HERITAGE: Restoration Drama

Party guests in their early-summer-evening’s finest—men in ties and jackets, women in colorful ensembles ranging from breezy to tailored—mill about the oak-paneled and stained-glass-windowed Great Hall, conversing in quiet tones, sipping champagne from fluted glasses, and sampling hors d’oeuvres offered by waiters moving adroitly about the room. The colossal table in the adjacent dining room, adorned by silver candelabra, is covered with plates of cocktail party fare: Brie with papaya chutney, goat cheese with Dalmatia fig preserves, zucchini squares, mounds of shelled shrimp. A pianist cajoles the keys of a baby grand piano into a soft background melody that, under other circumstances, might warrant more than a passing notice.

Tonight’s gathering at the Ventfort Hall Mansion and Gilded Age Museum in Lenox, Massachusetts, marks the official opening of its summer exhibition, Dreaming of the West: Reality and Romance, which features glass-plate photographs of pioneer life by Evelyn Cameron (1868–1928) and paintings of Native American culture by Alfred Vetromile (1917-2006). It’s also the tenth anniversary of Ventfort Hall’s public debut: in 2000, the museum opened its doors for the first time.

For the first hour of the reception, guests branch off in small groups to wander towards the Les Petites Dames de Mode exhibit—a highly captivating, four-years-running display of women’s fashions from 1855 to 1914, conceived by designer John Burbidge and modeled by graceful mannequins just twenty-nine-inches tall—in the first-floor Billiard Room, or upstairs to visit the Dreaming of the West exhibit.

Once the party is well under way, Jeffrey Folmer, with his gray ponytail tied neatly between his suit-coated shoulders, steps to the center of the hall. Raising a chime and giving it a delicate three-note ring, he smiles as the guests dutifully turn in his direction. As the executive director of Ventfort Hall, one of the Berkshire’s most remarkable nineteenth-century properties, Folmer welcomes them to the place he refers to as “half historic mansion, half performance venue.”

Many of the guests are already linked to Ventfort Hall—they’re members of the institution or they’ve made other financial contributions—and Folmer acknowledges their generosity. “Some of you have been with us since the very beginning,” he says, when “people came in for quick tours and said, ‘Let’s go back outside where it’s safe!’”

It’s astonishing, really, that people today are gathering in the grand interior of Ventfort Hall at all. In 1994, the one-hundred-and-one-year-old Jacobean Revival mansion was a mere vestige of its former opulent self. It was downright decrepit: the ceiling had caved in, the walls were crumbling, and piece upon piece of hand-carved wood and ornamental plaster littered the floors. Its future looked terribly bleak.

The house has had a series of owners since its debut in 1893, when George H. and Sarah Morgan—the sister of legendary financier J.P. Morgan—spent $900,000 of Sarah’s inheritance to build, according to a local newspaper, “the most extensive and costly summer residence in town.”

This was a particularly noteworthy distinction in late-nineteenth-century Lenox, which had become the playground of the American monied elite.

Designed by the Boston-based architectural firm Rotch & Tilden, the 28,000-square-foot, fifty-four-room mansion was outfitted with technological innovations not seen in even the most exclusive homes of the time: an elevator, burglar alarms, central heating, wiring for electricity, and ventilated bathrooms. A bowling alley was installed in the basement, beneath the long, backyard veranda. The mansion’s imposing brick exterior was softened by a series of stained-glass windows (some of which are marked with the Morgan family coat of arms). George H. Morgan, a horticultural enthusiast, transformed the twenty-six-acre property into a landscaped arboretum.

In 1896, tragedy struck: Sarah’s weak heart gave out on a trip to Europe. Grief-stricken, George returned alone. He remarried three years later—to another Sarah, in fact—but the richest chapter of his Ventfort Hall history seems to have been with his beloved first wife. 

When George died in 1911, his three children decided to sell the house. In the meantime, they rented it to Roscoe Bonsal, a railroad magnate, and his wife, Mary, who eventually bought the property in 1925 for $103,000. In 1945, Ventfort Hall was sold for an even lower price—$22,500—to a man who used it as a dormitory for Tanglewood students. One of the most extraordinary and vibrant owners of Ventfort Hall was Bruno Aron, who in the 1950s converted the mansion into an arts-oriented resort he called Festival House. Among his many guests, he welcomed African-Americans and Jews, who faced discrimination by other Berkshire innkeepers. Folmer has a photograph of folksinger Pete Seeger as a young man, around the time he was blacklisted during the McCarthy era, lounging by a Festival House fireplace with a racially mixed group of people. “Bruno Aron was ahead of his time,” Folmer says with admiration.

In the 1960s and ’70s, after it was sold by Aron, Ventfort Hall was the home of a ballet camp for girls. Later, it was used as a dormitory for Bible Speaks, a religious group formerly based in Lenox.

By then, the house had languished for decades in disrepair. In 1991, a local developer bought it, intending to raze the house in order to build a new nursing home on the site. Adding to the time-induced decay was damage inflicted by the developer himself, who soon realized that strong neighborhood opposition would derail his plan to build the nursing home. He tore out hand-carved woodwork and other valuable pieces, intending to sell them.

The condition of the house was dire. “The roof leaked so badly you could skate on that floor in the wintertime,” says Harold Brown, a Ventfort Hall tour guide, as he points to the dining room. Brown, along with his wife, Lois, works as a volunteer; he’s well-versed not only in the mansion’s history, but also in the dramatically disparate states of the mansion in the early 1990s and now. There were “gaping holes” in the plaster in the drawing room, he says, and many other rooms in the three-story home were completely destroyed.

“When I first came [to Ventfort Hall], I had to step over pieces all over the place,” Lois Brown says.
The nursing home debacle had caught the attention of Tjasa Sprague, a longtime Lenox resident with a penchant for preservation—and a proven track record of saving old properties.

 “I guess I have a weakness for old houses, which might be genetic,” Sprague says. When she was thirteen, her Slovenian family moved from Milan, Italy (to where they’d fled during World War II), to a house in Lenox that was designed by architect Charles Follen McKim before he founded the famed architectural firm McKim, Mead, & White.

In the late 1970s, Sprague had galvanized fellow members of the Lenox Club, a private society housed in a building dating to the mid-nineteenth century, to upgrade the ailing property in a strategic, systematic way. At the Lenox Club, Sprague joined forces with Marcia Brown, another Lenox resident with a keen interest in historic properties, who was also concerned about Ventfort Hall. In 1993, Brown managed to get the former Morgan property listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

“She was the person who knew the government and Massachusetts Historic [Commission],” Sprague says. “I’m just more of a common-sense person, [focused on] how to get the job done.”

Getting the job done at Ventfort Hall became Sprague’s primary mission. In 1994, along with Brown and a few others, including Sprague’s father, Milos Krofta, Sprague formed the Ventfort Hall Association (VHA), a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the former Morgan estate. By securing private donations and a loan from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the VHA was able to purchase the property in 1997 for $500,000.

Buying the property was only the first step; the restoration itself was much more daunting. “I don’t think anyone realized how many bad secrets were in the walls,” Sprague says. “Everything was totally compromised, structurally.”

An unexpected boost came in the form of Lasse Hallström, who was directing the movie The Cider House Rules, based on a novel by John Irving. In 1998, Hallström and Irving showed up at the Lenox Town Hall to ask if there were any old mansions nearby that might be used as the orphanage for the film. Ventfort Hall seemed a logical choice.

“They came out of the blue,” Sprague recalls. “We were in the right place at the right time.”
“Miramax Films … infused some badly needed cash and wonderfully welcome publicity by filming here,” Folmer explains. The company made some cursory repairs to the property, including the veranda, the Great Hall, and a stained-glass window. “I like to tell kids that Spider-Man was here,” Folmer adds, referring to Tobey Maguire, who also starred in The Cider House Rules.

Over the last thirteen years, the VHA has spent about $4.5 million on the restoration. Members acknowledge there’s still a long way to go, but progress has been remarkable: almost the entire first floor, and much of the second, has been fully restored. In addition to architects and general contractors, the project has involved top-shelf craftsmen like Michael Costerisan, who specializes in woodworking, and Jeffrey Gulick, whose expertise is in plaster and masonry.

Though private individuals aren’t anteing up today the same way they did during the dot-com boom of the mid-1990s, the VHA has been creative in finding new sources of funding to augment donor contributions. It has received a number of grants and loans and now has a steady income stream from tours, programming, and rentals. 

When Folmer settled in as executive director four years ago, he was impressed by the programming that was already taking place and embraced opportunities to broaden it. He promptly changed the name from Ventfort Hall: The Museum of the Gilded Age to Ventfort Hall Mansion and Gilded Age Museum. “We’re not just a museum,” he explains.

And Ventfort Hall today is indeed pulsating with life. Besides showcasing numerous exhibits, it runs a summer program for children, hosts year-round concerts, lectures, Victorian teas, and other special events, and is the venue for annual plays.

For nine summers running, the mansion’s Great Hall has been transformed into a stage for fresh and often provocative plays that draw scores of theater-goers to each performance. This year’s play, Revels and Revelations, written and directed by Juliane Hiam and produced in cooperation with Shakespeare & Company, delves into the story of a real-life Gilded-Age librarian named Belle da Costa Greene, who ran the Morgan Library for forty-three years, harboring a few personal secrets throughout the decades. The play runs through September 5 and, like most of Ventfort Hall’s summer plays, will return for a short run over the December holidays. On Saturday, October 9, Ventfort Hall will host a family-friendly Medieval Faire.

While Folmer focuses on programming, others concentrate on steadily improving the property. Kristine Sprague, an architect who is also Tjasa’s daughter-in-law, has served as president of the VHA since 2005. “My primary interest and goal … has been the restoration work,” Kristine says. From her professional standpoint, she sees the Ventfort Hall mansion as “one of the most elaborate in the Berkshires” in terms of its architectural detail. “The plaster ceilings are really over the top,” she adds.

But the museum itself has a broader mission. “What we’re trying to do is educate people … about the grandeur of these places and their part in the historical fabric of the Gilded Age,” Kristine explains.

Folmer understands that many people view the Gilded Age—which he defines as the period between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the First World War—as a very complicated era in this country’s history.

“The Gilded Age represented a small percentage of people holding the majority of the wealth, while most people were quite poor,” he acknowledges. “Those people with great wealth did wonderful and beautiful things. They created these magnificent mansions and collected art, and preserved, hopefully for all time, pieces of art, humanity, and our history … while the rest of the people worked and toiled and suffered for very little money. The Gilded Age represents both the best of who we could be and the worst,” Folmer concludes. “We try to celebrate the good of the Gilded Age, and let people enjoy the beauty of a place like this.” [SEPTEMBER 2010]

Christine Hensel Triantos is a freelance writer with a longstanding affinity for historic houses. She lives with her family in Richmond, Mass.

AT VENTFORT HALL

Exhibits:
Les Petites Dames de Mode
Through Dec 31
Miniature mannequins depict women’s
fashion from 1855 to 1914

Dreaming of the West: Reality and Romance
Through January 15
Glass-plate photographs by Evelyn Cameron
and oil paintings by Alfred G. Vetromile

Lecture and Victorian tea:
Sept 1 at 4
Donna Lucey presents Photographing Montana
1894-1928: The Life Work of Evelyn Cameron

Weekend of the Gilded Age:
Sept 10 at 4
John Sprague and Frederick Dalzell discuss two
new biographies of inventor/engineer Frank Sprague

Sept 11 at 1:30
Tub Parade
Ice Cream Social
Gilded Age Gala to celebrate
Ventfort Hall’s tenth anniversary

Medieval Faire:
Oct 9 and 10

THE GOODS
Ventfort Hall Mansion and Gilded Age Museum
104 Walker St.
Lenox, Mass.
413.637.3206