Thanks to the lavish Chambers Street parties and the obvious joy that Hosack took in throwing them, he had earned an international reputation as a gracious host. Now he presided over an endless house party composed of an ever-changing array of guests both foreign and domestic. In September 1830 Philip Hone, a former mayor of New York who was Magdalena’s cousin, was “walking and riding over Dr. Hosack’s splendid grounds” during a stretch of lovely early autumn weather. He noted in his diary the arrival of Joel Poinsett, a diplomat who had recently served as President Adams’s minister to Mexico; Poinsett had brought the governor of Mexico with him to meet Hosack.* And in 1832, Washington Irving warmly accepted an invitation to Hyde Park, “of which I have heard the most delightful accounts as well as the hospitality of the owner.” When guests arrived by steamboat and disembarked at a wharf at the western edge of the estate, they often found Hosack himself waiting for them in his carriage. Parmentier believed in impressing visitors with the vastness of a property before they caught their first glimpse of the residence, so guests approached Hosack’s house via a winding carriage drive that Hosack’s friend Thacher found “truly enchanting.” The white mansion rising among the trees at the western edge of the lawn looked to Thacher like a “palace.”
View from across the Hudson to Hosack’s Hyde Park estate, sketched by his guest Thomas Kelah Wharton
Hosack finally had a grand country seat of his own, and he happily played the laird of the castle. He showed guests his art collection, among them some vases that he told Harriet Martineau had belonged to Louis XVI before being smuggled out of France during the Revolution. He also loved sharing books from his exceptional library. The library, more than eight hundred square feet, was ornamented with matching mantelpieces of black-veined marble perched above grates that funneled in heat from the basement coal furnace. Five windows illuminated the room during daylight hours. On the mahogany reading table in the middle of the room, candlesticks stood ready for the evenings. The table also held bronze inkstands and a convex reading lens on its own mahogany stand. One guest noted that the “carpet, rugs, sofa, chairs &c. are in accordance with the sumptuous style of the rest of the house.” The room was so gorgeous, in fact, he thought it would be hard to focus on reading there. Still, he couldn’t help gravitating toward the mahogany bookcases lining the walls of the library. They were filled with thousands of beautifully bound volumes, many inscribed to Hosack from their authors, including some from Sir Joseph Banks. In one bookcase, Hosack kept extra copies of the biography he had written of Clinton, together with the many other works he had authored.
Hosack was very proud of his library. He told more than one visitor that there were between four and five thousand volumes and that he had spent at least $20,000 assembling them over the decades. It was indeed a spectacular collection; some contemporaries thought it was probably the finest in the United States, especially in the fields of botany and medicine. When Andrew Jackson Downing wrote his friend John Torrey in July 1834 requesting a letter of introduction to Hosack, he explained that he was “anxious to get a moment’s peep at a book or two.” Yet for all Hosack’s pride in his art and his books, it was the landscape of Hyde Park that seemed to delight him most. He walked with his guests down to the Hudson and around a promontory he called Cape Horn, and then he took them to rest in a pretty pavilion near the water. It was in this pavilion that Hosack sat with Harriet Martineau one day and reminisced about his old friend DeWitt Clinton. At another point during her visit, Hosack told her about the summer day thirty years earlier when he had rowed to Weehawken with his friend Hamilton. Hosack had also recently served on a committee to erect an elegant sculpture of Hamilton in the rotunda of the new Merchants’ Exchange building in lower Manhattan.
Hosack banned the firing of guns anywhere near the house and gardens at Hyde Park so that the air would always be filled with birdsong. The whole estate was, as one visitor wrote after a summertime ramble, nothing short of “a terrestrial paradise.” The perceptive Martineau understood what this landscape meant to a man as passionate about nature as Hosack: “I felt that the possession of such a place ought to make a man devout, if any of the gifts of Providence can do so. To hold in one’s hand that which melts all strangers’ hearts is to be a steward in a very serious sense of the term.”
Hosack was now in his midsixties. He had spent forty years driven by an intense feeling of stewardship—of people, nature, New York, and the nation. When he had fallen in love with medicine as a teenager in the 1780s and pushed himself so intensely in his studies, it was to become a capable steward of his fellow citizens’ health. When he had created the Elgin Botanic Garden and then labored lovingly over it year after year, it was because he saw himself as a steward of a parcel of land whose cultivation would save lives and bring new foods to farmers and city dwellers alike. When he had devoted his time and expertise to Columbia College, the New-York Hospital, the Lying-In Hospital, the quarantine hospital at Bellevue, the College of Physicians and Surgeons, the almshouse, the New-York Historical Society, the Academy of Fine Arts, and the New-York Horticultural Society—in all these ways and places, he was trying to steward his young nation and especially his city toward a future securely anchored in the kind of charitable and cultural institutions that would keep its residents healthy, thriving, and as well educated as Europeans. It was an exhausting, vital struggle to create and sustain these institutions.
At Hyde Park, though, Hosack was free to make his own world. He faced no legislative committees, no sneering stockjobbers, no stingy trustees. He liked to stroll down the gravel path that led south from the mansion between beautifully planted borders. Right next to the path, on each side, Parmentier had placed small herbaceous plants. Then he had angled the profile of the border upward with low shrubbery planted just outside the smaller plants, and finally he had culminated the whole design in tall shrubbery and small trees. When Hosack reached the end of this path, he entered a garden. He was surrounded on all sides by flowers, flowering shrubs, and flowering trees. At the heart of this garden stood a tall greenhouse flanked by two smaller hothouses.
Hosack was creating his own new Elgin. The complete façade of his conservatory was about one hundred ten feet long, and its design was strikingly similar to the one he had built on the Middle Road twenty-five years earlier. Hosack took his friend Thacher on a tour of the conservatory in 1830, only a year and a half after purchasing the estate. He had already managed to fill it with plants from around the world—magnolias, bird-of-paradise flowers, acacias, an eight-foot-tall India rubber tree, and pineapples that Hosack served his guests for dessert. Hosack soon added a fringe tree, Mexican tiger flowers, lemon trees heavy with fruit, and “a thousand other beauties.” Harriet Martineau thought the conservatory was “remarkable for America,” while when Downing later visited he found “a handsome and well filled range of hothouses” and got to sample a tropical fruit called cattley guava. Hosack’s new Elgin would be incomplete without medicinal species, of course, and there were many of these among the plants he was collecting in his conservatory. He was also working on plans for dedicated medicinal beds outdoors, according to his head gardener, Edward Sayers, who later recalled that when Hosack tended to the medical complaints of local villagers, he often advised them to “apply simples and herb tea, such as wormwood, horehound, &c.”† Sometimes the villagers also picked his exotic specimens as if they were wildflowers. When Hosack saw his plants in their gardens, he asked for them back, and they were returned politely.
At Elgin, Hosack had had fewer than twenty acres to farm. Now he had five hundred. He loved driving guests to see his agricultural operations, which lay on the opposite side of the Albany Post Road from the mansion and the conservatory. Anyone who had ever visited Elgin and now toured Hosack’s Hyde Park farm could see that he had outdone himself. By the autumn of 1830, he already had hundreds of acres of grasses and grains under cultivation. He had also ordered his gardeners to plant a kitchen garden filled with every
kind of vegetable that would grow locally. A visitor who took a summertime tour of Hosack’s farm saw carts piled high with ripe watermelons, while still another enjoyed the fresh citron melons served for dessert at the mansion. Hosack was so proud of his kitchen garden that he sometimes took specimens to the city and presented them to the horticultural society.
One secret to his excellent produce was in the adjacent barnyard, where his men had installed a manure pit forty feet in diameter, with drains that captured the liquid runoff and channeled it into the kitchen garden. Here, among stables, barns, pens, and sheds, was the beating heart of Hosack’s farm. Hogs lived in pens separated by breed (with a “cooking apparatus” located nearby), while Hosack’s six hundred or so sheep—Merino and three other kinds—had a yard of their own between the barn and the kitchen garden. Hosack showed Harriet Martineau his flock of poultry—“a congregation of fowls [that] exceeded in number and bustle any that I had ever seen”—and his herd of cows, whose milk went to a dairy located in the cellar of the old farmhouse. When Thacher toured this dairy, he was struck by two novel sights: windows covered with wires that kept out the flies, and a dog running on a flat wheel attached to the butter churn, evidently trained to anticipate a reward of butter.
Hosack seemed captivated by every aspect of farming and country living. One of his guests “found the Doctor sagacious about long horns and short legs in a degree which impressed me with a due consciousness of my ignorance.” Hosack made sure that the stream running through the farm was dammed in several places and that the resulting ponds were stocked with pickerel and trout. Hosack had a cider house ready that could hold one hundred barrels, and Jacob Harvey noted that “my father-in-law is very anxious to excel in fruits at Hyde Park.” Hosack also began keeping bees. According to Thacher, Mitchill had given Hosack a colony of stingless bees from Mexico, and Hosack had let them loose in his greenhouse so they wouldn’t die of cold. He wanted to raise native bees, as well, so Thacher—an expert beekeeper—designed Hosack a thirty-foot apiary containing forty hives, each of which was to be fitted with glass-fronted drawers that could be pulled out from behind to remove the honey. Several years after Thacher’s visit, however, Hosack confessed to him that “my bees have not succeeded,” because neither “my farmer nor his wife appear to understand the subject—they require another lesson from you.”
Over and over in his life, Hosack had approached all the failures and setbacks as so many opportunities for self-improvement and renewed optimism. Now his enormous wealth and his complete control over the Hyde Park estate had removed all constraints. Thacher was amazed at how completely Hosack threw himself into his new projects each day, rising early and leaving the house for whatever spot on the estate his attention was most urgently needed.
Hosack told another of his guests, the artist Thomas Kelah Wharton, that he was writing a book about his improvements at Hyde Park, and he asked whether he could include Wharton’s beautiful sketches of the estate as illustrations. Wharton was delighted at the proposal and insisted he didn’t want any payment, but while he was out of the room fetching his latest picture, Hosack wrote out a large check from his Bank of New York account and pressed it on him when he returned. Hosack had developed a keen interest in Wharton’s artistic future, and one evening they sat talking for a long time on the piazza as the Hudson faded into the gathering dusk. All around them lay the evidence of Hosack’s undimmed interest in the natural world. Forty years earlier, in the eighteenth century, with the help of Curtis, Smith, and Banks, he had begun his journey with a magnifying glass in one hand and a walking stick in the other, straining to discern the plant structures that would teach him how to organize his collections and his mind. He had never stopped trying to catalogue the natural world in this way. But now, as he sat on his Hyde Park piazza with the fireflies sparkling against the dark trees below, his views of nature had been enriched by the romantic nineteenth-century visions of artists like Cole, Durand, and Parmentier, who labored to reveal nature’s sublime, soul-stirring beauty.
In 1804, when Hosack had sent a sample of the young John Eddy’s herbarium work to the botanist Martin Vahl in Denmark, he had also confided that “in a few years I hope to be enabled to withdraw from the labour of the Profession and to fix my residence in the country in the neighborhood of this city.” In 1834, Hosack finally retired from his New York medical practice and began living on his estate all year.
It was around this time that John Francis began work on an article about Hosack for an encyclopedia of notable Americans. When he had completed a draft, he sent it to Hosack at Hyde Park for his corrections. Upon Hosack’s retirement, some of his friends had tried to persuade him to run for public office. Hosack had declined with an eloquent reflection on the great passions of his life, which Francis quoted:
If a party could be formed favorable to the interests of education, of agriculture, and the commercial character of our state; to the development of its natural resources and promotive of internal improvements; to such a party I could not hesitate to avow my allegiance, and to devote the best exertions of which I am capable to advance the interests of my native state and country: but under the existing dissentions, I must decline all connexion with our political institutions, and devote myself to the cultivation of the vine and the fig-tree, as more conducive to my own happiness and that of my family.
The “vine and the fig-tree” was a familiar Old Testament phrase, one that George Washington had famously used in a letter he wrote to Lafayette in 1784 describing how happy he was to return to Mount Vernon after the Revolutionary War. Hosack undoubtedly knew Washington’s letter; it had been published in a number of local papers not long before Hosack wrote his own statement.
Washington had had his Mount Vernon, Jefferson his Monticello, Hamilton his Grange. Hosack now had his Hyde Park.
* Poinsett was also an amateur botanist, and a striking flower he found growing in Mexico still bears his name: Poinsettia.
† In 2015, the Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded in part to the Chinese researcher Tu Youyou for her discovery that an active compound in sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua) was highly potent against the malaria parasite.
Chapter 17
“LIKE A ROMANCE”
IN THE AUTUMN OF 1835, HOSACK PRESENTED EACH OF HIS CHILDREN with a ring containing a lock of his hair, a common memento of a deceased loved one. Hosack was certain he would die soon.
It was around this time that Hosack took his oldest son, Alexander, aside for a private conversation. Alexander was now thirty years old and practicing medicine in New York. Hosack told Alexander that he expected to suffer a stroke before long and that he was trying to learn to write with his left hand, so he would still be able to communicate with his family if his right side became paralyzed. As Alexander watched, his father tried writing something and showed him the results. Hosack was as fascinated as ever by the afflictions of the human body, but the conversation made Alexander uncomfortable and he changed the subject. Hosack was as healthy as Alexander had ever seen him.
Not long after this talk, Magdalena’s youngest daughter, who was seventeen, married a scion of the wealthy Schermerhorn family. The wedding was held on December 9 at the Hosacks’ townhouse on Chambers Street, with an Episcopal minister from the Hyde Park village church performing the service. At the wedding supper afterward, one end of the table was laden with “superb” fruits and vegetables Hosack had grown in the Hyde Park greenhouse, as Magdalena’s cousin Philip Hone reported in his diary. One week later, on December 16, Hosack and Magdalena hosted a second party, this time so that Magdalena’s daughter could officially receive her family and friends as Mrs. Peter Augustus Schermerhorn. The thermometer had been below zero for days, and Hone and the other guests braved frigid winds as they made their way to the Hosacks’ townhouse for the celebration.
Later that same night, as Hone sat at home in his library writing, the city’s bells begin to peal an alarm—fire. He rushed outside and joined a stream o
f people surging toward the southernmost tip of the island, where he could see flames exploding into the sky “like flashes of lightning.” Hosack also raced to the scene, prepared to offer medical assistance. The blaze had broken out at a warehouse near the docks, and now the whipping wind was spreading it rapidly to neighboring structures. The city’s volunteer firemen were powerless to stop it, because the water had frozen in the wells and pipes. As the flames ripped through the buildings, people began dragging what goods they could out of the warehouses and shops, but many of these piles caught fire, too. Even the East River was aflame with burning turpentine slicks.
In New Jersey and Connecticut, people saw the red sky and knew that disaster had befallen New York. Documents from the businesses of lower Manhattan blew out over Long Island. A resident of Flatbush, more than five miles from Manhattan, later reported finding an insurance claim in his garden. By the end of the night, more than six hundred buildings had been destroyed, and virtually all of Manhattan’s financial and commercial district was in ruins. The statue of Alexander Hamilton that Hosack and others had commissioned for the rotunda of the Merchants’ Exchange now lay shattered under a pile of marble, just a few blocks south of Hamilton’s tomb in the Trinity Church graveyard.
As dawn broke over the city on December 17, soot-covered firemen, nearly asleep on their feet, staggered home. Some of them were wrapped against the cold in fine imported blankets once destined for tranquil nights in wealthy homes. One company of firemen had chanced upon a cache of artificial flowers, and they trudged through the charred ruins wearing bright blooms in their caps.
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