Edith Wharton
In February, the Mount—the palatial home of renowned writer Edith Wharton in the Berkshire mountains of Massachusetts—released startling news. It was facing foreclosure, and only the formidable task of raising $3 million in a month would save it. A subsequent series of extensions on its bank loan, now continuing through October, have kept the estate in the game, but will the most recent extension, allowing the estate to persevere through its lucrative summer season, save the day? Dismaying as the bad news is to those who know and love the estate, it is unsettling to the broader museum community as well. If a historic home this grand, with such support and such a pedigree, has bankers howling at the gate, what does that portend for struggling historic homes across the nation?
As details emerge, however, staff at other historic sites might be forgiven if they find it comforting that key problems are unique to the Mount itself. The estate’s president, Stephanie Copeland, who had shepherded the house’s restoration and renaissance for 15 years, left in May after her board appeared to question her leadership. A multimillion-dollar decision that she made during her tenure now seems highly questionable. And a similar cautionary tale at Mark Twain’s home, not far away in Hartford, Conn., further suggests problems specific to the sites, not necessarily the field at large.
But even among museums, historic homes find it particularly difficult to maintain financial stability and attract visitors. They often lack endowments, rely on largely volunteer staff (including directors), have a narrower focus that attracts a narrower audience, have a hard time attracting repeat visitors due to static offerings and have locations determined not by proximity to large populations or tourist destinations but by wherever old Nehemiah Jedediah or Esther Bluestocking happened to put down stakes. Some voices within the historic site community have even dared suggest that not every home with a history needs to be preserved as a historic home.
The Mount does face its own set of problems. But its mistakes of the past might not prevent it from offering historic houses a model for the future.
Daisy Buchanan’s voice was full of money, and so is the view as you drive into the Berkshires. You know there must be plenty of wealth around as you travel through leafy New England towns like Stockbridge and Lenox, where the Mount is located—the signs informing you that the town you are entering was “est. 1767,” the proliferation of inns (not motels), the quaint main streets actually called Main Street where the city fathers and mothers apparently fought a successful battle to keep out chain stores (though a Talbots did somehow sneak into Lenox). Posters and notices everywhere from small stores to the post office announce that summer cultural opportunities abound at theater, dance and music stages, notably the venerable Tanglewood, the summer venue for the Boston Symphony Orchestra and other performers. Residents, especially the seasonal ones, may have immigrated from Boston, New York and other cities yearning to breathe free, but they want some of what they left behind to follow them in.
The Mount, completed in 1902, lies off a two-lane road. A drive of a bit less than half a mile after you enter the property, passing a large stable and the former gatehouse off to the side, takes you to a large white mansion with green shutters and a cupola. A terrace in back overlooks a famous garden that people travel great distances to study.
But as the estate’s librarian, Molly McFall, says, “There are a lot of pretty houses around.” Why is this one special? Part of the answer of course lies with Wharton’s fans: A writer’s true admirers want more than her writing. They want to know what produced it, the person behind it, whatever doses of her real life are included but camouflaged. They search for clues in the work—and at places like the Mount.
The staff refer to it as an “autobiographical house” because Wharton was so completely involved in designing it. They bring up comparisons to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, as well as to the Mark Twain House and the Orchard, home of Louisa May Alcott. Publications director David Dashiell notes that “Wharton had written The Decoration of Houses [with architect Ogden Codman] five years before the Mount was built. It was not just about constructing a beautiful house but demonstrating the design principles she believed in.” Dashiell adds, “It’s the only house she built from the ground up, the only complete expression of her design—a three-dimensional expression of her genius.” And, as a fact sheet boasts, the Mount is one of only 5 percent of national landmarks honoring a woman.
It’s the kind of house that gives you a faux whiff of entrée as you enter—a place you never would have been allowed to set foot in. Depending on your disposition toward the unreachably rich, you feel perhaps resentful, mischievous or thrilled with anticipation.
The upstairs is only slightly restored. House manager Anne Schuyler says, “It’s interesting this way, too, because you see the bones of the house, not someone’s idea of it.” It also lets you see how much work went into the years of restoration. There is little or no furniture. As Schuyler stands in an empty upstairs bedroom, talking about hoping to obtain an expensive piece of furniture that would approximate the style and era—if and when the Mount overcomes its current financial troubles, a conditional phrase stated repeatedly in one form or another—add that to the $3 million garden renovation and you get a sense of the leaping, bounding costs the estate faces.
Furniture is also scant on the first floor; after Wharton’s death it was given or sold away, and the estate could not afford to buy it back even if anyone knew where it was. Some rooms offer large black-and-white photographs dating from Wharton’s day; they show that she followed through on her distaste of the overstuffed, overcrowded, over-tchotchked Victorian style she grew up with. “The house is so beautiful,” Laurie Foote, manager of house operations, adds. “People come in thinking they can do the house in half an hour, an hour. They tend to stay three or four hours.”
The staff freely admit they did not know all that much about Edith Wharton when they came aboard; they tended to arrive with only a glancing, high-school familiarity with one or two of her novels—a situation not possible for the staff at, say, Monticello or the Twain House. But once they got there, they got hooked by the property—and by Wharton herself.
Edith Wharton (1862–1937) was a member of upper-crust New York society; née Jones, she came from the family that supposedly inspired the phrase “keeping up with the Joneses.” Her parents forbade her from receiving a formal education, but they begrudgingly allowed her supervised access to her father’s library, where she educated herself passionately. She would become highly accomplished: the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize and to be accepted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a recipient of the French Legion of Honor for her heroism in World War I. The Decoration of Houses is still in print and read for courses.
She was a woman at odds with her time in sad ways as well. After years of a sexless marriage, betrayed by a husband who used her money to buy an apartment for his mistress, she ultimately did what women, let alone women of her caste, were never supposed to do: got divorced and moved, on her own, to Europe.
But her most important legacy is that among the 40 books she wrote in as many years are some of best American novels of the 20th century—The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, The Age of Innocence—many chronicling and critiquing her society and era. She has inspired Hollywood movies, an academic society that meets yearly to explore and further her legacy, a scholarly journal. The president of the Edith Wharton Society, Hildegard Hoeller, was momentarily taken aback when asked what is so powerfully appealing about Wharton’s work. “I think it’s the tension between realism and sentiment, how people caught up in a structure push against it, against internal censorship. She also addressed an unusually wide range of issues, from economics and manners to suicide, incest and euthanasia.”
Saving the house that promotes her legacy, both personal and literary, was a formidable task. In the decades after she left in 1911, the house was inhabited first by the Foxhollow School and then the theater group Shakespeare and Company, and finally experienced prolonged neglect. In 1980, however, Edith Wharton Restoration was organized to bring it back to life.
Any homeowners who have called in a contractor only to hear an estimate that threatens to cancel all nonessential plans for the next year—like vacations or second helpings at dinner—can appreciate what the restoration went through on a much larger scale. The group bought 49.5 acres of the original 128 and some of the buildings but had no money for restoration. There were some donations, such as one from General Electric, but not nearly enough. In 1997, however, a grant of $2.9 million from Save America’s Treasures and $1.4 million in half-matching funds from the state of Massachusetts kick-started a new flow of contributions and awards for restoration that carried monetary benefits as well. Dashiell, an architectural historian by training, arrived at the Mount six years ago, just after the restoration was completed.
"The restoration presented formidable challenges,” Dashiell says. The frame house was very fragile and had endured decades of deferred maintenance. “People were not even allowed on the terrace; it had to be torn down to the ground and rebuilt. The heavy terrazzo floors were too heavy for the structure. The floors were warped and sagging. A lot of the restoration money went just to steel beams to shore up the building. They had to redo the roof, re-stucco the outside, move mechanical systems, especially heating, to a separate vault to remove the danger of fire. So much of what was restored you don’t see.” In 2002, the house opened to the public.
So what happened? Ask people at the Mount this, and they are very open in presenting a variety of plausible reasons—acting president Susan Wissler explains that they see the media as their greatest ally, helping to get the word out. She says that the problem “has been building over multiple years. Whether it was 9/11 or the [five-member] board being too small to raise money, we couldn’t raise what we needed to fill the gap.” There were other financial problems as well: fluctuating visitation, rising interest rates, borrowing too much money. “Borrowing was not the way out,” Wissler says, “but no other way was open to us. So we sat down with lenders. The board made the decision to go public with our dilemma, either to bring out the Edith Wharton lovers to help or just the general public. People really stepped up to the plate.”
Librarian McFall adds, “They borrowed money because they thought it would come back soon. It was like putting money on a horse race. We had no proper development officer. [Then-president] Stephanie Copeland was running fundraising, in addition to running the place.” Copeland scored many successes in both areas, everyone agrees. Unfortunately, the house may not survive one of them.
Along with “Write what you know” and “Show, don’t tell,” one of the common instructions given to aspiring writers of fiction is to read voraciously because, well, what they read will inevitably shape what they write.
No one had to tell Edith Wharton to read. On her death, she left behind a collection of several thousand books. Some were destroyed in a warehouse during the London blitz, but most of them ended up with a British book dealer named George Ramsden. He bought many in the early 1980s and spent 20 years tracking down additional ones, ending up with 2,600 volumes.
Copeland was on fire to get them for the Mount and finally was able to do so for $2.6 million. Ramsden got a very good deal, because he knew how badly the estate wanted the books. Some estimate that it paid twice their value.
The purchase plunged the estate even deeper into debt, and many describe it, publicly or privately, as the final step toward foreclosure. McFall explains, “The reason the collection is special is not just because it’s a bunch of books, or they’re rare—they’re not necessarily rare—but because they have her notes in them.” She opens books with pencil notes in the margins. “Librarians would say notes like this are anathema, but they’re wonderful. These notes show the kind of things she was interested in, her thoughts.”
Was buying the library something the Mount could afford to do? “I wasn’t here,” says McFall, but she then adds a blunt assessment. “With hindsight, it was a terrible idea financially, but I can certainly see why they did it. It’s such an important part of her legacy, and the Mount was the logical place for her books—there isn’t really anywhere else. As for whether it was a bad financial decision—and you can’t pretend it wasn’t—they saw it as a financial fundraising tool.” As McFall explains, the staff hedged their bets on an unsuccessful adopt-a-book campaign where donors would get a bookplate for $50,000.
Wissler softens that view somewhat: “Even if the library wasn’t bought, the debt burden was still significant from borrowing. It’s hardest to borrow for ongoing costs: gas, the electric bill, salaries. Bricks and mortar are the easiest to raise money for, and new programs. But it’s a Catch-22 because you’re compounding your expenses in the long run, extending your costs.”
Copeland didn’t care. “Did the [financial] problem seem insurmountable? It did, but I focused not on whether something should be done. It must be done,” she said in a phone interview. That determination may, in a nutshell, have brought the Mount to where it finds itself today: brilliantly brought back to life, but on the verge of disaster.
"To me, that’s like saying, ‘Why save Monticello?” she explains. “The Mount is like Monticello. There’s no way to understand the person who built it without walking through something they created.”
"The library,” she adds, “is significant and something I’d had my eye on since I came on board in ’93. Wharton felt that ‘Books have souls; they’re like little people.’ She called them magic carpets. After she was allowed into her father’s library, she was never wholly alone again.” It’s very unusual, Copeland says, to find a full collection of someone’s books from childhood on. “You can see her develop as a reader and a writer.”
One of the unforeseen problems, McFall says, was the news coverage about the loan from Berkshire Bank. “The way the thing was publicized, it was very ambiguous. It looked like we’d been given the money outright. In our press releases at the time, there was no reference to ‘loan’ or ‘borrow,’ just ‘by the generosity of.’ I didn’t even know when I got here that it was a loan. The public saw, ‘You just spent $2.6 million; you must be doing great.’”
She observes, “We’re very lucky that it’s a local bank, a local Berkshires bank, or they would have closed us down the first day. They don’t want to cause harm to the local community, to a place that’s generating tourism.”
David H. Gonci, corporate finance officer of Berkshire Bank, echoes McFall. “As a local bank, we see the nonprofit sector as an important part of how we serve the needs of our markets,” he says. “We recognize that these organizations have a wide-ranging benefit to the local communities and our larger society. We recognize the efforts of the board and management of the Mount to address the issues that they face, and we are hopeful that they will continue to make progress towards their goals.”
Copeland’s vision for the Mount’s future was to “really make it a vibrant center that reflected [Wharton’s] passions and interests: design, gardens, poetry. It would complement an already culturally rich area.” Admirers note Copeland’s political savvy in attracting funders, and cultivating supporters like Sen. Edward Kennedy and first ladies Hillary Clinton and Barbara Bush, who both visited the house and spurred the kind of attention that attracts donations of all kinds.
Despite her successes, the purchase of the library—initially supported by the board—became a bone of contention. In March, the board proposed dividing her role into two: Copeland would continue as director, contributing her sense of vision, but another person would be brought in to head fundraising. Copeland said thanks but no thanks and left.
"Stephanie did everything, and it’s not something one person could or should do, realistically,” says McFall. “There wasn’t enough overview. There should have been someone else around, whether on the board or whatever.”
A great supporter of the Mount and of Copeland is Bobbie Greene McCarthy, executive director of Save America’s Treasures, which awarded the estate one of the largest grants in the funder’s history. Her conclusion is succinct: “It’s not that people stole money. Nobody in either of these places [the Mount or the Mark Twain House] stole a dime. Their passion and vision outgrew their financial vision.”
Lord Christopher Tughendat, a former member of Parliament and member of the Mount’s board of trustees, concurs. “If one is being frank about it, either one must say too much was done too soon before there was the money to do it, or one must say [the Mount’s] fundraising was not as successful as the artistic recreation. With hindsight, maybe you could say, ‘If only the money-raising had been as successful as the money-spending.’”
He adds that the Mount “is also situated in a particular locality. It didn’t establish the constituency of support it needed in its own locality. It’s all very well to have someone like me who loves [Wharton’s] work who adds an international dimension, but you also need a local layer.”
One observer close to the Mount’s story notes the “blind passion” that historic sites can engender. It is not surprising that sometimes those who run them lead with their hearts. They have to love their work—they aren’t doing it for the big bucks. Tugendhat understands this but says, “I think this is a problem for all artistic, creative charitable institutions. They need to keep a much tighter control over expenditures. You’ve got to have the resources rather than do it and hope you’ll get the resources—you need financial discipline.” If the Mount survives, buying the library could look like a stroke of genius—it will attract scholars, add prestige and further Wharton’s legacy. If it sinks, however, the library may well look like the iceberg that did it.
The Mount continues to work hard for support. The goal is to raise $3 million, which an anonymous donor would match. It currently has $940,000—well on its way were it not for the more than $100,000 needed every month for operating expenses. “I’m optimistic but realistic,” says Wissler. “We’ll need the full involvement of the board of trustees and to expand the board at some point.” The support so far has been mainly a grassroots campaign—the largest gift was $50,000, but many are $10 to $25. Wissler notes that one person gives $3 a week. “It feels like what’s left out of her paycheck.”
Even as it seeks funds, the estate continues its programs—lecture and poetry series—and plans to extend its programmatic mission to include not only all things Wharton but topics and issues related to the writer: broader issues of architecture and design, human rights, art, women’s issues.
Copeland strongly shared this vision in her time as president. “It’s a huge challenge to make historic homes vibrant,” she says. “The programs bring people back. You can’t have a site that’s a dead house museum, where you open a musty door. You have to go a step further with programs that enhance the value of the house to the community.”
As of mid-summer, the staff and board express cautious optimism. Donations have remained steady. “I must say,” says Tugendhat, “I’m a great deal more hopeful than I was at the beginning. There’s still an awful lot to do. But we’ve been able to arouse a great deal of interest again.”
McFall looks forward to diversifying the mission to embrace more of the author’s legacy. The way the Mount sold the house to visitors became more about Wharton’s design than her writing, “but 90 percent or more of people in the world don’t know or care that Edith Wharton was a designer. They all had to read Ethan Frome in high school.”
McCarthy lists many ideas for future partnerships, such as one with Canton Ranch, a nearby spa and retreat—“intellectual and cultural opportunities combining physical and psychological experiences.” Like Tugendhat, she sees the importance of involving the local community, such as one project this summer that will open the estate in the evenings. “They need to show the community an expanded vision of how the house can be used, because it’s not just a monument to Edith Wharton but a vibrant site that excites people about history.
“It is often difficult for historic houses,” McCarthy says. “The best of them find ways to give contemporary life—not to abandon their history, but to give it a currency.” The Mark Twain House is experiencing its own version of the Mount’s library snafu, having spent millions on a visitor center that, according to news reports, many feel it neither needs nor can afford. McCarthy observes, “They’ve probably saved the Twain House in the short term, but they’ll also have to find long-term solutions. And these are two of the best-known, most visited, iconic sites. Imagine what’s going on with smaller places.”
But the Mount offers more than a cautionary tale. On a positive note, it is making sound business decisions. The previous trustees resigned in 2006, and the newcomers, unlike their predecessors, have solid financial backgrounds at such institutions as Lehman Brothers and McKinsey and Company. More board members will join them, as the Mount has conceded that it does not have enough support at that level. It is also taking creative steps—for example, rather than spending more millions that it does not have, it is displaying the home as it is, inviting visitors to see the “bones” of what Wharton had to work with as well as to learn about the various stages and challenges of historic restoration. And it has promising ideas for expanding its mission to become ever more relevant. The Mount may be the historic-home disaster of the present, but it may offer the field a model for historic houses of the future. With a few caveats from the past.
