The Events of Thursday, October 28, 2010

          We awoke this morning--after the previous day and night being cloudy, foggy, and rainy--to a brilliantly blue sky. We ate breakfast and then headed out to the showers. Once we were all clean, we broke down camp and headed out of Millville Pond Campground to start our second day in Newport, Rhode Island.

          The first stop of the day was at the mansion called The Elms. After our tickets were checked, we received the player and headphones that would guide us through the tour of the mansion. Then, we stepped into the world of The Elms. The Elms was the summer “cottage” of Mr. and Mrs. Edward Julius Berwind. Mr. Berwind acquired his wealth from the coal industry. In 1898, the Berwinds hired Philadelphia architect Horace Trumbauer to design a house modeled after the mid-18th century French chateau d'Asnieres that is located outside of Paris. The mansion was completed in 1901 with the total cost adding up to about $1.4 million. After Mrs. Berwind’s death in 1922, Mr. Berwind invited his sister, Julia, to become his hostess at his New York and Newport houses. Mr. Berwind died 14 years later. Miss Julia continued to live at The Elms, living as she did in the early 1900s, almost as if she were in a glass bubble, until her death in 1961. The interiors and furnishings for The Elms were designed by Allard and Sons of Paris and were the setting for the Berwinds' collection of Renaissance ceramics, 18th century French and Venetian paintings, and Oriental jades giving the mansion an air of being almost an art museum.

          We started the tour of the house in the main entrance where elegant statues stood welcoming guests and tapestries and paintings filled the walls. The staircase was what Mom called a ‘backwards grand staircase.’ The stairs were on either side of the entrance doors, giving it a symmetrical look. They met at the landing and joined into one stairway leading to the second floor. We walked through the foreboding library, with heavy draperies and elaborate decorations. Then, we viewed the fresh and airy conservatory; a kind of indoor garden with numerous fountains, exotic plants and flowers in the arms of cream colored statues.

          After viewing the conservatory, we pushed the pause buttons on our interior tour and returned to the entrance hall to return our players. It was time for our “Behind the Scenes” tour. We met Daddy, who had gone to get our jackets and then went outside where our tour guide for the ‘Behind the Scenes’ tour was waiting for us. We were greeted by our guide, Raymond Roy, who gave us a quick overview of the history of the mansion and then told us about some of the details of the grounds. The name of the mansion was obvious back in the late 1800s, when elm trees populated the gardens and lawns. But after a destructive hurricane and a tree-killing disease that swept through Newport, all of the elm trees were wiped out. But there is no lack of trees on the grounds. Mostly all of the trees were imported from Europe and some are over a hundred years old. We entered the delivery driveway where groceries, ice, flowers, and other goods would have been brought. There was a circular structure with dense Wysteria leaves covering it. Mr. Berwind designed it this way so that the guests at his home, who might glance out a window on the east side of the house, would not see the “dirty” happenings, which might break them from the fantasy world of visiting a French chateau. This covering provided a shade with posts to hook up horses and led the deliveryman directly to the door of the basement. We walked through these doors and into a world that the owners of the house would never see and the only things that the servants of the house ever did see. Raymond Roy walked us through the cold kitchen, where salads and sandwiches were prepared. Then it was off to the coal cellar with its secret tunnel for delivering coal and three huge furnaces which used the latest technology of the day to deliver heat to the mansion all year long. Next was the laundry room, where they washed the sheets for the beds twice a day and the seven dresses that were essential for the social status of the lady of the mansion. Some of the linens, expensive European tablecloths, cost more than the highest paid servants made in a year. Then, we walked through the ice room, pastry chef’s kitchen, and main kitchen. After that, our tour guide took us up four flights of stairs, pausing briefly to view the butler’s pantry, and then up to the third floor to the servant’s quarters which was like a dormitory. We viewed the servants’ bedrooms and bathrooms (two for the ladies and one for the gentlemen) and then went out on the roof! We were dazzled by the spectacular view and took pictures to our heart’s content. That ended the ‘Behind the Scenes’ tour and after thanking Raymond Roy, we headed back to the main entrance for The Elms and went back to where we left off in our audio tour.

          We had left off in the conservatory, so we walked into the drawing room with French styled furniture and a hand-sewn elaborate rug. We viewed the upstairs bedrooms, bathrooms, and sitting rooms. We went down to the basement to return our audio tour players and then explored the grounds, before going back to the RV for a sandwich lunch and then on to Marble House to finish up our audio tour there. After we completed the Marble House tour, we drove to Chateau-sur-Mer, one of the earlier mansions in Newport. This mansion, completed in 1852, was built as an Italianate-style villa for China trade merchant William Shepard Wetmore and his family. Our tour guide, Michael William, gave us extreme detail on the materials used for the intricate decorations found throughout the house. Some favorites were a door built into a bookcase in the library to provide access to the gentlemen’s receiving room, peacock feathers in vases in nearly every room, the dining room table that expanded in both directions and the complex ornamentation at the base of the staircase. Unlike the other mansions we had toured, everything here was carved out of wood and all the fireplaces were adorned with colorful tiles. When the tour was complete, we toured the grounds and then drove out the entrance as the exit arch was too short and narrow for the RV.

          We headed out through the fog to the scenic Ocean Drive as dusk approached. Finding a spot along the shore to park, we parked Harvey and watched the sun set in the midst of the fog and clouds while we did some math work with Daddy. Soon it was dark and we could see a lighthouse flash in the distance and hear the bell of a bell buoy somewhere off the shore over the crashing of the waves. It was time to drive to a place to camp. Much to our surprise, our search for a Stop and Shop lead us to a Walmart. There had been no Walmarts listed in Newport. After a brief family shopping tour and receiving clearance from the manager, we ate our dinner of the remaining Hartley’s Original Pies (we had the beef and the rest of the chorizo) then settled down to sleep after an eventful, educational, and exhausting day.