turned upon its side against the wall, uncovering the mouth of some oubliette or pit, and for a moment he bent over it, trying to probe its depths, as though dreading lest that dear body should be lying broken in the darkness beneath. ”

“ Mr. Howbridge, the administrator of the estate and the girls’ guardian, had come to the Kenways’ poor tenement in the city where they lived, and had taken them to the old Corner House—quite an old mansion overlooking the Parade Ground in Milton, and supposed by some of the neighbors to be “haunted.” ”

“ It was not easy to make one's way through the stands and push-carts and the noisy dickering buyers and sellers, who haggled over trifles and chaffed good-naturedly and were strictly intent on their own affairs. No part of the town is more crowded or more industrious. If youth is the hope of the country, the sight was encouraging, for children were in the gutters, on the house steps, at all the windows. The houses seemed bursting with humanity, and in nearly every room of the packed tenements, whether the inmates were sick or hungry, some sort of industry was carried on. ”

“ Though few of the sounder authorities openly advocated the suppression of Homes, was it not true that they—and he once among them—practically did so by denying any value in their schemes to those emotional and spiritual contributions which alone turned a house into a Home? There lay the heart of the whole great problem. "Four walls," mused Charles, as he swung rapidly down Center Street, "and three meals a day, and even the banisters dusted, to boot—these mere utilities can never make a Home." ”

“ Everything but the roof has been improved. The basement has been coddled with electric lights until a coal hole is no longer an abode of mystery. Even the garret, that used to be but a dusty suburb of the house and lumber room for early Victorian furniture, has been plastered and strewn with servants' bedrooms. ”

“ The grounds, which might be very pretty with care, are ill-kept and slatternly, strewn with debris, as if everything was left to the easy-going nature of the servants. The main house is of brick, with verandas and galleries all round, and a colonnade of thirteen huge brick and stucco columns, in honor of the thirteen States,—a relic of post-Revolutionary times, when the house was the resort of Southern fashion and romance. ”

“ We introduced ourselves, and asked her if she could get us a breakfast. She answered in the affirmative, and asked us into the house. This was a large log-house, and was the one occupied by the owner of the premises. The negroes occupied two or three smaller ones in the same yard, and some five rods distant from the main building.
This is the way the buildings are arranged by the country farmers in this part of the State. The negroes all occupy log-houses. Some of the owners have nothing better, and inhabit the same; but most of them have frame houses, and many of these are large and elegant. ”

“ It has been my lot recently to follow in detail the process of building a private dwelling-house, and the solemn succession of deliberate, respectable, perfectly satisfied men, who have contributed each so many days of his life to this accumulation of weak compromises, has enormously intensified my constitutional amazement at my fellow-creatures. The chief ingredient in this particular house-wall is the common brick, burnt earth, and but one step from the handfuls of clay of the ancestral mud hut, small in size and permeable to damp. ”

“ The planter's dwelling, even though it was little and plain, sometimes no larger than 24 × 24, was referred to as the "manor house," "great house" or "mansion," in order to distinguish it from its [Pg 55] dependencies, the kitchen, milkhouse, smokehouse, henhouse, stable, barn and cabins for servants.
According to an early order by the Assembly, all dwelling houses throughout the Colony of Virginia must be palisaded. ”

“ Five days later, the Mayflower herself arrived from Provincetown, and the people began the erection of the first common house for themselves and their goods—a log hut about twenty feet square, with a thatched roof. Soon, however, they abandoned building in common, and “agreed that every man should build his own house, thinking that by that course men would make more haste,” so promptly did human nature and winter's cold assert themselves over theory. ”

“ Pouring over the Sierras, and dragging across the deserts, the home builders are spreading in the interior. The now regulated business circles, extending with wonderful elasticity, attract home and foreign pilgrims of character. Though the Aspasias of Paris, New Orleans, and Australia throng in; though New York sends its worthless womanhood in floods, there are even now worthy home circles by the Golden Gate. Church, school, and family begin to build upon solid foundations. All the government bureaus are in working order. The Custom House is already known as the "Virginia Poor House." ”

“ Even the old Capital prison is transformed into a handsome and fashionable block of private dwellings. The improvements at the West End are more striking. Solid blocks of city houses are rising in every direction, taking the place of the little, old, isolated house of the past, with its stiff porch, high steps, and open basement doorway. Vermont, Massachusetts and Connecticut avenues are already lined with splendid mansions, the permanent winter homes of Senators and other high official and military officers. ”