Ventfort Hall c 1893 Lenox MA Tour this Symbol of Great Power Wealth History Bites New England

Located in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts is the Gilded Age Mansion, Fenford Hall. This Jacobean revival style mansion was built in 1893 for Sarah Spencer Morgan, the sister of J.P. Morgan of New York. Sarah's husband was George Hale Morgan, who was also her seventh cousin. The house, designed by Boston architects Roche and Tilden, was originally set within a large landscaped garden of 26 acres and contained 54 rooms, 15 of which were master bedrooms. The house included 17 fireplaces, both gas and electric fixtures, an elevator, and a burglar alarm system. Fenford Hall was one of the approximately 75 so-called cottages built in Lenox during the late 19th century, when the village became a popular Gilded Age resort. Beginning in the 1870s, the Gilded Age was a period of significant industrialization and economic growth, but also of dramatic wealth inequality, political corruption, and corporate dominance. It would be followed by the progressive era reforms of the early 20th century. In 1997, the Fenford Hall Association purchased the property for $500,000, and since that time has spent more than six million dollars on restoration. The association notes that complete restoration will cost at least another eight million. The entryway in the Great Hall leads to the Porte Cocher, meaning coach door in French, which is a wide covered passageway allowing a coach or motor car to unload passengers in a sheltered area before entering the residence. In the Gilded Age, the Great Hall would be used as the main ballroom. The orchestra would often play in the musician's gallery above the entryway. The curved windows and woodwork, notes the house museum, helped the music resonate throughout the entire Great Hall. The carved limestone fireplace is original, except for the two lions at the top, which have been replaced. Prior to the restoration work of the late 1990s, the Great Hall's fireplace lions were missing. Located adjacent to the Great Hall, original pictures of the library reveal its mahogany paneling, grand architecture, and a mix of informal furnishings, showing this to be a summer house. However, in 1991, a developer purchased the then empty house with the intention of demolishing it and building a nursing home in its place. It was during this time that almost all of the woodwork in this room was stripped from the walls. The elaborate plaster ceiling, however, is original, one of the only ones in the house to remain almost perfectly intact. The bay window in the dining room features original Cuban mahogany, while the ceiling has been restored with Honduran mahogany. George and his wife Sarah used the money from her inheritance to build Venford Hall. According to Alexandra Mava of the New York Times, for three years George and Sarah opened Venford Hall with fanfare, throwing lavish parties well into the days of fall foliage. George lived on at Venford until 1911. The fireplace marble is from Vermont. All of the original Italian marble was stripped, with only one small sample piece left behind. Following the death of her father in 1890, Sarah inherited three million dollars, putting more than a third of it into the building of Venford Hall. Following her death in 1896 and her husband's departure from Venford in 1911, the house would experience many lives, some of which included ballet school, dormitory for the nearby music venue Tanglewood, and a hideaway for a fundamentalist Christian sect. Raised in Hartford, Connecticut, he was a prominent banker and philanthropist who built a transatlantic financial empire, establishing J.S. Morgan and Company in London. Junius was a mentor to his son, the famous financier J.P. Morgan, setting the foundation for the Morgan banking dominance. In 1890, he suffered a fatal fall from a horse-drawn carriage. Beginning in the 1890s, it was common practice every September for the women of Lenox to put on their best outfits, dress up their carriages in the prettiest flowers, and parade around town to show off a bit and celebrate the end of summer and welcome the coming fall. The middle child of Sarah Morgan, he was, in the words of the online American aristocracy, the black sheep of the family, and was described as the Morgan who went to Yale University without getting a degree, got engaged without getting married, and worked at his uncle's banking house without becoming a businessman. George's family decided to send him on a world tour in the hope that he would return to America and want to settle down. In 1901, George met a young Yuki Kato during a visit to a geisha house. Three years later, they were married in Yokohama, Japan. While Yuki's family was in attendance, George's was not. George and Yuki traveled, living in Paris and Japan. George died in Sevilla, Spain in 1915. Yuki returned to Japan in 1938, adopted the Catholic faith, and passed away in her native country in 1963. It also features a yellow sienna marble fireplace. The original pieces of the fireplace were put back together. Two pieces of imported Italian Renaissance carvings are set into the massive doorway, as are the two twisted wood columns in the fireplace. Originally, a large billiard table would have sat in the middle of this room. In the Gilded Age, this is where the men would retreat at the end of the night to relax, smoke cigars, and socialize. This was the home on the site currently occupied by Venford Hall, called Vent Fort, meaning strong wind. The home was owned by Elizabeth and Owen Haggerty, who had two daughters, Annie and Clements. Annie met Bostonian Robert Gould Shaw at a pre-opera dinner party at his sister's house in New York City. Shaw was the colonel in charge of leading the Massachusetts 54th Regiment, which consisted of 1,007 black soldiers and 37 white officers, making it the second all-black regiment of the Union Army during the Civil War, and the first in Massachusetts. On May 2, 1863, Annie Haggerty married Shaw. While the wedding took place in New York, the newlyweds spent a four-day honeymoon in Lenox at the Haggerty's Vent Fort. Less than three months later, on July 18, Robert Gould Shaw was killed in the Second Battle of Fort Wagner in South Carolina, alongside many members of his regiment. He was 26 years of age. Annie was widowed at age 28. She never remarried and spent many years after the war living abroad with her parents. When the Morgan family purchased this property, they moved the original Vent Fort across the street and renamed it Bel-Air. Annie rented Bel-Air, which was originally her childhood home, for her last Lenox summer in 1906. Bel-Air was lost in a fire in 1965. This bedroom, the house museum notes, has been designed to look the most like it would have in the Gilded Age, compared to other rooms in the house. While no original furniture or photos remain of the his and her master bedroom suites, the Vent Fort Association does have a copy of two family inventories, and has used these as the inspiration for how Sarah Morgan's room is displayed. Set designer Carl Sprague, who has made sets for period movies, designed Sarah's bedroom in 2011, using the family inventory as a guide. This is one of the few photographs taken on the second floor during the Morgan family's time at Vent Fort Hall. Originally George Hale Morgan's bedroom, this room is furnished with a dining room exhibit to display items from the Foster family collection. The Foster family was also in the Lenox area during the Gilded Age. The Fosters owned the estate known as Belle Fontaine, which is now used as Canyon Ranch, a spa and wellness resort. The photograph on the wall is one of the actual Belle Fontaine dining room, which was set for Mr. Foster's birthday party in the 1920s. The green room begins the transition from the Morgan side of the second floor to the guest side. All of the windows on the second floor are clear glass, while the majority of the windows downstairs are stained glass. A Lenox resident and prominent socialite, Robertson, according to the Berkshire Eagle, illuminated the South Berkshire social scene and once served as a secretary to a Romanian princess. She was a direct descendant of two members of George Washington's staff, Peter Stuyvesant and Nicholas Fish. The blue room would have been another guest room in the Morgan's day. The exhibit on pressed butterflies reflects the popular Victorian hobby as an effort to bring elements from nature inside, similar to the idea of glass domes with flowers and seashells. Most likely Junius, the son of Sarah and George Morgan, and his wife Josephine, used this room when visiting Venford Hall.