The Beneficiary

by Janny Scott

  To build a house suitable to his station, he hired a Philadelphia architect with a fashionable practice catering to what Michael C. Kathrens, an architectural historian and author of a book on the architect, has described as the desire of the extremely rich of that era “to flaunt their wealth with more grandiose and more expensively appointed old-world-style houses.” The architect, Horace Trumbauer, had made a name for himself in the Philadelphia area at the end of the nineteenth century by designing a forty-room castle for a sugar baron. From that modest beginning, he’d gone on to build a hundred-ten-room palace for a trolley-car titan; a Renaissance-style mansion with frescoed ceilings for the titan’s business partner; and an Elizabethan-style house for the business partner’s son. With a Trumbauer house, a man might hope to cement his business connections and build what Kathrens describes as dynastic alliances through the marriages of his children. When the Colonel hired Trumbauer, the architect had yet to undertake some of his best-known commissions, including Widener Library at Harvard, and Miramar, a summerhouse in Newport, which he equipped with a twenty-foot stone basin big enough to accommodate two hundred magnums of champagne on ice.

  The house Trumbauer designed for the Montgomerys had no champagne basin. But modest it was not. The design was inspired by a house in Surrey that had been featured in Country Life, a British weekly read closely by country gentlemen, arrived or aspiring. The Montgomery house would have fifteen bedrooms, fifteen fireplaces, and accommodations for twelve servants. Trumbauer stretched the scale of certain features of the Surrey house to achieve what Kathrens calls a more monumental appearance. For interior decoration, the Montgomerys hired the London firm that had overhauled Buckingham Palace after the death of Queen Victoria. The Colonel’s wife hired that firm “with the understanding that everything was to be as plain as possible, but of a quality unsurpassed.” Her tastes, it seems, were simpler than those of her husband, whose birthday checks she sometimes parked in a bank account and forgot about for years. Occasionally, she called the palace he’d ordered up “my Taj Mahal.”

  The Colonel didn’t stop at the house. He arranged for a fifty-foot-long swimming pool, fed by springwater that arrived through a spout at one end and spilled out the other end into a chute leading to a passing stream. He built a seventeen-hundred-foot-long stone wall along what was then the northern frontier of the estate. He called for a balustrade of Indiana limestone, decorated with sculptures, matching the trim on the house. He had the driveway circle expanded to accommodate the turning radius of a large touring car. He built a stone water tower—concrete-lined, shingle-roofed—and had water pumped from springs on the property into underground tanks. To design homes for farm employees, he sent his architects a book on British cottage architecture. The semidetached houses were to be surrounded by gardens, fruit trees, hedges, honeysuckle, roses. The architects wrote back, reassuring the client, “The whole group will be quite English in effect.” Because he’d long dreamed of a stable with a clock tower, he sent his architect a pencil sketch of what he had in mind. When the stable was completed, it had a stone tower with a self-winding Seth Thomas tower clock, an indoor exercise track, box stalls, a saddle room, a trainer’s room, a trophy room. Grain arrived, and manure departed, via carriers attached to a hanging track. Years later, my grandmother would say the stable was the part of her parents’ place she’d loved most when she was a child.

  Poking through the Colonel’s papers, it occurred to me for the first time that the place I’d known from my earliest years was an invention. It had seemed to date from time immemorial; in truth, it was a creation of a fairly recent vintage—a product of one man’s imagination and will. The invention wasn’t simply the house with its towering gateposts decked out with lanterns with antique glass panels. The Colonel had ordered up farm roads, stone bridges, walls. He’d had boulders hauled out of the fields and woods, to be crushed into gravel for surfacing the roads in his preferred shade of gray. He’d selected the grasses—timothy, bluegrass, redtop, white clover—which were still growing in the pastures when I was young. He’d insisted upon Norway spruce along the boundary to the north—until he changed his mind and replaced them with white pine. In the heaps of correspondence, bills, and receipts, I could track his restless desire behind the thousands of man-hours spent clearing, blasting, hauling, digging, filling, grading, planting, transplanting, plowing, harrowing, seeding, paving, pumping, fencing. Even the landscape was, to some extent, the Colonel’s vision.

  A year or two after moving into the house, he ordered up a forest. He enlisted the services of a nursery in New York that had developed a sideline in transplanting mature trees onto estates. The nursery sent a landscape architect to Pennsylvania to design a bespoke forest, then dispatched the superintendent of its tree-moving department to oversee the operation. For three weeks in February 1915, men uprooted trees, swaddled roots in burlap, and hauled transplants from one end of the Montgomery property to another. As George S. Kaufman said of the hundreds of trees transplanted onto Moss Hart’s estate, “Just what God would have done if He had the money.”

  But, several weeks in, the Colonel aborted the maneuvers. The cost was turning out to be much higher than he’d expected. It had taken thirteen days to move just six trees. What’s more, the trees, once transplanted, weren’t tall enough to fulfill their intended purpose, which, it seems, may have been to erase the sight of another very large house rising on an estate a mile away.

  The following spring, the planting extravaganza resumed. Ten thousand rhododendron bushes were ordered for the woods on the Montgomery holdings. Seven hundred linear feet of privet went in along the boundary to the south. On the high banks of the long, straight road that served as the property line to the north, one thousand, two hundred fifty climbing roses took root. Seven hundred fifty honeysuckle plants arrived from a local nursery. In April and May, landscapers installed two dozen purple beech trees, two dozen junipers, three dozen white dogwoods, four dozen hemlocks, and dozens of snowballs, lilacs, forsythias, mock oranges, hydrangeas, and box trees. For the landscaping around the new swimming pool, nine hundred ferns were trucked in. The lawns spilling away from the big house were planted with nearly five hundred trees. Six hundred cowslip, rock cress, white stonecrop, and other small, flowering perennials arrived from a nursery in Vermont, along with instructions from a famous landscape architect in Manhattan to plant them in the cracks of rocks.

  The Colonel furnished himself, too, with the ultimate gentleman’s accessory, a herd of cows.

  When I was young, mine was the only Main Line grandmother I knew of with three hundred cows. But in her father’s day, I’ve since learned, a dairy herd was prized accoutrement for the gentleman farmer on several Main Line estates. Percival Roberts, the iron and steel man with the Olmsted landscapes, had Ayrshires at his place in Penn Valley and Gladwyne. Another estate, with a house modeled on a Tudor castle in Warwickshire, had its own dairy, too. The Colonel, who’d already dabbled in sheep and poultry, bought approximately a dozen Ayrshires—hardy, economical, long-lived producers of superior milk—from a friend who’d imported them from Scotland. In a photograph from the early years, the original cows stand in a row, facing away from the camera, their posteriors on display. The unpronounceable names they brought with them—Auchenbainzie Katie, Lessnessock Violet II, Muiryhill Sally III, and so on—read as though lifted from a Scottish gazetteer.

  By 1920, the herd had multiplied sixfold with the cooperation of the Colonel’s prizewinning bull. The Colonel wanted his dairy to be state-of-the-art, so he sent an emissary to gather intelligence at an innovative farm in the Hudson Valley. He experimented with crop rotations; he tried a portable barn for milking, to save money on bedding—then ditched it, having realized his cows were wasting energy growing winter coats. By the time a reporter from Field Illustrated Advertiser showed up in 1920, the farm was said to be turning a small profit. But the Colonel insisted that making money mattered less to him than superio
r milk. To his sister, he wrote, “My personal pride prompts me to sell a better product, if I can, than anyone else, as I never like to have to do with anything unless it is the best.”

  Brandy from Berry Bros. in London, picnic baskets from Asprey, jodhpurs from Huntsman & Sons of Savile Row: The laird of Ardrossan prided himself on his standards and taste. Once, he instructed his grown son to return forty-one cases of Gordon’s gin: Only Bellows would do. He fished for salmon on a river in Canada where Micmac fishing guides escorted the world’s richest men. His black cloth overcoat was lined with mink. And when rodents turned up in the big house, no garden-variety pest-control specialist would suffice: Horace Trumbauer wrote to his exacting client, “With reference to exterminating the rats at your residence I have made inquiry as to who did this work at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel.”

  The big house required a battalion to run it. Thirteen servants—young immigrants from Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland, and France—lived in the house at the time of the 1920 census. When the household was in full operation, my father said, sixteen men and women sat down to the midday meal in the servants’ dining room. There were cooks, maids, butlers, valets, chauffeurs, handymen, gardeners, watchmen. The pantry housed enough silver to keep busy a polisher chasing tarnish full-time—candlesticks and candelabras, hot dishes with covers, footed bowls, fish platters, compotes, bouillon spoons, ice tongs, chop plates, toast racks, chafing dishes, gravy boats, candlesnuffers, and old-fashioned glasses etched with the word “Achievement.” The staff didn’t simply clean, cook, wait on tables, wash dishes, wash laundry, drive, cultivate the gardens. They were essential to the raising of children. My great-uncle Aleck had not one baby nurse but two. When his mother’s breast milk couldn’t keep up with demand, the family summoned the fashionable wife of the fashionable French chef of a fashionable French restaurant in Philadelphia to fill in as a wet nurse.

  Extravagance in genuflecting to the past was not, it turns out, exclusive to our Colonel Montgomery. A distant kinsman of his occupies a rarefied niche in British history for having mounted an ill-fated medieval jousting tournament on the grounds of his imitation Gothic castle in Ayrshire, Scotland, in 1839. At a time of Romantic infatuation with chivalry and other things medieval, Archibald Montgomerie, the thirteenth earl of Eglinton, trained forty earls, viscounts, marquesses, and so on to play the role of medieval knight, and dressed them in medieval costume and armor. He had pavilions and grandstands constructed. A glittering roster of guests, including the future Napoleon III, turned out for the event. Four thousand people were expected; as many as one hundred thousand are said to have shown up. Then, as knights and their entourages pranced forth in the opening-day parade, lightning crackled and a sudden downpour swamped the festivities. Guests ended up having to flee on foot. At the time, the earl’s effort was admired for its pageantry and ambition. But ridicule followed. The Eglinton Tournament has been remembered more recently as “one of the most glorious and infamous follies of the nineteenth century.” It took a large bite, too, out of the thirteenth earl’s cash.

  It had never occurred to me to wonder what our Colonel had been thinking. There was the story of his fall from the rented horse and his resolution to build a house on the spot—a story that every journalist who ever encountered my grandmother swallowed whole and served up in print. But that tale didn’t really explain the serial annexations or the magnitude of the Main Line Taj. The Colonel hadn’t merely bought a hilltop with a view that had caught his eye. He’d made a statement about himself, his family, his place. As decades passed and generations piled up, Ardrossan appeared to embody assumptions about family—for example, the responsibilities of each generation to those that preceded and came after. Had my father’s grandparents, both motherless at a young age, shared a dream of an indissoluble, multigenerational clan? “On Ardrossan, unity is strength,” the Colonel’s wife, whose children and grandchildren called her Muz, wrote upon hearing that her eldest grandson was decamping. When they locked up their land and houses in trusts that couldn’t be tampered with for a hundred years, were they envisioning a family compound that would endure intact far into the future?

  I ran that hypothesis by my uncle. My father’s only sibling (and the third of the four Edgars), he’d known his grandparents longer than any member of his generation. He’d grown up on Ardrossan and returned to it after the Marines, Harvard, and marriage—until it had become clear that his wife’s happiness wouldn’t survive being cooped up on the same eight hundred acres as his mother. He’d spent his career in the stockbrokerage that his father and the Colonel had founded. He was as likely as anyone to know his grandparents’ motivations. When I went to see him, he was in his late eighties, living with his wife and their dogs, cats, and horses at the end of a gravel road in the rolling countryside near the Brandywine River valley in a landscape that three generations of Wyeths had painted. Fifteen years earlier, while foxhunting at age seventy-five, he’d found himself parallel to the ground, halfway out of the saddle, on a galloping horse after it stumbled on a fence. Seeing no alternative, he’d let go and fallen, breaking a piece of bone that projects upward from the second vertebra in one’s neck. Thinking nothing was seriously wrong, he’d accepted a ride, from a photographer with a jeep, to a trauma center, where a nurse, wheeling him out of the room where a technician had just X-rayed his back, assured him he was lucky because nothing appeared to have been broken. “Well, I’m certainly glad to hear that,” he’d remember saying, “but, I must say, I’ve never had such a sore neck.” The broken bits, he discovered after the nurse executed a volte-face with the gurney, had not displaced. So he’d avoided paralysis and/or death. The day I went to visit, big yellow dogs bounded to the door of his house, tails wagging with enough vigor to upend a small child. We sat in a room with a picture window, beyond which hills plunged and climbed into the distance. When I asked him if he thought his grandparents had conceived Ardrossan and set up the trusts out of a commitment to some idea of the enduring family, he seemed to doubt it. The Colonel was dynastic, he said. But my uncle said what my father, the former trusts and estates lawyer, had occasionally said: Their grandparents’ intention was to avoid taxes.

  The first trust was set up in 1912—the year before the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment gave Congress the authority to tax income. The second was dated 1917—one year after the Revenue Act of 1916 created a tax on the transfer of wealth from an estate to its beneficiaries. A third was dated 1933—the year Congress created the gift tax to stop the rich from dodging the estate tax by handing down wealth during their lifetimes. The Ardrossan trusts had other benefits, too. They’d protect the Colonel and his well-situated wife in the event of losses in his business: Any creditor who came after them would have no claim on anything held in trust. In the meantime, the estate might be made self-sustaining. The rents paid on the houses could be used to cover expenses without having to be declared as income. Though many of the houses went to family members for rents that seemed minimal, my uncle told me those rents “damn near did maintain the property for years.”

  The Colonel had become an investment banker at an opportune moment. He’d gone into finance just as the market for industrial securities was being born. Until 1890, Americans with capital to invest had mostly put it in real estate. If they’d wanted to buy securities, railroad securities had been almost the only option; industrial firms had tended to be small, closely held, and not publicly traded. In the early 1890s, that began to change. With railroads covering much of the country, the demand for investment capital for the rail system had become less urgent, and a market for industrial securities emerged. Dozens of industrial companies issued investment-quality, dividend-paying preferred stocks in the early years of that decade, through mergers, incorporations, and recapitalizations. A business grew up in the distribution of industrial stocks. After those stocks performed better on average than railroad securities during the depression of 1893 to 1897, investors embraced them, enabling ma
nufacturing and other industrial firms to grow. A wave of large-scale mergers took place. By the early twentieth century, investment banking firms were underwriting new issues of industrial securities, selling the stock to investors, and making money on the sales. When Montgomery, Clothier & Tyler was formed in 1907, that was the firm’s business.

  How successful the Colonel’s firm really was proved almost impossible for me to determine. Newspaper articles and advertisements from the period make it clear that the firm was busy with stock offerings, bond issues, syndicates, mergers. But, as a private partnership, it wasn’t required to keep records or file reports; how much money the partners made on individual deals was not recorded. Until the advent of the income tax, the partners kept what they made. But because the firm was an unlimited liability partnership, their own money was at stake. If they paid more to underwrite an issue than they made distributing the stock to investors, they swallowed the loss. My uncle, the third Edgar, told me he’d heard that the firm lost money for the first seven years, then more than made up for it in each of the following seven. A cousin of my father’s remembered his grandmother, Muz, telling him, “You know, your grandfather went bankrupt twice, and I bailed him out both times.”

  At thirty-two years old, the Colonel landed at the center of one of the biggest deals of the time—the reincorporation, restructuring, and recapitalization of what had been the leading firm in the locomotive industry. The Baldwin Locomotive Works had for a long time produced more than a third of all the locomotives built; in its best year, 1906, it had turned out two thousand, six hundred sixty-six engines, running its Philadelphia plant around the clock and employing seventeen thousand men. In 1909, Baldwin had incorporated as a privately held company with a capitalization of twenty million dollars. Two years later, the directors took the company public. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Colonel prepared the financial plan for the new corporation, whose capitalization doubled overnight to forty million dollars. Though Baldwin’s officers eventually enlisted two larger and better-known firms to work with Montgomery, Clothier & Tyler, the Colonel himself was reported to have made a killing. “According to reports current in financial circles at the time, and which were not denied, Mr. Montgomery made one million dollars by his work on the project,” the Inquirer later reported. A banker who’d advised Montgomery, Clothier & Tyler on the deal resigned as president of his bank amid criticism of his sharing in the profits of the financing. The underwriters were said to have been paid in common stock, and the adviser’s share was rumored to be valued at five hundred thousand dollars. Baldwin’s net profits averaged 9.8 percent of sales between 1910 and 1915, rising with the advent of World War I.