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The Genius of a House: Grey Towers as Nineteenth-Century Stage for Twentieth-Century Conservationism

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Performing Dream Homes

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Abstract

Iris Smith Fischer’s essay analyzes the intersections between the performed categories of public/civic and private/domestic. Through her examination of Grey Towers, the home and estate in Milford, Pennsylvania, established by James and Mary Pinchot in 1886, Fischer demonstrates how houses perform shifting national identities. Grey Towers provided the Pinchots with a stage for both asserting their own familial identity and negotiating their family’s place within the nation’s complicated transition to an industrial culture. Here, the home became a stage that allowed for many different dreams, some connecting the family to an ahistorical past and others aspiring toward the future. Fischer also explores the Pinchots’ personal relationship with Edwin Booth and how it may have influenced their understanding of the links between behavior, character, and aesthetics, both inside and outside the home.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This article is based on research done at the Houghton Library, Harvard University; Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College; and Grey Towers National Historic Site, maintained and operated by the U.S.D.A. Forest Service. My thanks to Lori McKean, Rebecca Philpot, and other Grey Towers staff members, and independent scholar Mary Paterson. I am particularly grateful for the support of the University of Kansas (KU). A Humanities Research Fellowship from the Hall Center for the Humanities provided time and resources to write the manuscript from which this article has developed. Susan Craig of the KU Libraries assisted in accessing materials.

  2. 2.

    Grey Towers Historic Structure Report, FS-327 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, 1979), 15.

  3. 3.

    Ibid., 13.

  4. 4.

    Peter Cooper Pinchot, “Thoughts about Grey Towers,” 3 December 1993, unpub. ms., Grey Towers National Historic Site Archive, U.S.D.A. Forest Service, 6.

  5. 5.

    Sudhir Hazareesingh, The Legend of Napoleon (London: Granta Books, 2004), 151.

  6. 6.

    Ben Highmore, Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday (London: Routledge, 2011), 36, 34.

  7. 7.

    Bruce A. McConachie, Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre & Society, 1820–1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), 237.

  8. 8.

    “The Other Pinchots of Grey Towers,” brochure, Pinchot Institute for Conservation Studies (Washington, DC: U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, 1978), 4.

  9. 9.

    McConachie, 256.

  10. 10.

    Una Chaudhuri, Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 5.

  11. 11.

    Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 130.

  12. 12.

    My account of James Pinchot’s early life is adapted from Char Miller, Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2001).

  13. 13.

    Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 41.

  14. 14.

    Carol Severance, “The American Art Collection of James W. Pinchot (1831–1908),” unpub. ms., Grey Towers National Historic Site Archive, U.S.D.A. Forest Service, 6.

  15. 15.

    Ben Highmore, The Great Indoors: At Home in the Modern British House (London: Profile Books, 2014), 7.

  16. 16.

    Letter of 27 April 1886, quoted in Nancy Jean Carrs, Grey Towers 1884–1890: A Social, Architectural, and Decorative Arts History of James Wallace Pinchot’s Country House in Milford, Pennsylvania. Unpub. master’s thesis, Columbia University, 1981, 84.

  17. 17.

    Quoted in Carrs, 81.

  18. 18.

    Grey Towers, 13.

  19. 19.

    Quoted in Highmore, Ordinary Lives, 34.

  20. 20.

    Ibid., 35.

  21. 21.

    Quoted in Arnold Lewis, American Country Houses of the Gilded Age (New York: Dover, 1982), xiii (Revision of George William Sheldon’s Artistic Country-Seats: Types of Recent American Villa and Cottage Architecture with Instances of Country Club-Houses. New York: D. Appleton, 1886–1887).

  22. 22.

    Highmore, Great Indoors, 7.

  23. 23.

    Letter from Mary Eno Pinchot to James Wallace Pinchot, 16 January 1886, Pinchot family papers, Gifford Pinchot Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  24. 24.

    Carrs, 121.

  25. 25.

    Ibid., 125.

  26. 26.

    Papers of Charles S. Peirce. Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Folder R1562: 1–19. Folder numbers follow the index compiled by Richard S. Robin, Annotated Catalogue of the Papers of Charles S. Peirce. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1967.

  27. 27.

    Joseph Brent, Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 141–149.

  28. 28.

    Fiona Macintosh, “Introduction: The Performer in Performance,” Medea in Performance 1500–2000, ed. Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh, and Oliver Taplin (Oxford: Legenda, 2000), 15.

  29. 29.

    Ernest Legouvé, “Préface,” Médée, Théâtre complet: Comédies et drames, Vol. 3 (Paris: Ollendorf, 1890), 231–234.

  30. 30.

    Papers of the MacKaye Family, Papers of Steele MacKaye, Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, Box ML-5, Folder 136: 23.

  31. 31.

    Peirce Papers, RL 542.

  32. 32.

    Quoted in Elsie M. Wilbor, Delsarte Recitation Book and Directory (New York: Edgar S. Werner, 1890), xv.

  33. 33.

    Peirce Papers, RL 542.

  34. 34.

    Quoted in McConachie, 241.

  35. 35.

    Quoted in Charles H. Shattuck, The Hamlet of Edwin Booth (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1969), 60–61.

  36. 36.

    Shattuck, 26.

  37. 37.

    Alexandre Cabanel 1823–1889: La tradition du beau. Musée Fabré (Montpelier) exhibition catalogue (Paris: Somogy editions d’art, 2010), 373–374.

  38. 38.

    Peter Cooper Pinchot, “Remarks by Peter Pinchot on the 30th Anniversary of the dedication of Grey Towers to the U.S. Forest Service,” 25 September 1993. The Conservation Legacy (Pinchot Institute for Conservation, 1995), 10. www.pinchot.org/about_pic/history. 9 September 2016. Pinchot includes in this assessment Gifford’s wife, Cornelia Bryce Pinchot, and Amos’s second wife, Ruth Pickering Pinchot.

  39. 39.

    Quoted in Char Miller, Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2001), 245.

  40. 40.

    James Steele Morrison Mackaye, Paul Kauvar, or Anarchy: A Play in Five Acts, in Representative plays by American dramatists, Vol. 3, ed. Montrose J. Moses (London: Benjamin Blom, 1964; Cambridge: ProQuest, 2003).

  41. 41.

    Percy MacKaye, Epoch: The Life of Steele MacKaye, Genius of the Theatre, Vol. 2 (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1927), 127–128.

  42. 42.

    Hazareesingh, 179.

  43. 43.

    Marvin Carlson, Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 187.

  44. 44.

    V. Alaric Sample and Char Miller, “A Transformative Place: Grey Towers and the Evolution of American Conservationism,” Journal of Forestry, July/August 2005, 237.

  45. 45.

    The statue, on loan from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, is currently displayed at the Grey Towers National Historic Site.

  46. 46.

    Quoted in Carrs, 77.

  47. 47.

    Carrs, 106.

  48. 48.

    Hazareesingh, 178–179.

  49. 49.

    Ibid., 169.

  50. 50.

    Ibid., 175.

  51. 51.

    Ibid., 178.

  52. 52.

    Ibid.

  53. 53.

    Ibid., 268.

  54. 54.

    Definitions were drawn from the Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), www.oed.com.

  55. 55.

    Raymond Williams, “Social environment and theatrical environment: the case of English naturalism,” English Drama: Forms and Development, ed. Marie Axton and Raymond Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 208.

  56. 56.

    Ibid., 217.

  57. 57.

    Ibid.

  58. 58.

    Ibid., 223.

  59. 59.

    Chaudhuri, 6.

  60. 60.

    Ibid., 5–6.

  61. 61.

    Miller, 5–7.

  62. 62.

    Ibid., 8.

  63. 63.

    Grey Towers, ii.

  64. 64.

    Sample and Miller, 238.

  65. 65.

    Peter Cooper Pinchot, “Remarks,” 8–9.

  66. 66.

    Miller, 110.

  67. 67.

    Peter Cooper Pinchot, “Thoughts,” 4.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA

    Iris Smith Fischer

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  1. Iris Smith Fischer
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Correspondence to Iris Smith Fischer .

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  1. Department of English, Saint Mary’s College of California, Moraga, CA, USA

    Emily Klein

  2. School of Theatre and Dance, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC, USA

    Jennifer-Scott Mobley

  3. Department of Theatre Arts, Marymount Manhattan College, New York, NY, USA

    Jill Stevenson

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Fischer, I.S. (2019). The Genius of a House: Grey Towers as Nineteenth-Century Stage for Twentieth-Century Conservationism. In: Klein, E., Mobley, JS., Stevenson, J. (eds) Performing Dream Homes. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01581-7_8

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