A House with a History

A House with a History by Philo T. Ruggles

"A House with a History" recounts the story of the Morris–Jumel Mansion, a rare survivor of colonial-era architecture standing on the heights of upper Manhattan long after its brownstone-front contemporaries had been demolished, converted, or absorbed into the anonymous churn of New York real estate. Ruggles opens by contrasting the monotonous brown-stone rowhouses that dominate the city with this singular wooden mansion, painted white, built broad and low in the old style, with a slanting roof, dormer windows, and a rooftop railing from which nearly all of Manhattan Island can be seen. He frames the house as a rebuke to the era's restless habit of tearing down and rebuilding, since it stands essentially unchanged inside and out, still occupied by descendants of the family that owned it, still packed with eighteenth-century furniture, portraits, and bric-a-brac that lose nothing in comparison to contemporary taste. The essay first approaches the mansion through its grounds: an orchard in spring blossom, archers on the lawn, sweeping views of the Harlem River, the Sound, Brooklyn, and Long Island, all just minutes from an elevated railroad station yet as quiet as a wilderness retreat. From there Ruggles guides the reader indoors, room by room. The front hall holds a life-size portrait of Madame Jumel with a child at her side, along with other family portraits, and a small inlaid table on which an unnamed but well-known unorthodox writer composed his most famous book. An archway is decorated with a mutilated version of the American coat-of-arms, its eagle removed because the ornament was purchased in Paris when displaying an eagle was politically unsafe. The parlor, furnished in mahogany with a carpet still intact after generations of use, opens through folding doors into the octagonal drawing-room, furnished with Paris-made chairs and sofas upholstered in satin and ornamented with plaster angels suspended by invisible wires. It was in this drawing-room, Ruggles notes, that George Washington once met with a delegation of Indian chiefs who arrived uninvited and were at first thought hostile. The dining room, described in loving detail, contains a vast mahogany sideboard and shelving crowded with old silver plate and rare china, much of it linked to notable historical figures. Having toured the house, Ruggles turns to its history. It was built by Roger Morris, a British army officer who had served as an aide to General Braddock and was wounded at Fort Duquesne. Morris married the wealthy heiress Mary Phillipse and settled into the mansion, then "near New York," in 1764. The house's Revolutionary War significance follows: Washington used it as headquarters during the 1776 campaign on Manhattan, viewing troop movements from its grounds with Generals Greene, Putnam, and Mercer shortly before British forces occupied the very same spot. After the fall of Fort Washington, the mansion served as headquarters first for the Hessian commander Knyphausen and then for British forces until the 1783 evacuation of New York. Because the Morrises remained loyal to the Crown, they were named in New York's 1779 act of attainder and left permanently for England, where Roger Morris died in 1794 and his wife lived to age ninety-six. Ruggles traces the property's postwar transformations: a brief occupancy by Dr. Isaac Ledyard, then its conversion into a hotel and stagecoach stop by Talmage Hall, who advertised its octagonal drawing-room as ideal for a "turtle party." A legal dispute over the attainder's effect on the Morris heirs' claims allowed John Jacob Astor to purchase those claims cheaply and reportedly profit half a million dollars—an episode Ruggles credits as a contributing seed of the Astor fortune. Washington himself revisited the house in 1790 as President, dining there while it was occupied, as his diary records, by "a common farmer." The mansion later passed to the wealthy French merchant Stephen Jumel, who refurbished it and imported furniture, artwork, and trees from France, much of which still fills the house. After Jumel's death, his widow married Aaron Burr, making the estate a near neighbor to Hamilton's country seat, the Grange. Madame Jumel later transferred the property to her adopted niece Mary, whose descendants held it amid protracted litigation. The synopsis closes on the legal aftermath: following Madame Jumel's death in 1865, a series of lawsuits over the estate consumed roughly fifteen years and $300,000 in legal costs before the title was settled, culminating in a 1881 partition suit and a court-ordered public auction of the property in 1882. Ruggles, who signs the piece as the court-appointed referee overseeing that sale, appends the formal auction notice describing the mansion, its surrounding city lots, water frontage, and additional Manhattan properties to be sold at the Merchants' Exchange Salesroom. The work thus moves from picturesque architectural appreciation through Revolutionary War drama and Gilded Age society to a closing note of real-estate and legal record, using the house as a thread connecting the Republic's founding generation to the commercial New York of Ruggles's own day.

By Philo T. Ruggles · First published 1882 · Genre: History, Architectural History, Local History · 3,850 words

First lines

It is a treat to see a house occasionally that is a little different from its neighbors. One that has not a brown-stone front and high brown-stone steps, and a brown-stone railing, and a brown-stone area, and the face of a brown-stone servant girl looking out of the basement window. There are a few houses in New York that were not cast in this mould, but very few; and whenever we see one it is a relief to the eyes to stop and look at it. If it happens to be a very old house, with one or two walls a little out of plumb and big dormer windows on the roof, so much the better, for then it brings a suggestion of big, airy rooms and other luxuries our ancestors enjoyed before what we call the "modern conveniences" were invented. These modern conveniences consist, in very large part, of rooms a trifle larger than lock-boxes in the Post-office, entries whose narrowness is equaled only by their shortness, and five or six families trying to live in the space that would comfortably hold one. We see so few fine old-fashioned places in New York that we are more likely than most people to appreciate one when we do find it. The old homes of nearly all the wealthy old families have gone to the dogs. Some have been torn down, some have been changed into apartment houses, some are business places. There is hardly one left just as it stood half a century ago. The thing we are most accustomed to is the flimsy house that was put up yesterday, and that will be pulled down tomorrow to make room for a larger. In this uncomfortable and unsettled state of affairs he is a benefactor who discovers a real stately old mansion, standing to-day just as it stood nearly a century ago, inside and out, with no changes but those made by old Time. So much the better if the mansion is one known to history, and if its broad rooms have sheltered men whose names we venerate. There is at least one such mansion still standing in New York -- standing now just as it stood in the days we read about in history, filled up to the very throat with furniture of the last century, that loses nothing by comparison with our own, overflowing with bric-a-brac, the walls hidden with paintings. Better than all, still occupied by the same family that owned it when Canal street was a very good street, but rather too far up town.

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history · house · architecture · family · heritage · nostalgia · domestic · historical fiction · secrets · memory · past · building

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