Sunday, October 16, 2022
(written by Kathi)
Warning: this is a long one, so grab a cup of coffee or something. The other day I told Lori I was going to work on not writing so extensively for the GW journal. Big fail.
We were up and about a little earlier today, about 7:30, closer to our usual GW rising time. For breakfast we enjoyed yogurt and the delicious farmers market granola. This morning Lori and I were determined to leave the house earlier, so we were efficient about our morning routines. We had our lunches packed and were ready to leave in time to arrive at our chosen destination before noon.
Today we explored another du Pont family home. Let me give you a bit of background first. Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours (1739 – 1817) was a French-American writer, economist, publisher, and government official who emigrated with his two sons to the U.S. during the French Revolution. One of those sons, Éleuthère Irénée du Pont (a.k.a. E. I.) founded a company that eventually became one of the America’s most successful and wealthiest business dynasties of the 19th and 20th centuries. Whenever we write about visiting a du Pont estate, we will be referring to someone in E. I.’s line of succession. E. I. was a chemist with an expertise in making gunpowder. The family came to the U.S. with supplies of gunpowder that eventually ran out. When E.I. realized how much poorer quality the gunpowder was here in comparison to that made in France, he launched his company and subsequently made a fortune manufacturing gunpowder and later glass, paint, textiles, chemicals . . . the list goes on. Each of the massive du Pont family homes we have visited here in Wilmington have been built and owned by members of E. I.’s progeny.
E. I. and his wife Sophie had seven children—three sons and four daughters. One of them, Henry (a.k.a. Big Red, 1812 - 1889) was the first president of the gunpowder business. Big Red, who with his wife Louisa had eight children, was succeeded as company president by his son (E. I.’s grandson) Henry Algernon (1838 – 1926). Meanwhile, some of E. I.’s other heirs had sold off hundreds of acres of the original ginormous parcel of the family’s land to a business partner, Jacques Bidermann (1790 – 1865), who happened to be married to one of Big Red’s sisters, Angelina. Jacques was from Winterthur, Switzerland. He and Angelina used their newly acquired family land to build a huge house on a massive estate, and in honor of Jacques’ birthplace, named it Winterthur (the “h” is silent, by the way).
Jacques and Angelina (du Pont) had a son, James, who inherited Winterthur upon his father’s death. James apparently did not want the responsibility, and sold Winterthur to his uncle (his mother’s brother), Henry Algernon, son of . . . are you following along? Big Red. So, after Big Red dies in 1889, Henry Algernon owns all of Winterthur, AND all of Hagley, the property housing the gunpowder works and adjoining estate. He and his wife, Pauline, used Winterthur as a country home, converted the house to a French-style manor house, and added a fourth floor and yet another 900 acres to the property.
Henry Algernon and Pauline had planned for a huge family and expanded their home and estate so that they would have plenty of room; however, in the end they had only two children who survived childhood: Louise du Pont Crowningshield (1877 – 1958) and Henry Francis (1880 – 1969). Pauline died in 1902, and Henry Algernon (who served in congress after the death of his wife) died in 1926. Henry Algernon left Hagley, which Lori and I explored on Day 2, to his daughter, and Winterthur to his son, who had been managing the estate since the death of his mother.
We arrived at Winterthur just before noon and bought our tickets. The buying of tickets is newsworthy because both Lori and I are now old enough to qualify for the rate for seniors at most museums! You would have thought we had won the lottery; we were so excited to pay the reduced rate. At any rate, after we bought our SENIOR RATE tickets, we boarded the garden tram, which would eventually deliver us to the amazing home of Henry Francis du Pont.
The garden tram was open-sided and took a sinuous route from the visitor’s center to the main house through the 60 acres of naturalistic gardens planned and planted by Henry Francis du Pont with help from a female phenom gardener names Marian Coffin. The place is stunningly beautiful, even with very few flowers in bloom. Lori and I agreed that we would have called the rolling hills, forested areas, and meadows landscaping rather than gardens, but that is mostly attributed to the time of year and our rigid idea of what “gardens” are. Under the soil lurked 5 million bulbs that start sprouting every spring, carpet the fields and borders with color. There were still tons of hostas, hardy begonias, aster, and other blooms visible, but it all had an “organized wildness” vibe that tricked one into ignoring that decades of work had gone into the planning. Henry Francis, like so many other members of his family, was a naturalist who loved the outdoors. Our tram driver/guide seemed to know the name of every tree, bush, and ground carpet we passed, and he was delightful to listen to.
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| The Winterthur Mansion |
Henry Francis established his enormous mansion as a public museum in 1951, and he moved into a smaller building on the grounds. The museum has now grown to hold galleries, lecture halls, and a library. Our tram delivered us first to the galleries housing two floors of furniture and artifacts not only from the big house, but also collected by the museum curators. I spent a lot of time in the first room of the galleries, which had clearly been fully redone since the pandemic. I know this not only because I asked the docent on duty, but because any Black communication scholar worth her salt would recognize the language on the walls, signs, and exhibits in this room to be acknowledgement of white privilege rarely seen lately, and certainly not before the summer of 2020. I was simultaneously amazed and appreciative of signs that began with questions such as, “Who should be involved in interpreting the themes of privilege and inequality portrayed by an object like this one?” This place has a fan for life.
After visiting the galleries, we took a break to enjoy the sandwiches we had packed, then presented ourselves at the mansion. Our house tour began at 2:00 pm from the conservatory, which is a huge and beautiful completely glass structure on one end of the house. Henry Algernon and Pauline had expanded the home to 50 rooms, but son Henry Francis and his American furniture habit/obsession/addiction apparently needed way more room than that. In 1931 renovations were completed on the final expansion of Winterthur. Henry Francis added ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE ROOMS AND FOUR MORE FLOORS, increasing the total number of rooms to 175 (!!). To his credit, he and his architects did an amazing job of hiding the fact that the house was now as big as a small city. Rather then going up higher, he added floors underneath the four existing ones. The house was set into a hill, so Henry Francis moved down the hill, adding as he went, and not stopping until there were four additional floors. Oh, yeah, and an attic, although I’m not sure which Henry added the attic. Winterthur has been called the "largest and richest museum of American furniture and decorative arts in the world."
Because of this stair-stepping architecture, the “ground floor” through which we entered is in actuality now the fifth floor of the house, topping the four that had been added below. The tour encompassed this fifth floor and part of the fourth floor. Henry Francis fell in love with American furniture during the time he was managing Winterthur for his father. Now that he owned the home outright, he filled each of this seemingly endless supply of rooms with traditional and antique American furniture pieces. LOTS of them. The rooms are kept exactly as they were when Henry Francis died, and although there is room to walk through them, you don’t want to swing your arms too heartily or some precious antique will go flying. One of the docents informed us that there are over 90,000 separate, catalogued items in this house, and 19,000 of them are pieces of china. Having just moved seven months ago, and still feeling somewhat traumatized by the experience, the thought of actually owning that much stuff takes the air out of my lungs.
After exiting the house at the end of the tour (on a lower floor and different side than where we entered) we walked through some of the grounds, including the reflection pool (formerly a full cement swimming pool) and the enchanted forest Henry Francis created in one of his gardens for all the workers’ children living on the estate. There was also a lovely, shaded, secluded area with a couple of koi ponds under a cool canopy of trees. We could have stayed in that space all day, relaxing with a book. On one of the previous days of this trip, Lori and I had talked about wanting to see a fox, and the tram driver had told us the place was full of them. When we walked into the koi pond area there were two women standing there, who told us they had just seen a fox standing right there on the steps, literally 30 seconds before. We missed him. When we left the water area and were headed back to where our car was parked, a couple was walking toward us. They said they had just seen a fox and asked if we had seen him! Of course, we had to answer no. Apparently, fox is the new moose, the other animal who successfully evaded us for 20 years.
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| Marian Coffin gardens |
Lori and I walked back to our car, passing the now closed visitor’s center and outbuildings, and drove out of the parking lot at about 5:15. We decided we could squeeze in one more thing we wanted to see, so we headed to Marian Coffin Garden. These gardens were designed by the same woman who had helped Henry Francis design some of the Winterthur gardens, and Lori came across them in her research. They are attached to another large mansion in Wilmington which, unsurprisingly, also has a du Pont connection (purchased in 1909 by Isabella Mathieu du Pont; 1882 – 1946, great-granddaughter of E. I. and 3rd cousin to Henry Francis and Louise). The mansion is abandoned and literally falling apart, but a Delaware state organization collects funds to help preserve the garden. This place is not nearly as large as the other behemoths we have visited here, and seems really tucked away, but apparently it is well known as a spot for photos. There were four separate professional photographers taking photos of an engaged couple, a 5-year old birthday girl, a young couple with a new baby, and what was likely a young violinist taking senior pictures. We explored as much as we could while avoiding these groups, then left.
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| the garage belonging to the mansion on the property |
When we got home neither of us was really hungry, so we just snacked throughout the evening while journaling and watching TV. We started a new show because we were sick of watching Niecy Nash’s boobs flop all over the place. This show is called The Good Cop and stars Tony Danza and Josh Groban (yes, THAT Josh Groban, the singer). The show is a comedic drama and is very good; however, Lori was asleep on the couch by 8:15, halfway through the second episode. She rallied to semi-watch one more episode, than gave up and went to bed at about 10:30. I wanted to journal a bit and take care of a couple of things for work that would make my life easier when I get back. I finally turned in around 12:30 am and slept like a rock.
Before Lori went to bed we tossed the states, but both final options landed bottoms up and therefore lived to face another day.
