Historical American Homes Open for Touring
Nestled in the high hills of Cornish new Hampshire, the Saint-Gaudens National Historical Site preserves the Federal-style house, lush formal gardens, and studios of one of America’s greatest sculptors. The Irish-born Augustus Saint-Gaudens studied at the Ecole des Beauz-Arts in Paris before spending five years perfecting his craft in Rome. His first major commission, an 1876 monument to Civil War admiral David Glasgow Farragut, unveiled in New York in 1881, was a huge success. Augustus Saint-Gaudens left new York in 1885 for Cornish, where he rented an old brick tavern from his friend Charles C. Beaman.
Enchanted by the area’s white pines and sweeping meadows, Saint-Gaudens purchased a 150-acre estate there in 1892 and began to remodel the house and grounds to suit his needs. He hamed the house Aspet, after his father’s ancestral village in France.
The artist added dormer windows and a pair of parapeted brick chimneys to the plain late 18th-century brick building, as well as a second-story porch off the master bedroom. The house’s beauty rests on the simplicity of its overall design, the white exterior walls, the shuttered windows, a wide colonnaded veranda, and a front doorway with a semicircular fanlight.
Saint-Gaudens added a mezzanine study, a sunroom, and bedrooms to the wo-story house. The first floor contains an entrance hall, dinning room, double parlors, kitchen and pantries, and a wide curving staircase that leads to the second-floor bedrooms. Visitors can wander through four rooms furnished with Saint-Gaudens’ possessions, including 17th-century Flemish tapestries, 18th-century American furniture, and paintings by the artist’s wife, Augusta.
The landscaping of the estate was a lifelong work in progress. For some 15 years, until his death in 1907, the artist refined his architectural and landscape design, and created monumental sculptures for a wonderland of picturesque pools and fountains, areas of dense woodlands, wide vistas, ad formal gardens that served as settings for casts of his sculptures. These casts of earlier work include copies of the figure for the Adams Memorial in Washington, D.C., and the bronze relief of the Robert G. Shaw Memorial on Boston common, which honors a colonel who died with his regiment of black soldiers during the civil War.
Visitors can explore part of the 150-acre grounds along the Blow-Me-Down Trail, which descends through 80 acres of mature stands of white pine trees to a millpond. The Ravine Trail follows an old cart path through fern gardens, 100-foot-tall pines, and a hardwood forest of maple, birch, oak, ash, and beech trees.
Other buildings on the estate include the stable and icehouse, which was used to store blocks of ice cut from Blow-Me-Down Pond during the winter, and the New Gallery, existing out buildings to which architect John Ames added a Roman-style atrium and a reflecting pool in 1948.
A marble temple marks the burial sit e of the Saint-Gaudens family. It was designed for a play be members of the Cornish colony, a group of artists who lived here in the early part of the 20th century.
Now we will venture all the way to New Mexico.
Kit Carson Historic Museum
In 1826 a weary 17 year-old boy named Christopher Carson arrived in Taos, new Mexico, as a member of a wagon train that had been traveling along the Santa Fe Trail. Just weeks earlier, he had been an apprentice at a Missouri saddle maker’s shop when the wagon train passed by. Acting on impulse, he quit his job and signed on with the pioneers. At the time, the impetuous carson was just another unknown young man who had been coaxed into the journey westward by the promise of exciting adventure and a better standard of living. By the time he died in 1868, Kit Carson, as he was then known, had become one of the most famous characters in the history of the Old West.
Carson’s facility for languages and searing thirst for adventure drew him into all kinds of exploits over the next 42 years of his life. He became everything from a trapper, Indian fighter, and translator for settlers heading to Mexico to a scout on several mapping expeditions made by explorer John C. Fremont, an Indian agent and a Union officer in the Civil War.
Carson was known as a wide-ranging adventurer whose daring deeds in the saddle made him a legend. Trying his hand at ranching in the mid-1800’s, he once drove 6,500 sheep from New Mexico to California through some of the most hostile Indian country in the nation. What many people don’t realize is that this great frontiersman was also a doting husband and gather. Visitors to the Kit Carson Historical Museums in Taos, New Mexico, can explore the house where Carson lived out many of his happiest days, as a homebody. Originally built in 1825, the long, low adobe building with 30-inch-thick walls was bought by Carson in 1843 as a wedding present for his new bride, Maria Josefa Jaramillo, the daughter of a prominent family in the region.
Carson had been married previously to an Arapaho woman, but she died shortly after the wedding. His marriage to Josefa lasted 25 years, and the couple lived happily in the house where six of their eight children were born. Carson also entertained a steady stream of friends, admirers, and dignitaries, including Fremont and George Ruxton, a British writer who kept extensive records of his adventures in the United States.
Only a portion of Carson’s original four-room house is preserved as part of the museum. The U-shaped, 12-room structure underwent numerous alterations over the years, serving at various times as a home, stable, store, and saddle-making shop. By 1910 the local Masonic lodge had stepped in to take over the preservation of the house that once had belonged to one of its most famous members. Not much of the structure remained; in fact, only a few original walls and portals stand today. Though not part of the structure in Carson’s time, the large timber beams, known as vigas in Spanish, are typical examples of the construction techniques of the Southwest.
The interior of the house is decorated with period pieces from the mid-1800’s including a spool bed, wooden organ, and Carson’s rustic black desk. The living room, kitchen, and bedroom provide glimpses into the era in which Carson lived. The floors alternate between dirt and wooden planks and the kitchen is set up so authentically that it looks like Carson’s large family might arrive any time and sit down to eat. One of the personal items on display is a brown silk dress that was among Josefa’s favorites. Other exhibits illustrate Carson’s larger-than-life story with displays of his personal effects, including a Spencer carbine rifle and a beaded rifle bag.
The museum also provides visitors with a better understanding of the contributions that diverse groups of people made to the development of the region. The Carson’s lived in their beloved adobe home until they died, within a month of each other, in 1868. Josefa’s death resulted from complications in childbirth, and Kit died from an aneurysm. They are buried in the cemetery at nearby Kit Carson Park, just a few blocks north of the house in which they raised their family.
The Kit Carson Historic Museum is located in Taos, New Mexico.
Olana
When artist Frederic E. church built Olana, de designed the windows and doorways as frames for the breathtaking landscape surrounding his house. Set on a lofty hill overlooking the Hudson River, the fanciful structure is an architectural collage of patterned brickwork, Islamic arches, balconies and high towers After acquiring the hilltop property, church wrote: “About an hour this side of Albany is the center of the world, I own it.”
Widely considered the finest of the Hudson River School painters, church first purchased land in the area in 1860. Seven years later, he traveled to Europe and the Middle East with his wife, Isabel, whre the two were smitten by Islamic architecture. The Italianate villa they had planned for the Hudson River property was abandoned in favor of an Eastern-style building. In 1879 the churches named the estate Olana, after an ancient Persian fortress.
Church constructed the house between 1870 and 1876 consulting with new York architect Calvert Vaux. The two-story house borrows freely from Persian, Italian, and Moorish architectural design. The exterior is faced with yellow, red, and black bricks arranged in a decorative array above a mosque like entryway.
Information above gathered from tour guides as I have visited many of these locations!
