Massachusetts

Ventfort Hall Drawing Room, Lenox, Mass

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The drawing room at Ventfort Hall in Lenox, probably around the 1890s. Image courtesy of the Lenox Library Association.

The room in 2018:

Although the term is rather archaic now, a drawing room was essentially a living room, functioninging as a place that guests could “withdraw” to after a dinner party. Here in Ventfort Hall, the drawing room is located in the northwest corner of the first floor, next to the main entrance and across the entry hall from the grand staircase, which can be seen beyond the doors in the present-day photo. The first photo shows the room at some point around the 1890s, probably soon after the house was completed in 1893.

Ventfort Hall remained a summer home for more than 50 years, and the drawing room was likely used for its original purpose throughout much of this time. However, the last private owner sold the property in 1945, and the house subsequently became, at various times, a dormitory, a hotel, a ballet school, and a religious school. By the late 20th century, it had deteriorated on both the interior and exterior, and it was nearly demolished in the 1990s. It was ultimately preserved, though, and the house was restored to its original appearance and opened for public tours starting in 2000.

Today, the property is the Ventfort Hall Mansion and Gilded Age Museum, and the historic home is still open for guided tours of the interior. Here in the drawing room, the furnishing is not identical to the first photo, and plain white walls have replaced the busy Victorian wallpaper, but otherwise the room is easily recognizable from the first photo, including the restored ceiling and the ornate mantelpiece. Because of its location adjacent to the front door, the drawing room now serves as the museum’s gift shop, as shown in the present-day scene.

Ventfort Hall Grand Staircase, Lenox, Mass

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The grand staircase in Ventfort Hall in Lenox, around the 1890s. Image courtesy of the Lenox Library Association.

The staircase in 2018:

As discussed in more detail in the previous post, Ventfort Hall was completed in 1893 as the summer home of George and Sarah Morgan. Sarah was the sister of financier J. P. Morgan, and she constructed this house soon after receiving a $3 million inheritance from their father, Junius Spencer Morgan, upon his death in 1890. However, she died only three years after the house was completed, and George died in 1911, but the house remained in the Morgan family until 1925, when it was sold to railroad executive William Roscoe Bonsal.

The house was designed by the Boston architectural firm of Rotch & Tilden, with a brick, Jacobean Revival exterior. The interior consists of 28 rooms, but perhaps the most impressive space in the house is the grand staircase, shown here in this scene. It is located just inside the main entryway on the north side of the house, and it features a carved oak banister and oak paneling, matching the Jacobean style of the house. The second floor is decorated with arches, and above them is an ornate plaster ceiling.

Ventfort Hall remained a summer residence until around 1945, and during the second half of the 20th century it was used for a variety of other purposes, including a dormitory, hotel, and ballet school. From 1976 to 1987, it was part of the Bible Speaks College, but it subsequently sat vacant and was threatened with demolition. However, in 1997 it was acquired by the Ventfort Hall Association, which restored it and opened it as a museum.

Today, the appearance of the grand staircase has hardly changed since the first photo was taken some 125 years ago. Much of the interior suffered from neglect in the late 20th century, but the staircase remained well-preserved, and it remains one of the highlights of the building’s interior. Ventfort Hall is still open to the public for tours, and its restoration marks a major accomplishment for historic preservation in the Berkshires.

Ventfort Hall, Lenox, Mass

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Ventfort Hall, on Walker Street in Lenox, around 1893. Image courtesy of the Lenox Library Association.

The scene in 2018:

Ventfort Hall is one of the many large summer homes that were built in the Berkshires during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The region, particularly the southern part in and around Lenox, was a popular resort destination during this period, and some of the nation’s wealthiest families had estates here. Ventfort Hall, shown here in these two photos, was owned by George and Sarah Morgan, of the prominent banking family. Sarah (1839-1896) was the sister of J. P. Morgan, and her husband George (1840-1911) was a New York banker. Despite having the same last name even before their marriage, George and Sarah were only distantly related, having been descended from two different brothers who came to America in the 17th century.

Sarah’s father, the prominent financier Junius Spencer Morgan, died in 1890, leaving her with an inheritance of $3 million, equivalent to about $85 million today. Soon after, she purchased this property on Walker Street, which at the time was occupied by another house. This house was demolished, and the Morgans hired the Boston-based architectural firm of Rotch & Tilden to design a new one. These architects had previously designed several other estates in Lenox, including the nearby Frelinghuysen House, which the Morgans rented while Ventfort Hall was under construction. However, Ventfort Hall featured a very different architectural style, with a brick, Jacobean Revival exterior, as opposed to the wood-frame Colonial Revival-style Frelinghuysen House.

Ventfort Hall was completed in 1893, around the time that the first photo was taken, but Sarah Morgan died only three years later. George continued to own the property until his death in 1911, and his two children, Junius Spencer Morgan II and Caroline Morgan, subsequently inherited it. However, the house was often rented out to other affluent families. During the late 1910s, Margaret Emerson Vanderbilt spent several summers here while her own estate, Holmwood, was under construction here in Lenox. She was in her early 30s at the time, and had been widowed in 1915 when her husband, Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt – son of wealthy businessman Cornelius Vanderbilt II – died in the sinking of the Lusitania.

The house was then rented by William Roscoe Bonsal and his wife Mary. William was a railroad executive who was originally from South Carolina, and he and Mary rented the house for seven years, before purchasing it outright from the Morgan family in 1925. He died in 1933, and Mary in 1940, and the Bonsal family sold the property in 1945. By this point, though, the age of large summer estates in the Berkshires had passed, and, like many of the other nearby properties, it was converted into institutional use.

During the second half of the 20th century, Ventfort Hall was used for a variety of purposes, including as a dormitory for Tanglewood, a hotel, and a ballet school. Starting in 1976, it was one of several historic mansions owned by the Bible Speaks College. However, this school closed in 1987, and the building subsequently sat vacant for about a decade. It was threatened with demolition by a developer who wanted to construct a nursing home on the site, but it was ultimately sold to the Ventfort Hall Association in 1997, and it has since been restored to its original appearance.

Coming after many years of neglect, the restoration of Ventfort Hall was a major project, but the house opened for public tours starting in 2000. Around this same time, the house made an appearance on the silver screen when the exterior was used as a filming location for the 1999 film The Cider House Rules. Since then, the house has remained open to the public as the Ventfort Hall Mansion and Gilded Age Museum, and it is one of several historic 19th century mansions in the Berkshires that have been converted into museums.

Frelinghuysen House, Lenox, Mass

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The house at the corner of Kemble Street and Walker Street in Lenox, around 1890. Image courtesy of the Lenox Library Association.

The scene in 2018:

This house is often identified as having been the summer home of Frederick T. Frelinghuysen, a former U. S. Senator from New Jersey and the Secretary of State under President Chester A. Arthur. However, it appears that the house was actually built in 1888 – three years after Frelinghuysen’s death – by his widow and three of their adult children. Either way, though, the house is a very early example of Colonial Revival architecture, and it was the work of the Boston architectural firm of Rotch & Tilden, which designed several other grand summer homes here in Lenox.

The three Frelinghuysen children who owned this house were Frederick, Jr., Lucy, and Matilda. They lived here at various times, but they also rented it to other families in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These included George and Sarah Morgan, the brother-in-law and sister of financier J. P. Morgan, who lived here in the early 1890s while their own house, Ventfort Hall, was being constructed nearby. About a decade later, the Alexandre family similarly lived here while awaiting the completion of Spring Lawn, which is located immediately to the south of here.

By about 1909, the Frelinghuysen house had been named Sundrum, and it was occupied by Thatcher M. Adams, a New York City attorney who served as president of the New York Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb. Sources provide conflicting information about whether he owned it, or simply rented it from the Frelinghuysen family, but either way Sundrum was his summer home until his death in 1919.

Subsequent owners of this house included the Bassett family, who were here for many years during the mid-20th century. However, they would be the last private residents of the house, as by this point the era of grand Berkshire summer homes had passed. Like a number of the other estates in the area, it was converted into institutional use, becoming a dormitory for the Lenox School for Boys. This school closed in 1971, but the former Frelinghuysen house was subsequently acquired by the Bible Speaks College, used the property from 1976 until 1987.

In the early 1990s, the house was converted into a hotel, which opened in 1995 as the Kemble Inn. Although millionaires no longer built massive summer estates here in the Berkshires, the region remains a popular destination for tourists, with a number of hotels and resorts, particularly here in the Lenox area. The Kemble Inn is still in business nearly 25 years after it opened here in the former mansion, and the exterior of the house remains well preserved, with few noticeable differences between these two photos except for the missing balustrades on the roof.

Springfield & Connecticut River from Forest Park (2)

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Looking north up the Connecticut River toward downtown Springfield, from Laurel Hill in Forest Park, around 1905. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

The scene in 2018:

These photos were taken from the same spot as the ones in a previous post, but they show the view looking a little further to the left, directly up the Connecticut River. The location of these photos is Laurel Hill, a bluff on the western end of Forest Park. It was once part of the estate of Everett H. Barney, a wealthy ice skate manufacturer who built his mansion, Pecousic Villa, nearby in 1883. He had intended to build a second home here on Laurel Hill for his only child, George, but George died in 1889 at the age of 26, and Everett instead build a mausoleum here on the hill.

A year later, Everett donated his property – which included the house, a carriage house, and meticulously-landscaped grounds – to the city. This land became part of Forest Park, which had been established 1884 after another benefactor, Orrick H. Greenleaf, gave what is now the eastern section of the park. Barney’s gift extended the park all the way west to the Connecticut River, and his only stipulation was that he and his wife be allowed to live at Pecousic Villa for the rest of their lives.

Perhaps the most scenic part of the newly-expanded park was here at Laurel Hill, where an overlook near the mausoleum provided sweeping views of the Connecticut River and downtown Springfield. In the foreground of the photo is the western entrance to the park, flanked by hedges and a pair of stone markers with the letter “B” carved into them. Longhill Street runs across the foreground, along with trolley tracks that are barely visible in the road. More noticeable from this angle are the poles that supported the overhead wires for the trolleys. The railroad also passed through this scene, although the tracks are hidden from view because they ran further down the embankment between the street and the river.

In the center of the first photo is the South End Bridge, an iron truss bridge that was completed in 1879. It was the third bridge across the river in Springfield, after the Old Toll Bridge in 1805/1820 and the North End Bridge in 1877, and it provided direct access to the city from Agawam and points to the south and west, replacing an earlier ferry that had operated here. Just beyond and to the left of the bridge is the mouth of the Westfield River, which is one of the largest tributaries of the Connecticut River.

Further upstream from the bridge is downtown Springfield, which is marked by an assortment of church steeples and smokestacks. The white, wooden steeple of Old First Church is visible in almost the exact center of the photo, and just to the right of it is the granite tower of the Hampden County Courthouse. Other identifiable steeples include, from left to right, those of St. Joseph’s Church, St. Michael’s Cathedral, Church of the Unity, and South Congregational Church. Aside from these churches, another major landmark is the main arsenal of the Springfield Armory, which is visible to the right, on a bluff overlooking the city.

In the nearly 115 years since the first photo was taken, this scene has undergone some dramatic changes. The most obvious of these is the construction of Interstate 91, which now passes through the narrow space between Laurel Hill and the Connecticut River. This section of the highway was built in the early 1960s, and the project required the demolition of Pecousic Villa, which had been  acquired by the city after Everett Barney’s death in 1916. However, the carriage house was spared, and it still stands on the bluff, just out of view on the far right side of the scene. Both the mausoleum and the overlook on Laurel Hill are also still part of Forest Park, although the modern-day view lacks the same picturesque attributes of the first photo.

Aside from Interstate 91, another major change to this scene is the South End Bridge. Also known as the Julia B. Buxton Bridge, the present-day South End Bridge was completed in 1954, replacing the old 1879 bridge from the first photo. Further in the distance, the Springfield skyline is also very different from the early 20th century. For many years, the city had no skyscrapers because of height restrictions, but these were lifted in 1970 with the construction of the 371-foot Tower Square, which is visible in the center of the 2018 photo. Several other skyscrapers would be built in the ensuing years, including the Monarch Place office building to the right of Tower Square, and the Chestnut Park apartment building a little further to the right.

Despite all of these changes, though, there are some surviving landmarks from the first photo. The churches are no longer the dominant features in the skyline, yet some of them are still standing, including Old First Church, St. Michael’s Cathedral, and South Congregational. The old courthouse is also still there, as is the Armory, but these older buildings are now joined in this scene by modern hotels, office buildings, parking garages, and the silver dome of the Basketball Hall of Fame.

Trinity Methodist Church, Springfield, Mass

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Trinity Methodist Church on Bridge Street in Springfield, probably sometime in the 1870s. Image courtesy of the New York Public Library.

The scene in 2018:

Trinity Methodist Church was established in 1844 with about 40 members, many of whom had left the Union Street Methodist Church. The following year, the congregation moved into its first building, which was located on Pynchon Street, across the street from where City Hall is now located. However, as the city grew in the mid-19th century, so did the church membership, and within less than 25 years the Pynchon Street building had become too small for the church.

In 1869, Trinity Methodist relocated to this building here on Bridge Street, as shown in the first photo. Its exterior featured a Romanesque-style design, which was the work of local architectural firm Perkins and Gardner, and it measured 122 feet long and 74 feet wide, with a steeple that rose 185 feet above the street. The entire cost, including the land, was $73,000, which is equivalent to about $1.4 million today. By 1883, the membership had grown to 447 people, and the church also had a Sunday school that was staffed by 38 teachers, and had 377 students.

However, for such a large, elegant church, this site was a rather unusual location, tucked away on a side street with commercial buildings on one side and modest houses on the other. As downtown Springfield continued to grow, the church would become increasingly out of place here on Bridge Street. By the turn of the 20th century, it was the only church on or near Main Street in the mile between Court Square to the south and Memorial Square to the north, with the rest of this corridor becoming almost exclusively commercial.

Around the same time, residents were beginning to move away from the city center. Trolleys, and later automobiles, made it easy for people to live on the outskirts of the city and commute into downtown, and by the mid 20th century many of the downtown churches had followed their parishioners into the suburbs. Among these was Trinity Methodist, which moved out of this building on Bridge Street in the early 1920s, and into a new Neo-Gothic church that still stands on Sumner Avenue, in the city’s Forest Park neighborhood.

The Bridge Street church was demolished in 1922, barely 50 years after its completion, and it was replaced by a three-story commercial block. Named the Trinity Block in recognition of its predecessor, it still stands today, and it is visible on the right side of the 2018 photo. The only other historic building in the present-day scene is the Fuller Block, on the left side of the photo. It was completed in 1887, and both it and the Trinity Block are now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.