Chapter I: Part 1

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

© 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.]

FAMOUS
COLONIAL
HOUSES

BY
_PAUL M. HOLLISTER_

Illustrated by
_JAMES PRESTON_

With an Introduction by
_JULIAN STREET_

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

© 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

© 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

You may come up a long straight aisle of locust trees, or you may wind through Gothic arches of elms along a skilfully engineered road which picks its way through the estate for a half-mile or more. Either course will bring you before a wide low house of yellow brick, with green blinds and white woodwork and English ivy. Directly ahead of you, across the circle of the driveway, the square main section of the house, capped by a tower, rises above a bright portico. To left and right the house throws out long extensions of even height, terminating in wings set endwise to you, like double-faces in the game of dominoes. Your first impression will be one of unusual size, your next of flatly rectangular simplicity. Your eye will be caught momentarily by a cross-tipped bell-tower of the right wing, where Charles Carroll built the only private chapel in America because England would not let him worship in peace. You will know that you have never seen such a house in America, and you will probably not suspect that it is a monument to several great Americans.

A lad of four or five is playing on the grass circle of the driveway before the great house. The undulating Maryland countryside is not half as absorbing as the game in hand, though his great-grandfather was governor of all those miles. If you were to ask him the way to Annapolis he would probably indicate the double file of venerable trees which stand sentinel along the tapering avenue, smile courteously if you thanked him, and then scurry off on an important engagement. He wouldn’t tell you that in his grandfather’s great-grandfather’s day Annapolis was the national capital, nor that that gentleman was one of the bold spirits who made a national capital possible.

There is no reason why he should know of it, or be interested. If, with your heavy wisdom, and your rhapsodies on the pride of race, and your generally affable tourist behavior you succeed in alarming the lad until he retreats to the shelter of the portico, know, stranger, that you have aroused the suspicions of Charles Carroll, the Ninth in America, and the seventh heir of that name to Doughoregan Manor.

Ancestors can be lived up to or lived down, and there is no particular point or prowess in bragging about them. To me there is glorious romance in the fact that this youngster of five is romping on the ground that was granted to his ancestor by a King of England. Perhaps it is glorious and romantic because it is fact, but I prefer to believe that the real reason may be found in a verse in the book of Exodus, which reads:

“Honor thy father and thy mother.”

They were worth honoring; they have been duly honored even unto the eighth and ninth generations.

Charles Carroll the First, like many another Irishman since, went west. He came to Baltimore in 1688 with the ink hardly sanded on his commission as attorney-general of Maryland. As a Roman Catholic he found the commission suddenly nullified by revolution in England, and it was four years before a Royal government was set up in the colony restoring and protecting its proprietary rights. His wife had died childless during that period, and he married again. Of ten children of his second wife, the eldest died on the voyage home from school in Europe. Back at St. Omer’s in French Flanders he left a younger brother, Charles Carroll the Second, and presently the plodding ships bore back to him the news of Henry’s death and the heritage of responsibility and affection which devolved upon him. In 1723 he came back to his own people, married in his turn, and in 1737 Mistress Elizabeth Brooke Carroll bore him a son. The precedent for the name Charles was already strong, Charles was a good name, and so was christened Charles Carroll the Third.

In the archives of the State Department at Washington you will find his signature. It is hidden from the light, but reproductions of it and the pledge to which it is attached have already made it familiar to every American. The story runs that in the congress at Philadelphia when the Declaration of Independence was presented, John Hancock turned to Carroll and offering him a quill, asked “Will you sign?”

“Most willingly,” was the reply. And he signed, in an easy clear hand, with less flourish, perhaps, than Franklin’s or Hancock’s, but no less sincerity--and Carroll, the richest man in America, had more to lose than either.