Governor's Mansion

“ 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. ”

“ The main entrance is the same as in the governor's day. There is a second entrance, however, nearer the house, through which we get glimpses of the mansion beyond. This is flanked by two marble statues, one of which represents an angler dressed in colonial costume, while the second is a hunter, armed with a Rip Van Winkle fowling-piece.
They seem to extend, with outstretched arms, [Pg 132] a mute welcome to the guest, for hospitality has ever been a characteristic of the Wentworth mansion.
The grounds are extensive and are laid out in lawns and grass lands. ”

“ At one extremity a noble elm tree and at the other a huge chestnut, stand like sentinels over the ancient buildings that they may not share the fate of the neighbouring manor-house, which was burned down by its loyal owner, the third Viscount Campden, during the Civil War, to save it from the ignoble fate of being seized and garrisoned for the Parliamentarians. From the imposing entrance gate and two remaining curious pavilions at either end of a long terrace, one may judge it must have been a fine early-Jacobean mansion. ”

“ They are ready to revive more than the splendor of past days. For a number of years the house, rented to the Government, has been used for offices. But within twelve months it has been purchased by General Edward Fitzgerald Beale, who has rehabilitated it, without remodelling it, for his own family residence. The ample halls and grand salon remain unchanged in proportions, while fresh frescoes, historic devices, French windows and marble vestibule, give to the antique mansion the aspect of modern elegance. ”

“ Now we went on toward the manor-house that loomed against a soft background of river fog.
The mansion is wholly unlike either Brandon or Westover, being a massive square building without wings. It is two and a half stories high, with a roof of modified mansard style pierced with many dormer windows. It has both a landward and a riverward front, and both alike. Each front has a large porch of two stories in Georgian design with Doric columns. The walls of the house are laid in Flemish bond, black glazed bricks alternating with the dull red ones. ”

“ The mansion, situated upon a gentle elevation, was of old-time construction with the wide hall, large rooms and broad staircases, and colonade of immense pillars supporting the roof of the front porch. It was embowered in thick clusters of live oaks which stood round in a kind of outer park, while the inner park was composed of terraces covered with flowers and shrubbery, while thickets of rose gardens seemed to stretch in every direction. An aged negro was the only living being about the place. ”

“ The front of the mansion faces east, and it has within a central hall with apartments on either hand. At the back, beyond the outbuildings and the barn, stretches the carriage road, which in Washington's time was the main entrance, off to the porter's lodge, on the high road, at the boundary of the present estate, about three-quarters of a mile away. Everything is quiet, and in the thorough repose befitting such a great man's tomb; and this is the modest mansion on the banks of the Potomac that was the home of one of the noblest Americans. ”

“ People of sensibility do not wish even to board in a house so haunted with tragic memories of human lives. The house is now used for Government purposes. Its site is so superlative; central to the most interesting objects of Washington, and facing the waving sea of summer-green in Lafayette square. In the march of change its place will soon be filled by some soaring Mansard mansion of the future. But when every brick has vanished, the memories of the old club-house and Seward mansion will survive while any chronicle of Washington endures. ”

“ There are houses which are scenes, and there are houses which are only houses. The trouble with the domestic architecture of the United States is that it is not scenic, thank Heaven! and the good fortune of an old structure like the turreted mansion on the hillside of Le Mans is that it is not simply a house. It is a person, as it were, as well. It would be well, indeed, if it might have communicated a little of its personality to the front of the cathedral, which has none of its own. Shabby, rusty, unfinished, this front has a romanesque portal, but nothing in the way of a tower. ”

“ In the rear 381 there was a long veranda with lofty pillars, and beyond, extensive grounds set with well-grown evergreens, and with that princely tree, the magnolia grandiflora, now in bloom. White marble statues and marble seats were scattered through the grounds. A rustic staircase led down to a conservatory, built low for the better care of the plants. The mansion stood on an eminence sloping sharply in front, and a legend-haunted subterranean passage led from the dwelling to the street, the entrance to which was covered by shrubs and vines. ”

“ As Wharton says in her Martha Washington: "An executive mansion presided over by a man and woman who combined with the most ardent patriotism a dignity, elegance, and moderation that would have graced the court of any Old World sovereign, saved the social functions of the new nation from the crudeness and bald simplicity of extreme republicanism, as well as from the luxury and excess that often mark the sudden elevation to power and place of those who have spent their early years in obscurity." ”

“ In a spacious chamber of a great, gloomy mansion, an old man sat alone, his gray head bowed upon his trembling hands, which rested upon a cane. A few blocks away the hum and traffic of the Crescent City filled the air; but here all was still and quiet. An up-town mansion, embowered in huge live-oaks—a shady, silent place, the sight of which made one feel gloomy, and caused a slight chill to pass involuntarily over the frame. The great house looked like an enchanted palace, with old Bernard Dane the presiding genii, all alone and lonely like the last leaf upon the tree. ”

“ I am thankful that Congress appropriated thousands of dollars to repair the Mount Vernon mansion. A mansion in its day, its rooms can bear no comparison with those of modern houses which make no pretensions. The dining-hall is the only one that can claim anything like stateliness or elegance of proportion. The parlors are the merest boxes, each containing one high window. The chamber in which Washington died commands an exquisite view, through the vistas of the grounds, down the Potomac. ”

“ The view towards the east has also equal claims to attention; a large and well-cultivated district thence appearing in lovely contrast to the view. The mansion is regular, of the Ionic order, composed of free stone, having an elegant portico on the south front. It stands on a sloping bank, amidst a most charming grove of trees of various coloured foliage. A handsome sheet of water, partaking of all the crystal beauties of its parent stream, the Kennet, flows before the mansion, over which stands a bridge of three arches, built in the Chinese style. ”

“ These people began to look toward a goal which may have been vaguely defined in their minds: a handsome and shipshape residence, preferably of brick, of two rooms deep and two storeys-and-garret high, with wings or separate dependencies to balance; a neat and orderly mansion, without steep gables, but with one cornice line for the whole building. This goal, of course, was the Georgian mansion of the eighteenth century.
At any rate, between 1680 and 1730 change permeated the air of Virginia, and a whole host of experimental buildings sprang up which we loosely label as "Transitional." ”

“ Very recently he had died, leaving no will and no heirs, and the estate again escheated to the crown.
"I was very anxious to search the old mansion, and readily obtained permission to enter. It was built in the time of Elizabeth, and was a large building, similar in architecture to many others built in the sixteenth century in this part of England. As I entered the deserted building a strange feeling of desolation took possession of me. Hardly a human being had been within its walls for fifty years. ”

“ Modern improvements have swept away, one by one, those old houses in all our cities to which time had given an aspect too much at variance with the tastes and requirements of a new generation. Even at the period in which our story opens—that is, in 1824—the house of which we are speaking already began to be pointed out as the Old Mansion—the name, par excellence, by which it was known in the city. ”

“ Later in the fifteenth century, the old mansion, already described, in the bailey, was restored and altered: a porch-tower was made at the north-east end of the hall, and a stair-turret intruded in the south-east angle. The dwelling-house, which had been built within the castle about 1200, was converted, in fact, into a stately mansion; and the house on the mount was practically abandoned. No better instance could be found of the gradual weakening of the military ideal in favour of domestic comfort. ”

“ Occasionally, in some obscure corner of the city, we come upon a rambling old mansion of quaint, picturesque architecture, once the home of refinement and wealth, where the great ones of the country lived in a state of ease, luxury, and almost feudal splendour. It is occupied now by hosts of coloured folk; swarms of black babies crowd the verandahs or climb and tumble about the steps and passages, while the dilapidated balconies are filled with lines of clothes to dry ”

“ But it is not the nature of this most indefatigable of speculators to rest contented with any state of sublunary enjoyment; improvement is his darling passion, and having thus improved his lands, the next care is to provide a mansion worthy the residence of a landholder. A huge palace of pine boards immediately springs up in the midst of the wilderness, large enough for a parish church, and furnished with windows of all dimensions, but so rickety and flimsy withal, that every blast gives it a fit of the ague. ”

“ Amid architectural surroundings which bespeak a bygone age of leisure, work and study now prevail as the students pursue their exacting college preparatory curriculum.
Designed in the splendid free Renaissance style by James Freret, the mansion was constructed in 1872 for Bradish Johnson, a young man of wealth and discrimination whose family fortune was based on sugar plantations. Its erection marked the second great period of affluence for the Garden District. According to tradition it was built at a cost of one hundred thousand dollars and its furnishings were as lavish as the house itself. ”

“ I know one or two old mansions that have been converted into farm-houses, and their rear-guard of timber hewn down and sold. There is a broken-hearted look about them that reminds one of a carriage-horse degraded to go in a cart. It feels its degradation, loses flesh, gloss, and spirit.
I was one day walking with an old friend whom fate doomed to live abroad all his life, but whose heart was ever in his native land. We were strolling near an old mansion, in its park, when he stopped, looked at it, and said, "Ye gentlemen of England, that dwell at home at ease—and in what ease! ”

“ This building, like the Capitol, was burnt in the British invasion of 1814 and afterwards restored. Unlike the nation, or the enormous public buildings that surround and dwarf it, the White House has in no sense grown, but remains as it was designed in the lifetime of Washington. It is nevertheless a comfortable mansion, though rigid in simplicity. The parlor of the house, the "East Room," is the finest apartment, occupying the whole of that side, and is kept open for visitors during most of the day. ”

“ Over the tumble-down gate-way, with a pigsty on one side and a dog-kennel on the other, hangs a coat of arms. The mansion--a square house with a steep shingle roof--stands, according to the unromantic custom of the country, with one side looking on to the farm-yard; and the drawing-room windows open exactly over an enormous dung heap which a party of women are in the very act of turning with pitch-forks, under the superintendence of a short stout man in a weather-beaten hunting-hat and shooting-coat with padded silk sleeves out of which the wadding is peeping at a hundred holes. ”

“ We forget all this in the kindly welcome they give us to-day; for some of them are still standing and doubly famous, as we all know. But the gambrel-roofed house, though stately enough for college dignitaries and scholarly clergymen, was not one of those old Tory, Episcopal-church-goer's strongholds. One of its doors opens directly upon the green, always called the Common; the other, facing the south, a few steps from it, over a paved foot-walk, on the other side of which is the miniature front yard, bordered with lilacs and syringas. The honest mansion makes no pretensions. ”

“ There is something wrong—some other John Weightman—a confusion of names—the book must be mistaken."
"There is no mistake," said the Keeper of the Gate, very calmly; "here is your name, the record of your title and your possessions in this place."
"But how could such a house be prepared for me," cried the man, with a resentful tremor in his voice—"for me, after my long and faithful service? Is this a suitable mansion for one so well known and devoted? Why is it so pitifully small and mean? Why have you not built it large and fair, like the others?"
"That is all the material you sent us." ”