by Bibi Gaston
The other landscape at Grey Towers had little to do with Cornelia’s order or domesticity. One might say it was the Walden of Amos, Gifford, and Rosamond that had fortunately escaped the ancestors’ saw. Behind the Forester’s Cottage lay the forest. Deep in the forest and down moss-covered banks lay a beaded necklace of deep pools, waterfalls, and a swift watery chasm where Sawkill Creek narrowed to virtually nothing. This landscape wasn’t a secret, but it was natural, and the Pinchots preferred to keep it that way.
In the summers, Governor Gifford and Aunt Cornelia lived in the château, while Amos lived in the Forester’s Cottage. The Forester’s Cottage was hardly a cottage. It featured three floors, ten bedrooms, and spacious common rooms perfect for family activities. Rosamond and her brother, Gifford, grew up in the summers in the Forester’s Cottage with their father, Amos, and mother, Gertrude Minturn. That is, until their divorce in 1918, when Amos married Ruth Pickering, a reporter from Elmira, New York, with whom he had started a relationship while still married to Gertrude. With his new wife, Ruth, Amos had two little blond daughters, Mary and Tony, who kept the Forester’s Cottage buzzing.
With the demands of Amos’s second family for space, Rosamond and Little Billy were moved to the château where there were usually two overqualified but enthusiastic babysitters at the ready. Governor Gifford and Aunt Cornelia spent many summer nights reading to Little Billy Gaston on the generous couch at Grey Towers, teaching him about the sound of crickets and the light of fireflies, taking him for walks at twilight in the flower garden and tucking him into bed at night in one of the remarkable tower rooms with a turret.
Perched in one of the turret rooms, Little Billy was often alone, but his location had marked advantages. He could look out over his great-grandfather James Pinchot’s landscape of open meadows and big trees and Aunt Cornelia’s colorful additions to the property, and he was within earshot of the moat with its battalion of bullfrogs. He could peer through the leaves of the General Sherman Tree, a sugar maple, planted by William Tecumseh Sherman himself in 1888 as a gift to Little Billy’s great-grandparents, James and Mary Pinchot, and into the walled garden with its urns and roses. He could even spy on the adults as they carried on about politics beneath the trellis covered with vines at Cornelia’s fancy new dining table, a stone water table inspired by her trip to the South Seas.
Of course, Cornelia’s architect Bottomley would rather have seen a long, coffinlike water table like the Rennaissance-era one at the Villa Lante in Bagnaia, a garden that told the tale of humanity’s turbulent descent since the Golden Age, but Cornelia had in mind an egg-shaped basin below an odd-shaped trellis that didn’t tell the story of anything. In a compromise, it featured a cheery blue bottom the color of the South Seas and like the table at Lante, a ledge wide enough for a place setting. Meals were more than just meals at the water table. Meals were a form of entertainment, where plates heavy with food sailed back and forth across the water on wooden barges, docking, it was hoped, on the other side.
Little Billy’s mother didn’t really care to sit around under the vines with all those politicians who she said were generally boring and unattractive. Rosamond called the place “Cornelia’s Stonehenge,” but Little Billy heard Cornelia call it by another name; she called it her “Finger Bowl.” When Aunt Cornelia filled the pool with a school of Japanese goldfish, Little Billy screamed to Rosamond in delight, “Mummy, I see a funny fish with a funny face and go-fedders in back!” It didn’t matter what anyone called the Finger Bowl. When his whole family gathered under the vines, there was nothing more exciting in the whole wide world.
The Finger Bowl, Grey Towers, Courtesy of the USDA Forest Service
One Sunday, Cornelia rose early to put the cooks to work. Billy heard her whispering and sneaking about, sending people with lists and detailed instructions to gather equipment and supplies. She told him that there wasn’t to be any horsing around and that he was not to go into the kitchen. Billy knew something was up. From his turret room, he watched delivery trucks coming and going, and by noon the house started smelling pretty darned sweet and familiar, of vanilla and yeast, flower and sugar. By afternoon, Little Billy was giddy with excitement. As it was turning dark, Aunt Cornelia tiptoed over the Mosaic Terrace and summoned everyone from everywhere. Just in time, Little Billy shot down the stairs to watch her light her baked Alaska with its towering meringue top in the shape of a volcano, floating on its own little wooden barge. With a tender shove, Cornelia sent the barge sailing across the clear blue waters of the Finger Bowl. As the barge threatened to capsize, Cornelia made a last-minute intervention, inserting dry ice in the mouth of the crater so that it hissed and sputtered, coming to rest at the stone ledge. Everyone began singing. It wasn’t anyone’s birthday, and no one really knew what was being celebrated. But Little Billy didn’t care, he just squealed his approval.
Cornelia had had a remarkable childhood herself. She was born in 1881 in Newport, Rhode Island, to Lloyd Stephens Bryce, a wealthy journalist and politician, and Edith Cooper, the granddaughter of Peter Cooper, founder of the Cooper Union, a free school of engineering and the arts for exceptionally talented youth in New York City. Endowed with an adventurous spirit, she dispensed with debutante balls to take her own cross-country journey, as one observer noted, with neither pearls nor maids. After declaring that the “butterfly existence” prescribed by her parents was not for her, she said that she “marked down, pursued and captured one of the few really big men I have ever known—one who never turned his back but marched breast forward—and [will live] happily and gloriously ever after.” That breast-forward man was Gifford Pinchot.
On August 15, 1914, Cornelia Elizabeth Bryce married Gifford Pinchot. She was thirty-three and he was forty-nine. Gifford married late, but he hadn’t exactly been avoiding women. After the tragic loss of Laura Houghteling and any number of subsequent flirtations, including one with the landscape architect-to-be Beatrix Jones née Farrand, the magnetic and enterprising Gifford set his sights on a woman Theodore Roosevelt, who attended their wedding, characterized as having “the best political mind of any woman of his acquaintance.” Cornelia not only supported Gifford’s political career, she had her own as well. She was an outspoken supporter of women’s rights, educational opportunities, and protection for women and children in the workplace. She sought office in the U.S. House of Representatives three times and ran for governor but lost each election. She also encouraged women to drive and participate in politics, particularly when it came to voting for her husband.
As cautious and methodical at dating as he was at forestry and government service, Governor Gifford made sure he knew who he was marrying when he brought Cornelia down to Sawkill Creek to see if she was enough of an adventuress. She evidently passed the test and their son, Gifford, learned to fish on the Sawkill where James had taught Governor Gifford to fish. Amos, the governor’s brother, taught his son, Gifford, to fish the same creek. However, fishing wasn’t limited to the Giffords. Thanks to her father, Amos, Rosamond was as good at reading the water as any of them. Sometimes she’d thrill all the boys, her father and the governor included, by reaching down into the river’s potholes to pull up a trout. That was when Little Billy realized he wasn’t like most boys and his mother wasn’t like most mothers. She’d wander the woods, fishing and swimming, and sometimes she took him to see a little green ship that never moved, but survived in the middle of the pool below the falls. His mother called it the “Good Ship Rhododendron.” She told him stories about that ship and that was when he realized that he was the luckiest boy of all.
In June, the fields and forests of Pennsylvania warm to the point where its wildflowers fear nothing but the young and the young at heart. Given the conditions, the summer of 1931 looked to be a banner year for snipping. One night, Rosamond scooped up little Billy and took him out to the perennial border where together they snipped one of Cornelia’s lilies. That night, she pinned it carefully to the top of the page in her red leather diary.
As June wore on, the hot summer sun baked the fields. One day was just as lovely as the next. The wind blew through the trees, the river ran low, the sun shone down on Cornelia’s perennials, her fleet of gardeners stirred the vegetable beds, and Rosamond decided to take Little Billy for a walk. One of her favorite destinations was the reservoir, where she liked to collect fresh watercress for lunch. That day, Billy wore a pair of little green trunks and crept gingerly through the prickly underbrush and patches of blue myrtle in bloom. At the bottom of the hill, where the trees thinned out, they came across the old graveyard where the first-and second-generation of Pinchots lay. Stopping briefly to look at a towering stone obelisk carved with the name Cyrille Pinchot, Billy turned to ask his mother, “Was he a big man? He had a very big stone.”
Cyrille Pinchot was not just a big man, he was the kind of man Aunt Cornelia would have said was a “breast-forward” man like Gifford or a “top-grade” man like Stroyan. Cyrille Constantine Desire Pinchot and his wife, Maria, hailed from the French bourgeoisie. With his father, Constantine, Cyrille was forced to flee France under the Bourbons in 1816 when the family supported Napoleon’s ill-fated last gasp at Waterloo. Gathering a troop of soldiers, Cyrille was said to have arrived one day late and missed the battle. Fearing retribution, Constantine, Maria, and Cyrille escaped to England but not without first commandeering a gunboat to attempt a daring rescue of the emperor off the barren, windswept Isle of St. Helena in the southern Atlantic. Failing that, they made their way to America, where they established a successful dry-goods mercantile in New York City before moving to Milford, which already had an established colony of French immigrants.
In 1819, Constantine bought a store and a house at Milford’s main intersection and four hundred acres of farmland. Business thrived and he became the largest landowner in Pike County. Cyrille continued to amass not just land but forested lands from which he could harvest timber, rafting it down the Delaware River to ports such as Philadelphia, New Hope, and Trenton. His father died in 1826, and by 1860, Cyrille Constantine Desire Pinchot had ravaged large swaths of his father’s forest, leaving the landscape around Milford in shambles.
In 1832, Cyrille and his wife, Eliza Cross, gave birth to a son, James, who inherited the family’s zest for business while caring deeply for the arts, civic improvement, natural beauty, and in no small measure, the forest. James grew up fascinated by systems of French and German forestry in which trees were thought of as a crop. By implication, he understood that if trees could be sustained generation after generation, so could wealth. With his sociable nature, good looks, intelligence, and penchant for hard work, James reestablished the family’s dry-goods business in New York under the name Pinchot and Warren, which became renowned for its remarkable wallpaper. James quickly made a name for himself but worked so hard that in 1855 his father tried to convince him to return to Milford for a year to raise chickens. He rejected the idea, but then James was diagnosed in 1859 with strange hemorrhages in the lungs and was directed by his doctors to take a good sturdy horseback ride through the south to recover. Another of his restorative techniques was said to be dancing at New York’s gilded-age cotillions, where he met Mary Jane Eno, the beautiful, bold, and opinionated first daughter of Amos Richards Eno.
Like James Pinchot, Amos Eno was one of New York’s most successful dry-goods purveyors. However, Eno didn’t stop at wallpaper. He turned his success into a real estate empire. In 1855, Eno paid $170,000 for an assemblage of land around a peculiar triangle at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Broadway and Twenty-third streets, where he developed the Flatiron Building. In 1859, he built the Fifth Avenue Hotel, then known as Eno’s Folly. His daughter Mary Jane grew up watching her forebears perform acts of remarkable public service, not only contributing money and objects to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but gifting the Eno’s hometown, Simsbury, Connecticut, with a church, a library, and a way station for the town’s less fortunate. Included in any young woman’s cultured upbringing was a love of gardens and nature, so Mary spent countless summer hours at her childhood home in Simsbury rearranging and straightening the beds and realigning the broad paths of her family’s estate.
When James Pinchot and Mary Jane Eno married in 1864, Mary envisioned a fine future for her husband. Soon enough, the two became major philanthropists in New York City, supporting the arts with a particular interest in the work of landscape painters. Their first son, Gifford, was born in August 1865, named after the landscape painter Sanford Gifford, followed by a daughter, Antoinette, and a second son, Amos, born on a trip to Paris in 1872, named for his maternal grandfather Amos Eno. James and Mary exemplified lives of purpose, so naturally they developed a distinct plan for each of their children. Gifford was raised “to do something important.” Amos was assigned to tend to the family estate. Antoinette, known as Nettie, went to England to escape the long arm of her parents, marrying a British diplomat instead of becoming one herself.
Among his charitable endeavors, James hatched a scheme to dignify the dusty little crossroads in downtown Milford. Accepting the none-too-glamorous commission was his good friend Richard Morris Hunt, whom he met while chairing the committee to locate and design a base for the Statue of Liberty. The two men discovered a shared passion for all things French and Hunt soon recognized that Pinchot wasn’t feigning French, he was the real thing, or at least his father was. Hunt wasn’t feigning French, either; he had studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, won the Prix de Rome, and worked to restore the buildings around the Tuileries. With impeccable taste, talent, timing, and no reservations about spending other people’s money, Richard Morris Hunt was a man with no small mission.
James Pinchot’s plan for an improved Milford was just one part of his personal vision. He and Mary also wished to build a house that would recall his ancestors’ origins in the Picardy village of Breteuil Sur Noye, a medieval villlage the Pinchots left in a hurry before boarding their gunboat to retrieve the emperor at St. Helena. Located on the Noye River, Breteuil was a study in water, featuring waterfalls, mills, millraces, moats, rills, and great wheels. At Breteuil, generations of Frenchmen harvested grain and turned that grain into flour. While hatching plans for an American summer place, James Pinchot remembered his watery past in Picardy and Mary recalled her childhood summers spent rearranging the broad paths at her family’s estate in Simsbury, Connecticut.
Normally prone to grandeur, Hunt held back and brought the scale of a small French country estate to his design for Grey Towers. The journey began at an elegantly proportioned gatehouse sited off a quiet country road just minutes from Milford. There, a long, sinuous carriage road snaked between allées of poplars, mounds of turf, and an occasional hillock. Playing the proper games of site planning, Hunt first teased the visitor with a glimpse of the manse. He threaded the road around a clump of imported trees, sending the eye off its mark and into the forest. Denying the view, then giving it back, Hunt mimicked the journey of blood to the heart, a surge of openness followed by constriction. Before the final ascent, a huge walled garden was visible to the south. To the north, three monumental sixty-foot round towers anchored the château, all of grayish bluestone quarried from the land. Steeply pitched roofs crowned the building and its towers, the slate from Lafayette, New Jersey. The first impression was one of solidity. The French influence, indisputable. The visitor had left America and arrived at a small French château, but not just any medieval château. Those who knew their castles knew that Grey Towers was meant to evoke La Grange, the château of Lafayette. Upon completion of its forty-four rooms and twenty-three fireplaces, Catherine Hunt, the architect’s wife, toured the house and said that it “had a character about it quite unlike anything else in America.” And it was quite unlike anything in Richard Morris Hunt’s residential portfolio. While Pinchot spent $44,000 on construction, he spent nothing on Hunt’s design. Out of affection for James and Mary Pinchot, Hunt never charged his friend a single penny.
After completion of the châtea
u, a lifetime of landscape challenges remained at Grey Towers. Thanks to James Pinchot’s timbering ancestors, the site resembled a moonscape. Frederick Law Olmsted, also a friend of James Pinchot’s, was unavailable at the time, so, at forty-four years old, James decided on an early retirement and embarked on a massive reforestation program for his devastated land. The land had once been covered in a dense mix of oak, ash, hickory, hemlock, and white and yellow pine. So James planted hundreds of native trees, but also introduced his taste for the picturesque by importing specimen trees, shrubs, and vines. Meanwhile, Mary Pinchot, who refused to keep secret her taste for Simsbury over the Milford moonscape, pitched in to design a circuit of walking paths through the property. It was on those paths that the next generation of Pinchots, including Rosamond and Little Billy, would form their memories of the natural world.
Several years after James Pinchot died in 1908, Amos and Gifford divided up the property, with the château going to Gifford, the Forester’s Cottage going to Amos, and a line being drawn down the middle of the walled garden. But neither brother paid too much attention to the line. The brothers were each other’s most important allies. Power had descended to Gifford, but he shared his successes, and sometimes his failures, with Amos, “[He was] the man to whom I most naturally turned first…. He could not, of course, appear as my formal representative. Nevertheless, his advice and his help were invaluable…. He was indispensable, and was especially useful in getting the facts to the public.”
Gifford’s parents placed such hope in their firstborn son that Mary could barely hide her displeasure when Theodore Roosevelt failed to give Gifford appropriate credit for his work in conservation. No gentle amount of arm-twisting would get her point across, so she wrote TR that her son was the “soul and fount” of forestry. Indeed, Gifford had established forestry as a legitimate profession and served as the spokesperson for much of Roosevelt’s environmental legacy. Without too much ado, Roosevelt agreed with her assessment when he wrote in his autobiography, “Gifford Pinchot is the man to whom the nation owes most for what has been accomplished as regards to the preservation of the natural resources of our country.”