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A Gilded Age Gentleman Farm in Each New England State

During the Gilded Age, the gentleman farm was an important element of the upper-class lifestyle. They served as formal summer mansions and working farms that often supplied produce and dairy products to the owners’ winter residences.

George Washington led the way as the nation’s first gentleman farmer in chief. But the fashion for elegant mansions sitting on landscaped farmland didn’t take hold until after the Civil War.

The Gentleman Farm

Gentleman farms reflected the outsize egos of their wealthy owners during an age of soaring inequality. They sat on large swathes of land, sometimes thousands of acres. Elite architects designed the mansions as well as the farmhouses, barns, carriage houses, greenhouses and follies.

Sometimes business moguls or their heirs used their farms to demonstrate their prowess in agricultural pursuits. They developed prize livestock or managed woodlots scientifically or created vast formal gardens. Landscape designers like Frederick Law Olmsted and Beatrix Farrand sculpted the grounds for scenic vistas, pleasant walks and interesting flower gardens.

The income tax put an end to many of the Gilded Age estates, though a brief perusal of real estate listings shows the gentleman farms may have entered a new heyday. Here, though, are six late-19^th to early 20^th century gentleman farms, one in each New England state.

Eolia Mansion at Harkness State Park

Birdseye view of a Connecticut’s gentleman farm, Eolia.

Stephen V. Harkness had the good fortune to invest silently in John D. Rockefeller’s fledgling Standard Oil Co. His son Edward, clearly a fan of the gentleman farm, built a 42-room mansion on 230 acres overlooking Long Island Sound and named it Eolia.

The family used the estate as a summer retreat and a working farm, which included a prize dairy herd and vegetable gardens. They later added outbuildings, like the teahouse and the carriage house.

Architect James Gamble Rogers redesigned the interior of the Roman Renaissance Revival style mansion to evoke the feeling of the inside of an oyster shell. Landscape designer Beatrix Farrand improved the grounds with lush formal gardens.

In 1920, Mary Harkness turned some of the grounds into a summer camp for children with polio. In 1950, she left the estate to the State of Connecticut. For years the house had to be boarded up, but by 1998 it had been restored.

People can rent Eolia for weddings and parties, as well as visit the estate on weekends and holidays from Memorial Day Weekend to Labor Day.

275 Great Neck Rd., Waterford, Conn.

Isaac W. Dyer Estate

The Isaac W. Dyer Estate in Gorham, Maine.

Gilded Age gentleman farms are increasingly scarce in Maine, but the Isaac W. Dyer Estate survives in a rural section of Gorham.

Isaac W. Dyer and his wife lived in Portland, where he built a large corporate law practice. For many years he served as district attorney, earning a reputation as an old-school conservative. Dyer also wrote a biography of Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle.

He bought the large Greek Revival farmhouse and 126 acres in 1887 and transformed it into a gentleman farm. Eventually he built many of the outbuildings, including sheds, barns, a garage and a greenhouse. Landscapers created a croquet lawn, a sweeping circular driveway and a rare walled garden.

In 1998, the National Register of Historic Places put the Isaac W. Dyer Estate on its list.

The Dyer Estate has shrunk to 6.4 acres and is privately owned.

180 Fort Hill Rd., Gorham, Maine

Turner Hill Farm

Turner Hill Farms, one of several gentleman farms in Ipswich, Mass.

North Shore businessman Charles Rice and his wife Anne Proctor Rice bought 700 acres and a farmhouse on Turner Hill in Ipswich, Mass., just before the turn of the century. They then crossed the Atlantic with their architect, William Rantoul, to check out the gentleman farms in England and Scotland for ideas. The Rices came back and spent the next few years building an immense Elizabethan mansion.

They also built 13 other buildings, including cottages for the butler and gardener, stables, a garage and barns. As many as 50 people worked the farm in the summer to pick produce and fruit and milk the 20 cows. The gigantic house required 22 domestic servants.

The Turners had three children, and during the summer held children’s parties every week for 175 children. Anne Rice, a skilled equestrienne, broke many bones riding over the property, and in 1933 died when her horse threw her. Charles Rice declined and died 10 years later. The LaSalette Fathers bought the property and turned it into a spiritual retreat. The National Register of Historic Places listed Turner Hill Farm in 1982.

Today it functions as a golf club and condominiums. Another gentleman farm in Ipswich, Castle Hill, is less than 10 miles away.

Historic Ipswich has fascinating photos of Turner Hill’s early days. Click here to see them.

251 Turner Hill, Ipswich, Mass.

The Fells, John Hay’s Gentleman Farm

The Fells in full bloom in Newbury, N.H.

In the 1880s, New Hampshire farmers were abandoning their land and moving west for better farmland. The New Hampshire state government stepped in and encouraged wealthy families to buy up the properties and turn them into gentleman farms.

John Hay, who served as Abraham Lincoln’s private secretary and U.S. Secretary of State, answered the call. He bought 1,000 acres of land on the shores of Lake Sunapee in 1888. Hay hoped to establish a summer colony for his group of friends. But then one of his friends, Clover Adams, committed suicide, and Hay abandoned his plan.

Instead, Hay built a rustic cottage and named the property The Fells, a term for a rocky upland pasture. His son Clarence and wife later expanded the cottage into a 22-room Colonial Revival mansion. Clarence wrote a book about it in 1962, called Gardening in Granite. “This is about a rock garden on Lake Sunapee, in the foothills of the White Mountains,” he wrote.

The Hays donated much of the land to the government, and when they died The Fells became a nonprofit organization. The Fells, a preservation project of The Garden Conservancy, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Today visitors can hike the forest paths and, in season, visit the house and grounds, which include a rose terrace, a rock garden of rare alpines and a hidden walled garden.

456 Route 103A, Newbury, N.H.

CCRI Knight Campus, Once a Gentleman Farm

Part of the old Knight Estate, now a community college in Warwick, R.I.

The Fruit of the Loom brand started with Rhode Island’s Knight family, headed by Benjamin and Robert Knight. When Robert died in 1912, the New York Times called him the largest cotton manufacturer in the world.

The Knights actually replaced the Spragues as the dominant manufacturing family in Rhode Island. When the Sprague family’s businesses went belly up in the financial panic of 1873, the Knight family bought many of the Spragues’ textile mills, mill housing, company stores and large farms.

The Knight Estate in the Natick section of Warwick was considered the nicest of the Knights’ gentleman farms. It had a large Federal and Greek Revival home and a number of fine farm buildings. Robert Knight used the farm to develop prize livestock.

In the 20^th century, developers bulldozed some of the farm to make way for the Midland Mall. Then in 1964, Royal Webster Knight donated the farm to the State of Rhode Island for a junior college.

Today, the old Knight Farm forms the nucleus of the Community College of Rhode Island. In direct opposition to the ideal of the gracious farm, CCRI built a Brutalist megastructure on the campus to house all educational functions. Some of the original farm buildings still survive. The college uses the manor house as the president’s residence.

400 East Ave, Warwick, R.I.

Shelburne Farms

Shelburne Farms in Vermont, one of the Vanderbilt gentleman farms.

Cornelius Vanderbilt, one of the richest men in history, had many descendants who built elaborate mansions and yachts. Vanderbilt’s granddaughter, Eliza Osgood Vanderbilt Webb, chose to create one of the Vanderbilt’s gentleman farms in Shelburne, Vt. Her brother George then one-upped her with the granddaddy of them all, Biltmore, in Asheville, N.C.

Eliza and her husband, Dr. William Seward Webb, bought up small farms to create their 3,800-acre estate in 1886. They hired Frederick Law Olmsted to design the winding drives, scenic vistas, parklands, gardens and a golf course. Architect Robert Henderson Robertson designed 16 buildings, including a stunning Shingle Style mansion. No less a conservationist than Gifford Pinchot advised them on forest management.

The farm began to shrink in 1910, and the next generations of Vanderbilts struggled to keep it up. In 1972, the Webb descendants incorporated Shelburne Farms as a nonprofit educational organization. It has 400 acres of sustainably managed woods and a grass-fed herd of Brown Swiss cows.

The National Register of Historic Places put Shelburne Farms on its list because of its significance as a Gilded Age ornamental farm.

It’s also one of the principal concert sites for the Vermont Mozart Festival. Shelburne Farms also features an inn and restaurant, open seasonally, on the shores of Lake Champlain, tours, walking trails, a children’s farmyard and a farm store that sells, among other things, cheddar cheese.

Shelburne Farms, 1611 Harbor Road, Shelburne, Vermont

Images: Eolia By I, PostMan1107, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2412245; Isaac W. Dyer Estate By Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35570189; Turner Hill Farm By User:Magicpiano – Own work, GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21986299; Knight Estate By Swampyank at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20439041;The Fells, By The Fells –http://www.gardenvisit.com/assets/madge/the_fells_newbury/600x/the_fells_newbury_600x.jpg, Attribution, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11155642. This story was updated in 2022.

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Six Brutalist Buildings In New England

Two of the most famous Brutalist buildings in America are still provoking strong emotions in New England decades after they first reared their heavy concrete heads.

The massive buildings – Boston City Hall and Rudolph Hall — are appropriately in Boston and New Haven. Both places are key to the development of modern architecture.

For example, the influential modernist Walter Gropius found a home in Boston after fleeing Nazi Germany in 1937. He joined the faculty at Harvard, where he brought modern ideas about architecture to the United States.

And in New Haven, Yale President Whitney Griswold’s building campaign from 1950-1963 had an outsize influence on modern architecture. Glass-and-steel International Style office buildings are called Yale Boxes.

Brutalist Roots

Like much New England architecture, Brutalism came from Britain. The British didn’t love it much. Prince Charles called a Brutalist shopping center in Portsmouth, England, a ‘mildewed lump of elephant droppings.’

Many Brutalist buildings were part of urban renewal programs and, like urban renewal, were born of idealism and quickly viewed as a big mistake.

Brutalist buildings got shabby fast as concrete aged faster than the architects predicted. They turned out to be unfriendly to pedestrians and difficult to subdivide.

When Michael J. Lewis entered architecture school in 1980, Brutalism was ‘unlovely, irrelevant, a universally acknowledged historical blunder.’

And now it’s coming back.

Nikil Saval, in the New York Times, wrote in October 2016, that enthusiasm for Brutalist buildings is taking hold.

“Preservationists clamor for their survival, historians laud their ethical origins and an independent public has found beauty in their rawness,” he wrote.

Brutalist buildings can be found throughout New England. Here are examples of six for you to love or hate.

Rudolph Hall, Yale University

The Yale Art and Architecture Building was the crown jewel of Yale President Whitney Griswold’s modern building program after World War II. Under Griswold, nearly a dozen new buildings were designed by such leading modernist architects as Louis Kahn, Eero Saarinen, Gordon Bunshaft and Philip Johnson.

Paul Rudolph, who studied with Walter Gropius at Harvard in 1963 designed the Brutalist Art and Architecture Building.

Critics called it ‘the most provocative American building of the decade.’

Rudolph, then chair of Yale’s architecture department, created a heavy concrete structure with 36 (or 37, depending on who’s counting) levels within seven stories.

The building had problems from the start. First, art students threatened to picket the dedication ceremony. Then during the ceremony itself, 2,000 people heard architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner condemn the building as oppressively monumental.

And yet it appeared on the cover of every major architectural magazine, and New York Times critic Ada Louise Huxtable raved about it.

Inside, the building had bright orange carpets, incandescent lighting and plaster casts of Classical artworks.

Sculpture students had to work in small, dark studios in the sub-basement. The rope curtains didn’t keep out sunlight.

“It ignored about two-thirds of its users,” said Mark Simon, an architect who had to use it. Richard Benson, who taught in the building for 18 years, called it ‘awful.’

A spectacular fire raced through the building not five years after its dedication. It was widely believed (though never proven) the fire had been set by student architects forced to use it. Yale remodeled the building, cutting up the interior space into a ‘depressing rabbit warren of white-walled rooms.’

Yale then spent $126 million to restore and expand the Brutalist building, renaming it Rudolph Hall. The New York Times called it, ‘a masterpiece of late Modernism.’

Hillside, Colby College

The problem with Brutalist architecture, wrote critic Michael Lewis, was that people ‘could not be made to see that the problem with modern architecture was that it was insufficiently surly.’

Corporate and commercial clients wouldn’t buy Brutalist architecture. Only administrators of academic institutions, government and the occasional church seemed to like it.

In Waterville, Maine, Colby College administrators belonged to that select group. The college hired Boston architect Ben Thompson, a partner of Walter Gropius, to design dormitories. He came up with a network of five interconnected dorms called Hillside.

A confidential student guide to Colby describes them as ‘ugly.’ “But they have their charm, including spacious common rooms, that cozy small-dorm feeling, and their own parking lot… Plus, “I live in Hillside” can be another point of bonding– bonding through adversity, hah.”

Boston City Hall

Boston City Hall arose from the urban renewal program that demolished the immigrant West End neighborhood in the 1950s. From the rubble rose the State Health, Education and Welfare Service Center, designed by none other than Paul Rudolph.

Mayor John F. Collins then continued urban renewal with the New Boston program. It leveled the bawdy Scollay Square neighborhood, to the regret of countless sailors.

Collins wasn’t careful enough for what he wished. When presented with the blueprints of City Hall, he is said to have gasped. Someone in the room then said, “What the hell is that?”

The architectural firms of Kallmann McKinnell & Knowles with Campbell, Aldrich & Nulty designed the Brutalist behemoth and completed it in 1968.

It is easily the most hated building in the city. Boston’s late mayor Tom Menino wanted to tear it down. So did the next mayor, Marty Walsh. Boston Globe columnist Paul McMorrow agreed with them. “Its great crime isn’t being ugly; it’s being anti-urban,” he wrote.

“The building and its plaza keep a crowded city at arm’s length,” he wrote. “It disperses crowds, instead of gathering them together. It creates an island of inactivity, several blocks long and wide, in the middle of what is otherwise a bustling commercial district.”

Some, though, view it as a masterpiece of Brutalist architecture. An American Institute of Architects poll listed it as one of the 10 proudest achievements of American architecture in 200 years.

Phillips Exeter Academy Library

The writer Tom Wolfe had little use for Louis Kahn, the architect who designed the Brutalist Phillips Exeter Academy Library in Exeter, N.H.

Wolfe, in his book From Bauhaus to Our House, described Kahn as a ‘shambles,’ who had deep within a ‘molten core of confidence.’ “Kahn would walk into a classroom, stare blearily at the students, open his mouth… and from the depths would come a remarkable voice: “Every building must have … its own soul.”

Kahn was hired in 1965 to design a home for the Phillips Exeter’s 60,000 volumes. The collection has grown to 160,000 since the library opened in 1971. Today it’s the largest secondary school library in the world.

Kahn designed the library in three concentric squares. The brick outer ring includes the outer walls and the library carrel space, the concrete middle ring holds the stacks and the inner ring is an atrium with circular cutouts that reveal the stacks.

In 1997, the American Institute of Architects 1997 gave the library the Twenty-five Year Award, which recognizes architecture of enduring significance and given to one building per year.

On the Brutalism website, someone commented,

This is exactly how I imagine the library from A Clockwork Orange (book).

Knight Campus, CCRI

In 2017, admirers of the Brutalist style held a funeral for the John E. Fogarty Building, torn down in 2017. (Watch the video here.)

It’s the third Brutalist building torn down in Providence. Also gone are The Outlet parking garage on Friendship Street and the circular Gulf gas station off Broadway.

But in Warwick, R.I., the Knight Campus of the Community College of Rhode Island still stands.

The Brutalist architectural firm The Robinson Green Beretta Corporation, viewed the building as an educational megastructure. They rejected the traditional sprawling college campus with buildings separated by disciplines. Instead they tried to promote diversity and interaction among students in a single, gigantic structure.

It was built on the former Knight Estate, a gentleman’s farm owned by the founders of the Fruit of the Loom brand.

When the building opened in 1972, people already considered it outdated.

Cathedral Church of St. Paul

In 1971, a fire destroyed the Gothic Revival building where years to Episcopalians in Burlington, Vt., had worshiped. The city had undertaken a massive urban renewal project at the time. It therefore offered to swap the old St. Paul’s land for a large tract overlooking Lake Champlain and the Adirondacks. Though controversial, St. Paul’s took the deal.

The cathedral’s leaders wanted to make a new architectural statement. They thought it shouldn’t function as a museum, but home to the arts, lectures and discussion. So an international competition was held, and the winner was a local firm Truex, Cullins & Partners. The Brutalist building was consecrated in 1973.

Images: Rudolph Building, Yale By Photographer: interrupt; – edit of flickr image, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11872101; Hillside (Sturtevant dormitory), By Colby Mariam – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49324860; Boston City Hall, By Daniel Schwen – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12229690 Phllips Exeter Academy Library, By Gunnar Klack – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57029474; St. Paul’s Cathedral, By Beyond My Ken – Own work, GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29111530. This story about Brutalist buildings was updated in 2023.

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