THE DEAN OF DERRY AND THE DAMES
by Anita Rafael
Whitehall House – the tale of a hardworking farm, a famous philosopher and a fine house.
Joseph Whipple sold it in 1729. The Reverend George Berkeley enlarged it, named it and wrote brilliant philosophy in it. Yale got it as a gift and innkeeper Abigail Stoneman was among those who ran a tavern in it. During the American Revolution, enemy British troops occupied it. Five generations of the Brown family were the tenant farmers there. The National Society of Colonial Dames in the State of Rhode Island made a museum out of it and you, too, can visit Whitehall House and its pretty walled grounds and herb garden.
Although those crib notes take two seconds to recite, it takes some guesswork to determine how Whitehall, Middletown’s most venerable historic dwelling, came to look the way it does. It is yet another one of those “old house puzzles” that make early American architecture such a beguiling subject.
Some historians have surmised that the reason why the scholarly reverend bought a farm on Aquidneck Island in the first place is the direct consequence of an inept sea captain who failed make port at Bermuda after about 180 days at sea. Whether Berkeley (b.1684-d.1753) arrived here by accident or design in January of 1729, he was on a mission to start a college in Bermuda. The then 44-year old Berkeley, who as Dean of Londonderry was the highest ranking English churchman to have ever visited New England up to that time, and his young wife Anne, began a sort of celebrity sojourn that lasted a little less than three years.
Berkeley, an Irish-born educator, published philosopher, mathematician, poet, and soon to be country farmer and general contractor, paid Joseph Whipple the considerable sum of £2,500 for 96 acres consisting of tillable land, a dwelling and outbuildings. He named his rural estate, situated about an hour’s walk from nearby Newport with its 4,500 or so residents, Whitehall for the royal palace in London and undertook its first extreme makeover.
Some say that the house there today was built entirely from the ground up in 1729, but it is not certain whether Berkeley tore down some or all of the original farmhouse, or simply added grand rooms onto what was a humble structure. One vintage photograph of the now 9-room, 2-story house taken from the rear before its first restoration, shows both old and new elements.
Berkley, whose entourage included, among others, the British architect Richard Dalton, is credited with giving the symmetrical 5-bay façade its high-style features. Wide, pilastered and pedimented, the Palladian-inspired double door is right out of the 1721 style book of classical designs by Indigo Jones. It makes a great impression, fit for an English squire’s house, however, a grand entrance it is not. Just the right hand side of the pair opens, leading into a cramped, stairless hallway; the left side is a false door which, on the inside, is just a plain parlor wall.
When it became evident that Berkeley’s plan for the college fell through, he left Newport in 1731, but his name and legacy remain forever linked to this quiet retreat. He gave the house and a thousand books to Yale College. (Harvard got 800 books and no house.). Upon his return to England, Berkeley became all the more eminent when he was elevated to Bishop of Cloyne, Ireland.
Not particularly interested in overseeing a coastal farm from a hundred miles away, Yale’s administrators leased Whitehall to tavernkeepers and farmers. According to advertisements in the Newport Mercury in the decades prior to the American Revolution one proprietor dubbed it Vaux Hall for a time and ran it as a “tea-house.”
Beginning in 1824, successive generations of the Brown family adapted Whitehall to their needs while they worked the land and sold milk, butter and eggs from their cows and chickens. In the 1890s, Abraham A. Brown built a modern and commodious home, one with indoor plumbing, practically next door to the old house. In the spirit of Yankee thrift though, Farmer Brown put the vacated Whitehall to practical use as a hay barn.
The rain-soaked structure was all but rotten, roof, floors and all, when three philanthropically-minded Newport women took it upon themselves in 1897 to save it for its virtue as a genuine colonial artifact, as well as for its connection to the by then legendary Berkeley. One of the women, Mrs. Livingston Mason, wrote an essay to motivate potential supporters, employing a bit of Victorianesque melodrama to describe Whitehall’s sorry state:
“… a great vine slowly coils in and out of its broken windows, like
some huge monster crushing its ribs and absorbing its last breath.”
Charles McKim, of the famed architectural firm McKim, Mead and White, probably should be given the most credit for why Whitehall still exists. He published this evocative photograph of it in 1874. The image, taken from the angle of the back northwest corner, is Number 26 of 29 photographs in a book titled, New York Sketch-Book of Architecture. Had he not shown and described his own heartfelt admiration for the character and construction of this house, others might not have been awakened to its significance.Seeing beyond the merely picturesque aspects of its sagging 17th century salt box roof and weather-beaten clapboards, he wrote, “…[old buildings] are always reasonable, simple in outline and frequently show great beauty of detail.”
The campaign to buy the site and a scrap of land was successful and Whitehall underwent a cellar-to-rafter restoration in 1898. Two years later, the women deeded it over to the National Society of the Colonial Dames in the State of Rhode Island, with the provision that it should be maintained as a memorial to Berkeley. In 1936, Norman Isham (praised for his pioneering preservation work at Newport’s Old Colony House and the Wanton-Lyman Hazard House) did more interior restoration. Blasted by the Great Hurricane of 1938, Whitehall once again needed repair, but for the most part, its stalwart hand-hewn timbers stood up to the blow. The look of the house was reinterpreted a third time between 1966 and ’68, and shortly after the work was completed, Whitehall was proudly listed on the National Register of Historic Properties.
The Newport Garden Club maintains an 18th century herb garden on the east side of Whitehall. Helen H. Hart originally conceived the design in 1953, and there is a marker commemorating her initiation of the project. The plantings are representative of the three categories of herbs that a practical-minded colonial housewife might have needed most. There are the usual herbs for cooking, plus plants for medicine and personal use (such as sage for brushing teeth and lavender for bathing) and housekeeping herbs (for example, thyme for keeping bugs off stored linens.)
What was once a secluded vale surrounding the house is now a klatch of clone-like condominiums and spanky ranch houses, but visitors need only to step inside Whitehall to time-travel back nearly three centuries. To the left of the paneled entry hall is the bright southwest parlor with its tile-adorned fireplace, and towards the back, is the old kitchen with its broad brick hearth where members of the Colonial Dames occasionally taste-test Indian pudding recipes stirred over the open fire. There is a small north bedchamber beside an oddly situated stair hall in the rear of the house, and a southeast parlor, which is furnished to show how the Reverend’s study might have looked. The second floor, with sitting rooms and two bedrooms, is a private apartment used by members of the International Berkeley Society who summer at Whitehall as guest scholars. A rustic loft space under the eaves has an assortment of early household implements on display.
The Reverend Berkley may have made Whitehall House famous, but all the kudos these days go to the Colonial Dames of the State of Rhode Island. For one-hundred and five years so far, they have been unwavering in their promise to keep it in a sound state of repair while welcoming the public for guided tours and to their popular open house days. Only the right half of Whitehall’s stately double entrance is a real door, but it is a door well worth knocking on for a privileged peek inside and for the pleasure of some old-fashioned hospitality.
