by Mac Griswold
19
SUMMER COLONY
Suitable Alliances
Against a wall inside the vault stands an old steel safe coated in cream enamel and filled with relics. Softness brushes my hand as I unfold a crumpled tissue packet: out falls a foot-long trail of blond ringlets and a glossy brown braid tied with twine. Might either have belonged to the same Mary L’Hommedieu Gardiner whose fortune kept the manor in the family in 1827? She died of a fever at age thirty-two in the landscape parlor. During the nineteenth century, a woman’s hair was often shorn when she was ill or after a difficult birth, supposedly to conserve her strength for healing. When a body was prepared for burial, the bereaved clipped a lock or two to make a hair bracelet or brooch to keep memory warm. Mary’s mother wrote down a sad little postmortem list of her clothes, which—unremarkably—includes shawls, a light silk dress, a loose calico gown, and some capes. But when I read about Mary’s white silk stockings, her pairs of “draws,” and the “baby things,” she comes too close to me. I’m supposed to be inventorying the lifeless contents of this safe, but their owners refuse to lie still. I catch my breath when I open a box and see something quivering inside it. It’s a still-pristine white shirt, one that belonged to Mary’s husband. Who would think that starch could last for two hundred years—long enough for the slight inhalation caused by lifting the box lid to suggest a chest heaving under the double organza ruffles that Samuel Gardiner wore? Longer than today’s dress shirts, this garment must have hung down to midthigh.
Gardiner’s ruffled front invokes the man. Born soon after the end of the Revolution, he died in 1859, two years before the Civil War. He carried the fashions of his youth deep into the Victorian era, and he continued to send his shirts to be starched and pressed by a local laundress, who still knew how to perform such tasks. His young granddaughters were wonderstruck at his outfits; Lilian remarked lovingly on his attire in a memoir, so it’s no wonder that one of his shirts was carefully saved for posterity.
Young and in a hurry, an unidentified woman walks through the shaggy lawn edging the boxwood path in the manor’s garden.
Samuel Smith Gardiner was the last proprietor to live at the manor year-round until Andy Fiske took up residence almost a century later. Gardiner’s eldest daughter, Mary, moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a twenty-four-year-old bride in 1848, soon after her marriage to the Harvard chemistry professor Eben Norton Horsford, who at twenty-nine had just set forth on his academic career. Mary died only a few months after giving birth to the couple’s fourth child, and in 1860 Eben married Mary’s sister Phoebe, who was two years younger than Mary. The youngest Gardiner sister, Frances Eliza, had wed a Bostonian, George Martin Lane, three years before. Although Samuel Gardiner had granted his children equal shares in his estate, Eben became his de facto successor. The Horsfords, the Lanes, and their offspring all used Shelter Island as a summer place, but the Horsfords took center stage as lord and ladies of the manor. With the Horsfords’ move to Cambridge, the family returned to thinking of themselves as New Englanders, as Nathaniel and Brinley had done, while Sylvester Dering and Samuel Gardiner had allied their interests more with New York.
Eben—appointed Rumford Professor of Chemistry at Harvard’s newly established Lawrence Scientific School in 1847—brought the exhausting, admirable exuberance of the nineteenth century to Shelter Island. With a polymath’s intensity, he interested himself in everything that crossed his path, but particularly science and history. What eighteenth-century books remain in the house are predominantly religious or political; the nineteenth-century mind disports itself in the dark upstairs hall, where a floor-to-ceiling bookcase houses works of ethnology, archaeology, metallurgy, geography, geology, anthropology, and genealogy, leavened by some poetry and fiction and a dash of art history. More than two dozen of Eben’s thin notebooks bound in marbled paper detail in his minuscule handwriting and drawings a lifetime of experiments and scientific observations. There are volumes in Latin and Greek, in French and Italian, and many in German. Before taking up his position at Harvard, Eben had spent two years at the University of Giessen, studying with the distinguished chemist Justus von Liebig, who invented nitrogen fertilizer (and dismissed the role of humus in soil health).
Although he was an active member of the conservative Protestant Shepard Church of Cambridge (named after the Reverend Thomas Shepard, one of Anne Hutchinson’s most vigorous persecutors), Eben’s life search was not a religious one. He was an inventor. He wanted to improve the human condition, to make life faster, easier, more efficient, and more economical. His many patented discoveries and methods—acid phosphate (a nineteenth-century “energy drink” and cure-all), antichlorine, yeast powder, and a process for condensing milk among them—were intended for immediate use as well as the long-term profits they could generate for his family. In 1863, forty-five years old and the father of five daughters, he quit Harvard, turning with zest to launching business ventures. Rumford Baking Powder (named after the American scientist who founded the Harvard chair) was Eben’s most successful and lucrative product. A stable calcium biphosphate compound that replaced baking soda and cream of tartar, it raised the family fortunes just as it raised biscuit dough. Sylvester Manor’s remaining 243 acres have stayed in his descendants’ hands in large part because the nineteenth- and twentieth-century generations never needed to sell off the rest of the land for financial survival.
The Horsfords swirled about in the invigorating intellectual and social currents of Cambridge. Eben attended dinner meetings of the Saturday Club, the leading literary society of Cambridge, of which Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Whittier, and Lowell were founding members. He served on exhibition juries in Vienna and Philadelphia and took his daughters along. The family visited Newport and other fashionable New England watering spots, and they crossed the United States in a private railroad car. Distant cousin Helen Hunt Jackson, the author of Ramona (1884), the influential novel about Mexican colonial life in California, was a frequent summer guest at the manor. She shared Eben’s enthusiasm for Indian life and ways and invited some of the Horsford girls to rough it with her on camping trips in the West, where they met members of local tribes.
Rocking Chair Sagas
The family came to Shelter Island and bathed in the formidable quiet. They reshaped the story of the manor to suit themselves, savoring the place and its history as the Past while introducing indoor plumbing, electricity, window screens, and newfangled contraptions: the island’s first telephone, the latest metal windmill, and a “touring motor.” They toyed with new names for their beloved homestead. What had been simply “the Gardiner farm” became Woodstock at one point, inspired by Sir Walter Scott’s Cavalier-and-Puritan romance of that title and by the female Horsfords’ visions of their ancestor, Auditor Thomas Brinley. Sylvester Manor eventually stuck, grandly emblazoned on writing paper and on new entrance gates that stand at the main road today.
Over the years, the Cambridge intelligentsia descended in droves. Poet friends arrived—Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell. So did Annie Fields, editor, publisher, and host of Boston’s most distinguished salon, accompanied by her more famous lover, Sarah Orne Jewett, who would chronicle literary New England’s Golden Age in memoirs and biographical sketches. Jewett’s work, at its most luminous in The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), generated an interest in atmospheric locales and characters, part of a national post–Civil War nostalgia for the innocence of a rapidly vanishing rural past. The Shelter Island that Jewett first visited in 1883 would have seemed just as gently untouched by modern times as the coastal New England she depicted, with its old salts and ancient turns of phrase.
In the summertime shade of the big trees near Gardiners Creek, Phoebe, Kate, and Lilian Horsford enjoy their rocking chairs, a solemn Dr. Morrill Wyman meditates, and Professor Horsford points out a detail of the manor house to an unidentified woman.
During the long summers, the Horsfords and their guests from Boston and New York exchanged the la
test gossip, discussed the great issues of the day, and dwelled lovingly on the manor’s history. The men and women gathered there included pioneers of philanthropy, advocates of social justice, and champions of female higher education. Henry Fowle Durant, who, with his wife, Pauline, founded Wellesley College in 1875, was Eben Horsford’s best friend; Horsford, the president of the Board of Visitors, established the scientific curriculum and provided salaries and sabbaticals. (Oddly, none of the Horsford girls attended college—but then higher education was widely considered unnecessary for upper-class women who didn’t need to earn a living.)
No doubt partly as a relief from the brute realities of nineteenth-century capitalism, they eagerly worshipped the past together. The house itself became a member of the Horsford family, like a beloved old aunt. They adorned her with rescued trophies. When the American elm on Cambridge Common under which Washington had taken command of his troops was felled, the Horsfords had an armchair crafted from some of the wood and affixed a commemorative brass plate to its back. When Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s venerable family house in Cambridge was torn down, the Horsfords brought a mantelpiece to Shelter Island and installed it in the room where Longfellow slept, attaching yet another brass badge of provenance. Alice told me that Longfellow once complained that his coffee cup was too small; they had to find a bigger one. And so the corner cupboard of what she called the Longfellow Room now holds a supersized Royal Worcester cup. “Longfellow’s,” said Alice. Ordinary objects reverberated with talismanic national overtones that had not accompanied the keepsakes of previous generations.
Summer also meant pageants in which the Horsford girls dressed up and played their ancestors—a sentimental form of time travel linked to the nineteenth century’s fascination with motion of every kind, from new forms of transport (trains, steamboats) to Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic series on locomotion. The Cambridge contingent was delighted to watch Shelter Island glide before their eyes like a sequence of brightly lit lantern slides. The landscape parlor’s French wallpaper, installed in the 1880s, a dazzling panorama of Andean peaks and florid jungle called “El Dorado,” was meant to be viewed in a stately circuit of the room.
The lead actor in one such tableau vivant—someone the author of “Hiawatha” no doubt appreciated meeting—was Isaac Pharaoh, a Montauket indentured to Samuel Gardiner “of his own free and voluntary will” in 1829, when he was five years old. Although free to leave the manor at twenty-one, he spent his entire life there and is interred in the Burying Ground of the Colored People. Looked at one way, Pharaoh had a safe berth for life at a time when most Montaukets scrambled for a living. But even though Gardiner had contracted to “teach him to read or write or cause him to be taught,” the cultural conditioning of being a second-class citizen that hooded Isaac Pharaoh probably limited his ability to strike out on his own. In winter he lived in the manor house attic or by the kitchen fireside, in summer on the North Peninsula. His circumscribed pattern of seasonal habitation (merely crossing the Upper Inlet to get to the peninsula and back again) echoed—in a melancholy minor key—his ancestors’ spring and fall migrations across the entire island, their trips across the Sound, and their free-roaming treks from Montauk Point to Southampton. It was Isaac who scratched the outlines of dozens of fully rigged ships into the attic dormer walls—the carvings Andy had so proudly shown me. Light reflected from the creek shone up through the crooked old panes; boats bobbed up and down at their moorings, ready to set sail—as Isaac did not.
Nineteenth-century Bostonians admired American Indians but preferred them as “figures in literary aspic.” Longfellow, a dedicated student of Indian languages, described the Sauk warriors who in 1837 visited Cambridge as “savage fellows … with naked shoulders and red blankets wrapped about their bodies; the rest all grease and Spanish brown and vermillion.” But Isaac, whom Eben dubbed the “last of his royal race,” was a sort of court jester to the Sylvester Manor family, the least threatening, the best loved of Indians.
The sloop that the Montaukett Indian Isaac Pharoah scratched in outline on a dormer board in the attic sails through storm clouds of whitewash. Approximately 60 to 70 feet long at the waterline and between 50 and 100 tons burden, such vessels were typical of small New England craft in the African trade. (Below: From Richard C. Youngken, African Americans in Newport, 1998)
Eben and Ethnology
Eben was also the benefactor of the anthropologist Frank Hamilton Cushing, arguably America’s first great modern ethnologist. Employed by the Smithsonian, Cushing began his groundbreaking fieldwork with the Zunis of New Mexico in 1879. Tribesmen initiated him into their most secret rituals and he adopted the Zuni lifestyle, calling himself “1st War Chief of Zuni, U.S. Asst. Ethnologist” and suiting up in native outfits, silver jewelry, and weapons. Eben, however, recognized Cushing’s genius despite his tendency to go earnestly overboard. An enthusiast himself, Eben enjoyed, understood, and endorsed the role of “participant observer” as a new and valuable anthropological methodology. On Shelter Island, Cushing whetted Horsford’s interest in archaeology with interpretive walks, spade in hand, along the North Peninsula, where they dug for the remains of the Manhansetts.
Eben was beset by the antiquarian’s desire to explore and then clearly define the past. This led him to confident overstatements about history—and to an error of a comic order. An honored guest at the manor in the 1870s was Ole Bull, an acclaimed Norwegian violinist and champion of his nation’s fight for independence from Sweden. To Yankee eyes, Bull was another Leif Eriksson, the first European to reach American shores, and by the 1870s, Eben and Bull busily set about rediscovering that medieval New World, Vinland. Over three centuries, Eben claimed, as many as ten thousand Norsemen had settled throughout Massachusetts and in coastal New Hampshire and Maine, building settlements, dams, canals, and piers. Although Eben enlisted supporters and issued publications substantiating a Norse city of Norumbega-on-the-Charles (the statue of Leif he erected on Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue still stands), his findings were quickly called into question. By the beginning of the twentieth century, his conclusions no longer had any credence. (Norumbega, a name that first showed up on maps of northern New England in the sixteenth century, may be a corruption of the Abnaki name for the area around Bangor, Maine. Like the name Atlantis, it sparkled with legends of vanished gold, crystal, and pearls and mysterious people and animals, so a good choice for Horsford’s Norse city in Massachusetts.)
It’s easy to laugh at Eben. But even though he was not the first to speculate on the Viking discovery of America, he initiated the popularization and “shovel testing” of the Norse sagas. The archaeological discovery in 1960 of Newfoundland’s L’Anse aux Meadows, settled around A.D. 985 by Vikings, has proved his underlying hypothesis correct. A pathfinder like the Senecas he had admired as a boy, Eben did not fear setting off on his own, seeking knowledge—proof—with robust Protestant self-assurance. In his own field, as a nutritional chemist, he became known as “the father of modern food technology.” He contributed to increased food safety, and processes he developed, such as that for condensed milk, made dietary staples more affordable and accessible. Could he have imagined that the nation’s industrialization he helped to develop would spawn today’s GM corn, feedlots, manure lagoons, and McDonald’s?
Evolution and Race
Classification was one of the main goals of nineteenth-century science, and the theory of evolution was in the forefront of that debate. Eben’s Cambridge was convulsed by the topic. Asa Gray, the great American botanist at Harvard, played a major role in bringing the theory of evolution to America. Charles Darwin, who had utilized Gray’s work on similarities between Japanese and American floras to support his thinking, wrote to Gray in 1857—before publishing The Origin of Species in 1859—laying out his reasoning on natural selection. Gray was convinced, albeit with reservations. He insisted that natural selection had to be directed by some supreme external force. A member, with Horsford, of the Shepar
d Church, he had thus found a way to reconcile Darwinism with Christianity. Gray himself arranged for American publication of The Origin of Species.
It’s surprising that Horsford’s papers give no evidence that he took part in the debate even though it so deeply engaged one of his closest colleagues, Louis Agassiz, as well as his friend Gray, Agassiz’s chief opponent on the subject of creation and evolution. Agassiz, a charismatic Swiss who had arrived like a thunderclap on the American educational scene in 1846, became Horsford’s trusted confrère. Sometimes they wrote to each other in German, Agassiz addressing Horsford as “Lieber Herr Kollege” (colleague) and signing his letters “Your friend.” In 1848, Agassiz was appointed founding professor of zoology and geology at the Lawrence Scientific School, where Horsford held the chemistry chair. Recognized as a brilliant zoologist and paleontologist, Agassiz held out for the standard religious view of creation. Following his teacher and mentor, the French paleontologist Georges Cuvier, he argued that God had fashioned each species in a single immutable form, without any heretical assistance from organic evolution. “Time,” he wrote, “does not alter organized beings.” In order to make sense of abundant fossil remains, Agassiz credited a series of Ice Ages with the repeated wipeout of the natural world, and God with its repeated creation.
The present-day scholar of American letters Louis Menand describes Agassiz as not only a thrilling scientific popularizer recognized nationwide, but also “personally thrilling … a large, handsome, self-assured man” whose “command of English was deliciously imperfect.” That the Saturday Club, the leading literary society of Cambridge was often called “Agassiz’s Club” measures the regard he enjoyed, given that members such as Emerson and Hawthorne were then at the height of their fame.
