The Richest Family In Massachusetts Built This Mansion. Then It Got Strange.. | Hawthorne Hill

At over 21,000 square feet, Hawthorne Hill was built by one of the richest families to ever call Massachusetts home. Hi everyone, Ken here. Hit that subscribe button, and let's explore this house. In 1862, Baird Thayer was born in Boston into one of the wealthiest families of 19th century New England. His grandfather, the Reverend Nathaniel Thayer, had served as the Unitarian minister of the First Church of Christ in Lancaster for nearly half a century. But it was Baird's father, Nathaniel Thayer Jr., who turned the family name into a byword The elder Nathaniel and his brother ran a Boston private banking house called Johnny Thayer and Brother, a firm that poured capital into the railroads then racing across the American West and Midwest, with Nathaniel serving as a director of several of those lines and steering the firm into manufacturing and other ventures that demanded large amounts of capital. By the time Nathaniel Jr. passed away in 1883, he was wrecking the richest man who had ever lived in Massachusetts up to that time, leaving an estate valued at more than $16 million, a staggering sum that included millions in stocks and bonds alone. Baird inherited both a share of that wealth and a lifelong freedom from the need to work. He never went into banking, he served merely as a trustee of the family estate and otherwise devoted himself to his pleasures. His obituary called him simply a millionaire sportsman, and he filled his days with hunting, foreign travel, and above all, horticulture, famously releasing thousands of ringneck pheasants across his George Hill land. He was also an accomplished yachtsman who in 1892 bought the steel-racing schooner Constellation from Edwin D. Morgan and later commissioned a yacht of his own called the Pilgrim. When his older brother inherited the original Thayer homestead in Lancaster after their father's death, Baird seized the opportunity to build something entirely his own, a modern estate crowning the heights of George Hill. For the design, he turned to Guy Lowell, one of the most fashionable Boston architects of the age. Lowell was the ideal choice, for he was not only an architect but also a trained landscape designer who had studied horticulture at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and architectural history and garden design in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts. Built between 1903 and 1904, the mansion rose as a stately exercise in the blending of colonial revival and Georgian revival taste, a three-story block of warm red brick, formal and symmetrical, that looked as though it had been transported whole from an English country rather than raised on a Massachusetts hilltop. The façade is dignified and restrained, its long rows of mini-paned windows marching evenly across the brick, its roofline crisp, its whole composition designed to project the calm authority of old money rather than the flashy exuberance of the nouveau riche. Approaching the main entrance on the west side, a visitor passes through a splendid gated forecourt, its wrought iron fence and gates ornamented with delicate flowers and overflowing cornucopias, a graceful hint of the abundance that lay within and without. Yet for all its scale, Lowell organized the plan around a clear and gracious ceremonial core on the ground floor so that the grand public rooms flowed logically off a central hall rather than sprawling at random. That entrance hall is one of the mansion's quiet marvels, paneled in warm sycamore and running through the depth of the house so that a guest arriving from one entrance could look clear through to the light spilling in from the other side. From this hall rises the Great Stair, a grand curved staircase with beautifully carved blusters that sweeps up toward the bedroom floors and gives the interior its single most theatrical gesture. To one side lay the formal dining room, a dignified chamber richly finished in oak paneling and clearly built for the kind of large, ceremonious entertaining a thayer was expected to host. On the south side of the house sat the library, arguably the most beloved room of all, lined in rich walnut paneling and worn by a marble fireplace carved with a scene from one of Aesop's fables, The Fox and the Stork, a witty and literate flourish typical of the care lavished on the place. The grounds were treated with as much seriousness as the house. Lau placed the mansion and its gardens with the help of the Sargent family, drawing on the horticultural expertise for which that family was famous, and over the following years the landscape was refined and elaborated by the noted Boston firm of Liddell and Brown. It was the partner Herbert Brown who designed the formal Italian gardens that became one of Hawthorne Hill's greatest glories. Set apart from the mansion stood the estate's carriage house, a handsome structure in the arts and crafts style that served as the stable and coach house for a country gentleman who bred and raised horses and kept prize-winning bulldogs, terriers, and deer hounds. That outbuilding was substantial enough to stand as a considerable property in its own right, sitting on its own five acres, and in modern times it has even been offered for sale on its own for just under half a million dollars, apart from the great house it once served. Thayer Thayer did not enjoy his creation for long. He passed suddenly in 1916 of heart disease at the age of 54. His widow, Ruth Simpkins Thayer, whom he had married in 1896 and with whom he had had four children, outlived him by a quarter century, passing in 1941. The mansion remained in Thayer hands until around the time of the Second World War, and But from there, it began one of the most colorful second lives of any American country house. In 1941, the estate was sold out of the family to a Greek Orthodox seminary, and for a time, it even served as a school for the blind. It then served as a Roman Catholic retreat house for a few decades. Then in 1986, the property took its most exotic turn of all, when it became the Mayarashi Ayurveda Health Center, a holistic wellness retreat associated with the celebrated figure Dr. Deepak Chopra. During those years, the old Thayer rooms are said to have sheltered a remarkable roster of famous guests seeking rest and rejuvenation, with names such as Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Jackson, George Harrison, and Barbara Streisand attending wellness sessions. The health center closed its doors in 2012, and the mansion, still magnificent but weary, drifted onto the real estate market, where it lingered for years and passed through a long descent of asking prices, from more than $5 million, down through the threes, and finally to $2.5 million, its sheer size daunting every would-be buyer who came to look. In the meantime, its cinematic good looks found a new audience. In the autumn of 2018, it served as a filming location for Greta Gerwig's acclaimed 2019 adaptation of Little Women, standing in for the interiors of the wealthy Lawrence household while a Concord house supplied the exteriors. And the Walnut Library, with its Aesop fireplace, even flickers briefly across the screen in a scene shared by Timothee Chalamet and Laura Dern. A few years later, the estate appeared again on the screen as a location for the 2021 revival series Dexter, where it played a wealthy character's mansion. At the very end of 2021, the house finally found new owners, selling for around $2 million. Today, Hawthorne Hill is once again a private home, actively being restored, tented, and loved rather than institutionalized, its future brighter than it has been in generations. And with that, I'll turn it over to you. Let me know your thoughts on Hawthorne Hill down below in the comment section, and while you're there, make sure you're subscribed so you never miss an exciting episode of This House.