Jamestown and Newport, RI

After the wedding we moved to a campground in Jamestown, about 10 miles from where we stayed in Newport. The campground wasn’t easy to find. Fort Getty is a state campground that allows many of the sites to be rented for the entire summer. There are 20 of the 100 sites that are available for daily rentals, but there are no signs on any of the roads that indicate there is a campground in the area. The campground sits on a hill overlooking the ocean. A typical east coast campground, the sites are close together (all back ins) on grass with water and electricity, but no sewer. The facilities are a bit rustic, but you can’t beat the view. We can look right out our window at Narragansett Bay – what a treat. The above picture was taken on the road right in front of our trailer.

We spent the week getting the kids started in earnest on their BYU home school classes in the mornings, and visiting the Newport mansions in the afternoons. In the evenings we watched movies and documentaries. On Tuesday night we watched the movie “Dances with Wolves”, the Kevin Costner movie that won seven Oscars including “Best Picture” in 1990. Given our recent experiences with the badlands and the Lakota Sioux, we thought it would be a great way to pull it all together. It had been a long time since Teressa and I first watched the movie, but we remembered it better than most. The cinematography is beautiful, even though many of the scenes are gruesome (civil war and Indian battles). It is an emotional film, and the kids struggled to understand why there wasn’t a happy ending. It reminded me of when they realized there isn’t a Santa Claus – the end of the innocence. It is painful to make them understand that throughout history, humans (mostly men) have not always been kind to one another. Hopefully by looking at past mistakes, they can help avoid future ones.

The mansion tours of Newport were amazing. For those that are interested, here are the details: The best bargain we could find was a 5 mansion package essentially for less than the price of two. We started with “The Breakers”, the largest mansion in Newport (see attached photo). The Breakers was built back in the 1890s, by a grandson of Commodore Vanderbilt, the shipping and railroad tycoon from New York. The house’s 70 rooms cover 120,000 square feet. Many of the ceilings on the main floor are 30 to 40 feet high. All the original furniture is in place, and that is one of the most impressive things about the house – they are spectacular. The other is that the entire house was built in 2 years, although at one point there were over 2000 workers building it. Other interesting facts:

- All the bath tubs in the house are plumbed for both fresh water and sea water (they thought it was healthy to bath in salt water)
- The billiards room is completely made of marble (floor and ceiling tiles, slab walls and fireplace).
- Several of the rooms were originally built in Europe, disassembled, shipped to Newport, and reassembled there
- They have a tapestry hanging on the wall from the 1600s
- There was no electricity at the time in Newport, but the house had a generator and batteries, with gas backup piped into most of the lamps.
- There was no phone service in Newport either, but the house has a complete phone system so people could communicate from every room
- The staff slept in the 30 rooms on the 4th floor
- The kitchen has two dumbwaiters and French stoves (the French chefs were the highest paid staff members)
- Ice was cut from the ponds in the winter and put in an ice house for refrigeration
- Picture taking inside the mansion is not allowed for security reasons (given all the valuables)
- The house cost $4M to build, and another $4M to furnish. In today’s dollars that would be ~$300M.
- The Vanderbilt’s only used the house for six weeks in the summer. Their house in New York City was even larger!

After touring The Breakers we walked a portion of the Cliff Walk, a path that runs along the sea for 3.5 miles skirting many of the big mansions. The kids were hungry so we made a quick stop for ice cream before heading back to our campground. We grilled chicken and mixed it with pesto pasta for dinner. The sunset provided a spectacular end to the day (see attached photo).

The next day I got up early and took Rocky for a long walk in the morning down by the pier and around the bay at low tide. He likes to smell all the dead sea life that washes up on the shore from the previous day (crabs, clams, fish, birds, etc.) – a kind of beach potpourri. It’s not my idea of fragrant, but each to his own. Rocky’s leg is completely healed now, and he is eating like a horse. The rest of us aren’t doing too badly either! ;-)

Our first mansion of the second day was Rosecliff. The architect, Stanford White, modeled Rosecliff after the Grand Trianon, the garden retreat of French kings at Versailles. The house was built for Nevada silver heiress Theresa Fair Oelrichs, whose father struck it rich on the Comstock sliver load in Nevada. When the house was finished in 1902, it witnessed some of the most lavish parties in Newport. Cole Porter was a frequent guest, playing the piano and composing music in one of the upstairs bedrooms. Terracotta dominates the architecture, giving the house a light and open feel. A number of movies have been filmed at Rosecliff including The Great Gatsby, True Lies, and 27 Dresses.

From Rosecliff we proceeded to Marble House, another mansion funded by the Vanderbilt millions. The “summer cottage” was finished in 1892 for William K. Vanderbilt, another grandson of Commodore Vanderbilt. He gave it to his wife Alva on her 39th birthday. The house is amazing. Almost every surface is covered with marble. In fact, of the total $11M it took to build the house, $7M was spent on 500,000 cubic feet of marble! The dining room was absolutely stunning, a huge room completely encased in pink Numidian marble. Gold leaf accents almost every room in the house. Alva Vanderbilt turned out to be a huge champion for women’s rights. She was the first “high society” figure to divorce her husband, and hosted many rallies for women’s right to vote. Marble House was definitely the most ornate mansion we toured.

The last stop on our tour was Chateau-sur-Mer. Built 40 years before most of the other mansions in Newport, it is an excellent example of Victorian architecture. The house is dominated by rich woods and “Victorian clutter” – interesting artifacts left on almost every flat surface. It was one of the most stately mansions in Newport until the Vanderbilt houses arrived on the scene. We really enjoyed this peek into America’s Gilded Age, when rapid population growth and extravagant displays of wealth dominated the landscape.

We felt fortunate the kids didn’t implode through three successive mansion tours, so we decided to call it a day and headed back to the campground. We retired to a quiet evening in the RV on the shore of Narragansett Bay.