Ventfort Hall’s 8th Annual Lenox House Tours
LENOX - Ventfort Hall Mansion and Gilded Age Museum is sponsoring its eighth annual Lenox House Tours with five historic houses in Lenox. Included are: an elegant Colonial Revival mansion sited by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and visited by an American President, a sumptuous Beaux Arts mansion under restoration, a recently restored village house enlarged during the Gilded Age in the Colonial Revival style, and more.The self-guided tour is slated for Saturday, August 9, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and includes a slide talk by well-known Berkshire architectural historian/author Cornelia Brooke Gilder as well as the option to enjoy gourmet box lunches on the Ventfort Hall Verandah. In addition to the five houses on the Lenox tour, Ventfort Hall itself will be open for guided tours from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
All the houses are on either Walker or Kemble streets and are within walking distance of Ventfort Hall located at 104 Walker Street. The tour has been organized to raise funds for Ventfort Hall’s ongoing restoration and programs.
Gilder will give a visual presentation in the newly restored library at Ventfort Hall at 11:30 a.m. and again at 1 p.m., elaborating on the personalities and places featured on the tour itinerary. She is author of the newly published “Hawthorne’s Lenox: The Tanglewood Circle” and co-author with Richard S. Jackson, Jr., of “Houses of the Berkshires, 1870-1930.”
Gilder points out, “The five houses on our tour were all built between 1804 and 1903 as private dwellings by owners with individual needs and aspirations. Their histories came together when they were acquired by the Lenox School for Boys which existed between 1926 and the mid 1970s.”
Originally the Walker-Rockwell House was for more than a century the home of the pre-eminent judicial family of the county. The imposing façade with its entry flanked by pairs of fluted columns was built in a refined Federal style in 1804 for a lawyer and later judge, William Perrin Walker. One of two “mansion-houses” with hipped roofs in Lenox (the other, Egleston House, is now the Lenox National Bank), the Walker-Rockwell House retains its interior detailing and floor plan – wide center hall, well-proportioned front rooms, elegant cherry balustrade and unusual dentilled window molding in the upstairs hall. Hotel owner William O. Curtis doubled the size of the house during the Gilded Age by adding rear porches and reception rooms.
In 1886 the prominent Frederick T. Frelinghusen family of New Jersey engaged landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and Boston architects Arthur Rotch and George Tilden for their new Lenox country house. Olmsted sited the driveway, the early Colonial Revival house, stable, terrace, tennis lawn and perennial borders. The property was owned for forty years by the children of Frelinghusen, President Chester Arthur’s Secretary of State between 1881 and 1885. Arthur was a guest when he came to Lenox to lay the cornerstone for Trinity Church across the street. Several months later he died and the family gave a Tiffany window to the sanctuary in his memory. The family of George and Sarah Morgan rented the house while building Ventfort Hall in the early1890s and the Alexandres rented it while building Spring Lawn in the early 1900s.
Rotch and Tilden also designed the square gabled structure that accompanied the Frelinghusen house for the family’s carriages and horses. The stable yard was originally defined by a fence and gate with slender urns, a decorative feature repeating those of the semi-circular porch balustrade of the house. Later the building became a three-car garage. Today it has been transformed into a private residence.
Next door is the tour’s largest house, the impressive Spring Lawn, the only known summer cottage in the Berkshires designed by Guy Lowell (Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 1910). Presently in the process of an extensive restoration, the house was built in 1903 for John E. Alexandre, a retired New York shipping executive and his wife, Helen Lispenard Webb. Like their neighbors the couple was well known in Lenox social and sporting circles. The house was staffed by a large retinue of servants all under the sway of an imperious English butler who was also captain of the Lenox Cricket Team.
Spring Lawn provides a dramatic example of the Gilded Age transformation of Lenox that swept away more modest village architecture. The Alexandre property had long been the site of The Hive, social and intellectual gathering place of Charles and Elizabeth Sedgwick and novelist Catharine Sedgwick. The old clapboarded house was demolished for the newly stuccoed Spring Lawn with its colossal porte-cochere supported by clusters of sturdy, rusticated Corinthian columns and generously scaled rooms.
Almost forgotten and nearly razed before its rescue and careful restoration last year as a private residence, Clipston Grange was initially an old nineteenth-century village house moved to Kemble Street from Main and Cliffwood streets in 1893. Purchased by Franklin K. Sturgis and his wife Florence Lydig, they enlarged the house the following year in the Colonial Revival style, capping the roofline with a parapet, installing elegant bow windows in the dining room and study, and adding a new reception room at the south end. Without children, the couple was devoted to animals. Florence’s family property is now the Bronx Zoo and Franklin was a founder of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
Ventfort Hall was designed by Rotch and Tilden in the Elizabethan Revival style for George and Sarah Morgan, sister of financier J. Pierpont Morgan. Upon completion, the Valley Gleaner newspaper described the 35-room mansion (15 bedrooms, 13 bathrooms and 17 fireplaces) as “One of the most luxurious finished this year at the cost of $900,000, including the grading of the grounds.” Today, the mansion operates as Ventfort Hall Mansion and Gilded Age Museum offering tours, exhibits, plays, concerts, lectures, kids programs and more. An Official Project of Save America’s Treasures and listed on the National Register of Historic Places, much of the restoration has been completed and work is ongoing to bring the building back to its full glory.
A special version of Ventfort Hall’s “Picnics on the Porch,” offered all summer long, will be available for tour participants and must be ordered in advance by August 6. The gourmet box lunches are $15. Combined tour and lecture tickets purchased by nonmembers before August 9 are at a reduced price of $25 and at the full price of $30 on the day of the tour. Members may purchase tickets for $20 before August 9 and for $25 on that day. Maps and tour sites will also be provided. Tickets may be purchased at Ventfort Hall, 104 Walker Street, Lenox, or by calling 413-637-3206. Orders for tickets via mail should be sent to Ventfort Hall, P.O. Box 2424, Lenox, MA 01240.
