A word of explanation: I was doing some work on my archives when I came across this piece and was stopped by the words "Donald Trump" in the first paragraph. I also saw the words "the new age of vulgarity." It seemed worth reading and even more when it turned out not to be about Donald Trump at all.This piece was written in 1989 after a trip to Vermont that Dan and I took that summer. It was our first time to visit Shelburne — the Museum and the Farms. We loved it and we've been back a couple of times, most recently in the summer of 2013 when all three of us went.
This column was published in The Daily News September 26, 1989 and the photos are from early August 2013. They seem to go well together though.
Nowadays, we read — usually with contempt and disgust — about the shenanigans of the very rich, the likes of Leona Helmsley and Donald Trump and Malcolm Forbes. It seems there's a new age of vulgarity and that people with vast wealth have lost all notions of graciousness.
But if the Helmsleys and Trumps and Forbes and their ilk are tasteless and ostentatious — and they are — they're certainly not the first generation of American big spenders.
In Vermont recently, we stayed in Shelburne, a small town in the northwest corner (near Burlington) set on the shores of Lake Champlain.
Shelburne is famous for two big attractions: the Shelburne Farms and the Shelburne Museum. Sounds pretty ordinary, doesn't it? But as examples of spending huge amounts of money and as tourist attractions, which is what they are now, I truly found each of them to be one of a kind.
The Farm is a 1,000 acre agricultural estate built in the 1880s by Dr. William Seward Webb and wife, Lila Vanderbilt Webb as their summer residence. (Both the Webb's and the Vanderbilt's money came from railroads.) Dr. Webb bought up many small Vermont farms to accumulate his land because he wanted to found a model farm and develop new methods of agriculture that would be of use to his neighbouring Vermonters.
His farm was fashioned by Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect who designed New York's Central Park, with every lane, every rise of land, every tree part of a careful plan.
The barns were designed by the best-known architects of the day, with special attention paid to the buildings that could be seen from the house so they would blend easily into the grounds and the foliage.
And the house. The house has 110 rooms, rolling landscaped gardens, a lily pond and a spectacular view of Lake Champlain and the Adirondack Mountains on the other side. It took one railway car of coal a day to heat.
The coach barn, which is the most attractive outbuilding since it's fairly near the house and Dr. Webb didn't want to offend his guests with an ugly structure, once housed 150 vehicles — every possible carriage, coach and sleigh that was available at the time.
Today, the farm is still working and is managed by a foundation. The house is an inn and restaurant, the rest of the estate is a tool for teaching and demonstrating the stewardship of agricultural and natural resources. The farm is famous for its cheese — it has a large mail-order business — and I can vouch for the excellence of that cheese.
Just up the road a piece is the Shelburne Museum, lifelong project of the Webbs' daughter-in-law, Electra Havemeyer Webb. Her project is described as “a collection of collections” and I can't do any better than that.
At the age of 18, Electra came home with her first cigar store Indian. Her mother said, “What in the world have you done?” She replied, “I've bought a work of art.” It was the beginning of a collecting mania that continued for decades until she finally needed a place to put all her stuff.
So she started to drag buildings from all over Vermont to house her various collections. Today, there are 40 buildings on 45 acres containing an enormous amount of Americana — not just cigar store Indians but carousel animals, dolls, antique furniture of all sorts and ages, quilts, tools, paintings, a complete old railway station and a private car of the sort that rich people used to travel in, a Lake Champlain paddle steamer (for which she built a series of canals and a railroad to move it overland from the Lake), the last covered bridge in Vermont and a lighthouse (both of which she had dismantled, moved and rebuilt, board by board). And I've only scratched the surface.
Even with all this, to me the most amazing thing is that after Electra died, her children wanted to make a monument to her. So they took apart her New York City Park Ave. apartment — walls, ceiling, floors, furnishings, everything — and moved the whole thing up to Vermont and into a house they'd built for this purpose. You can go in and take a tour and see how the really rich lived and you can also — right in this small, Vermont town — look at priceless paintings by Renoir, Rembrandt, Monet, Manet, Corot, Goya, Courbet, Degas and family friend Mary Cassatt.
These are fascinating experiences and there seems to be something more acceptable in the way the Webbs spent their money, compared to how the very rich today spend theirs.
But I suppose it also doesn't hurt to remember that while the Webbs were living their memorable lives, a great many people in the United States were living in abject poverty: immigrant women and children were virtually slaves in the garment districts, there were many homeless and unemployed, there were people working to reduce the 80-hour work week, and black Americans were just one generation away from official slavery.
I guess there were worse ways to spend a fortune than the Webbs chose, but surely some of it could also have been spent in better ways.
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