Webinar | Creating Winterthur: The Museum, Garden & Library with American Ancestors
I recently watched the webinar Creating Winterthur: The Museum, Garden & Library featuring speaker Jeff Groff, the retired estate historian at Winterthur, and hosted by American Ancestors. The talk covered the history of the du Pont family, their properties, and the journey of Winterthur from a private home to a modern museum. The talk was fast-paced, highly detailed, and illustrated with beautiful photographs of the house and grounds, along with family pictures and images of other properties associated with the du Pont family. This is a summary of my favorite parts.
The du Pont family dynasty began in the United States with Éleuthère Irénée du Pont, a gunpowder manufacturer who worked alongside the Brandywine River, designed a house called Eleutherian Mills (now part of Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, DE), and had a merino sheep named Don Pedro who was so famous that Thomas Jefferson sent du Pont a sympathy note when the ram died. His daughter Evelina Gabrielle DuPont Bidermann inherited the property along with her husband James Antoine Bidermann, a partner in the gunpowder business. When the couple went to visit their son in Paris, they also visited Winterthur, Switzerland where the Bidermann family was originally from. They built a Greek Revival house named after the village.
Meanwhile, Evelina’s younger brother Henry du Pont, also known as “Boss”, became president of the family gunpowder works from 1850 to 1889. His son, Henry Algernon du Pont, was a West Point graduate who won the Medal of Honor in the American Civil War, ran the du Pont Railroad Company, and served as a senator. He and his wife, Mary Pauline Foster DuPont, moved to Winterthur in 1874 and updated the building a decade later in 1884. Another expansion, led by architects Perot & Bissell, followed in 1903, although Mary died in 1902, a year before the French Renaissance style renovations began. Their son, Henry Francis du Pont or “HF”, took over the renovations at age 23, apparently sparking a lifelong love of architecture.
Several years later, HF and his wife Ruth Wales DuPont visited their friends William Seward Webb and Eliza Osgood “Lila” Vanderbilt Webb at their home of Shelburne Farms in Vermont to learn more about their gentleman farming operation. They also met with their son James Watson Webb II and his wife Electra Havemeyer Webb, who started a folk art collection. HF loved her pine dress with pink transferware ceramics so much that her children later gifted him the dresser in 1960. Meanwhile, Shelburne Farms became a museum for the family collections, but I have sadly yet to visit. I have been to another property on this trip, Beauport, the house in Gloucester, MA designed and owned by Henry Davis Sleeper, who became a friend and collaborator of the couple.
Meanwhile, HF’s older sister Louise Evelina du Pont had married Boston Brahman member Francis “Frank” Boardman Crownenshield in 1900. HF bought Eleutherian Mills from the DuPont Company, which had used it as a clubhouse for workers, and the siblings worked together to restore the house. Louise enjoyed early 19th century art and was a collector before her brother. She was even a founder of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which now how an award in her honor. One notable feature of the house was a “New England kitchen”, inspired by the kitchen at Beauport. When their father, Henry Algernon DuPont, died in 1926, HF inherited 2500 acres of land and a 50-room house, which apparently was not big enough for him. He hired young architect Albert Ely Ives to expand the house using structural steel and reinforced concrete, creating a modern building up to nine-stories tall.
HF enjoyed decorating Winterthur in antiques, which he purchased from dealers such as Israel Sack and J.A. Lloyd Hyde. He once “mined” a Georgian-style house called Port Royal for its elegant parlor and other rooms. Outside the building, Marian Coffin designed the landscape, including the Sunken Garden and Wild Garden. She had met HF while taking courses at the Bussey Institution at Harvard University (later Institute for Research in Experimental and Applied Botany). At its peak, the cutting garden alone had eleven full-time gardeners. Also on the property was a herd of Holstein Frisian dairy cows, obviously the best breed of cows one can get. (One line of my ancestors came to the United States in the 1890s after the Whitin family of Whitinsville purchased a herd of Frisian Holstein dairy cows and received a herdsman in the bargain, so I may be biased.) Winterthur even had its own train station, post office, and postal code
By the 1930s, HF considered how his collections and beautiful house could be best displayed. He hired architect Thomas Tileston Waterman to build a steel winding staircase and created displays inspired by Stamper-Blackwell House of Philadelphia, PA, a Georgian-style house whose decorative elements were harvested and displayed at Radnor Valley Farm, now Radnor Valley Country Club, originally owned by Franklin McFadden. DuPont bought these elements from widowed Mary Adele Lewis McFadden in 1938, about a year after her husband died. In 1948, he added facades from multiple historical 18th century buildings from Philadelphia to create Shop lang with historic storefronts like the Ping Pong Room, Dancing Room, and China Shop. In 1960, he harvested elements from Bannister House in Newport, RI. Tours of the house began as early as the 1940s, as he was inspired by sites like Mount Vernon. By the time of its opening as a museum in 1951, Winterthur was featured in many magazines and newspapers. DuPont had Thomas Waterman construct a new house to replace the poorly maintained Cottage on the property, and ended up with a fifty-room English Regency style manor. He could do nothing in a small way.
From then on, additions to Winterthur were frequent, including a degree-granting program in collaborating with the University of Delaware in 1952, the South Wing designed by wife-and-husband team Victorine du Pont Homsey and Samuel Eldon Homsey in 1960, The Pavilion created by the same team in 1961, their Copeland Lecture Hall in 1966, Crowninshield Research Building by Shepley, Bulfinch, Richardson, & Abbott in 1969, an additional program with the University of Delaware in 1974, Yuletide at Winterthur tours beginning in 1978, and The Galleries at Winterthur in 1992. The museum continues to go strong to this day and has been on my bucket list for quite some time. Most recently, digitizations of its collections are available online. I greatly enjoyed this fast-paced and informative talk. I look forward to exploring its archives and hope to visit the museum in the future.