The Many Mansions of Elizabeth Hazard Sturges

[00:00:00]One of America’s oldest and richest families  built 2 amazing mansions in Rhode Island. Hi everyone, Ken here, hit that subscribe  button and let’s explore This House!

[00:00:08]Elizabeth's fortune flowed from the Hazard family  of Peace Dale, a Rhode Island dynasty whose wealth was spun from wool. The story begins in 1802, when  her great-great-grandfather Rowland Hazard bought a half interest in a small fulling mill on the  Saugatucket River. Over the next five generations the Hazards turned that modest operation into the  Peace Dale Manufacturing Company, the mainstay of the family financial empire and, by its own proud  claim, the place where the first power looms were successfully operated in America, if not in the  world. The family practically built the village around its mills, right down to the library, the  church, and the memorial hall, and for more than a century the fortunes of Peace Dale and the  fortunes of the Hazards were one and the same.

[00:00:51]They were also never content to be mere mill  owners. Elizabeth's great-grandfather Rowland Gibson Hazard ran the family looms by day and  wrote philosophy by night, publishing treatises on the freedom of the will and trading long  letters on the subject with John Stuart Mill, one of the most celebrated thinkers of the  age. His son Rowland pushed the family into bolder territory, branching into lead mining  and then, in 1881, helping to found the Solvay Process Company in upstate New York, the  first American producer of soda ash and such a success that the company town outside Syracuse  is still named Solvay today. Elizabeth's father, Rowland Gibson Hazard II, was a Brown University  graduate who served as a vice president of that enormously profitable chemical enterprise  and poured money into schools, libraries, and civic buildings across Rhode Island. Into this world of wool, chemistry, and fortune, Elizabeth Hazard was born in  the 1880s. In 1908 she married Rush Sturges, an ambitious young Providence lawyer, and the  match proved as practical as it was happy, for Rush soon became legal counsel to the  Hazard family's many enterprises, among them the Narragansett Improvement Association. A family of such standing needed a proper city seat, and in 1922 Elizabeth got one, a brand-new  mansion at 55 Power Street in the leafy College Hill neighborhood of Providence. The address alone  was a statement. Power Street runs through the heart of the city's oldest and grandest quarter,  and just across the street stands the John Brown House of 1788. To build here was to invite  comparison with the finest houses of the early republic, and Elizabeth hired an architect with  both the pedigree and the training to meet it.

[00:02:28]William T. Aldrich was Rhode Island aristocracy  himself. Born in 1880, he was a son of Nelson W. Aldrich, the longtime United States Senator  from Rhode Island who chaired the Senate Finance Committee and wielded such power over the  country's money matters that he was nicknamed the general manager of the nation. William's  sister Abby married John D. Rockefeller Jr., which made the architect a brother-in-law of  the richest family in America and an uncle of the future vice president Nelson Aldrich  Rockefeller. William himself chose drafting tables over politics and banking. He trained at  the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts, the  finishing school of America's great architects, and he went on to build a distinguished Boston  practice known especially for museum work.

[00:03:10]For the Sturges family, Aldrich produced  a restrained essay in Georgian Revival, a mansion of warm brick with a flat roof. A strong  horizontal cornice cuts across the elevation above the first two floors, giving the top story the  look of an attic and lending the whole house a broad, spreading presence. The effect deliberately  recalls the grand China Trade mansions of the neighborhood while feeling somehow more worldly  and complex than any of them, a 20th-century architect holding a knowing conversation with  his 18th-century neighbors. And the house does not stand alone, for its east and south sides open  onto a walled garden with wrought-iron fencing, brick walls, and garden sculpture, an outdoor  room composed as carefully as any interior.

[00:03:52]Inside, the Providence house trades its  refined exterior for a more adventurous spirit.

[00:03:57]The stair hall is where Aldrich hid  his most playful ideas. Instead of the traditional colonial passage running straight  through the house from front door to garden, he placed a lateral hall that runs the full  width of the home just behind the entrance, a French Renaissance arrangement that reflected  his Beaux-Arts training and put every principal room within a few steps of the door. At  its heart rises an elaborate staircase, its curving sweep so photogenic that the architectural  photographer Paul J. Weber made it a centerpiece of the album he shot of the house around 1930. The sitting rooms are dressed in neoclassical detail, with niches, handsome fireplaces, and  delicate moldings, and they are arranged in a line, each room opening into the next and  out onto the terrace and garden beyond, so that on a warm evening the whole ground floor  could flow together into one continuous party.

[00:04:45]The dining room carries some of the  home's most memorable flourishes, above all its scenic wallpaper, whose sweeping  painted landscapes wrap the walls in color and give dinner guests something to explore  between courses. Paneling and fine moldings complete the room, lending it the quiet formality  expected of a family of the Hazards' standing.

[00:05:03]If Power Street was Elizabeth's formal parlor,  Wakefield was the family's great escape. In 1933, in the very depths of the Depression, the  Sturges Family built a summer estate in the village of Wakefield, Rhode Island, back  in the family's ancestral South County, and this time they wanted nothing polished or  urban. The house they raised is a rugged manor of stone in the Norman Romanesque manner, all rough  masonry, heavy walls, and picturesque massing, looking less like a Providence mansion than like  something carried over from the French countryside and set down on a Rhode Island hilltop. The architect this time was Thomas P. Cope, a Philadelphia designer. For the Sturgeses he  produced a house that feels centuries older than it is, and that was exactly the point. The library and study spaces at Wakefield were designed for deep comfort rather than display,  a warm-hued room whose double Dutch doors open straight onto the manor terrace, the sort of  room built for a book, a pipe, and a sea breeze.

[00:06:00]The dining and gathering rooms carry the  sturdy charm of a New England country house, with post-and-beam trusses overhead, quarry-tile  floors underfoot, and a dramatic stone fireplace anchoring the largest of them. A relaxed living  room opens toward the grounds and rounds out the intimate spaces, and together these rooms make  plain that this was a true family retreat rather than a showplace, a house for sandy feet and  long summer dinners rather than receiving lines.

[00:06:26]Elizabeth and Rush eventually retired full-time to  their beloved Wakefield estate, trading the city for the hilltop for good. Elizabeth passed  away in 1954, and Rush followed in 1967.

[00:06:39]The Providence house enjoyed perhaps the most  graceful second act any mansion could ask for.

[00:06:43]The Sturges family gave it to Brown University  in memory of Elizabeth's father, transferring the property in 1947, and in 1949 it became the  official residence of the university's president.

[00:06:55]Every Brown president since has lived at 55 Power  Street, hosting dinners and receptions in the very rooms where Elizabeth once entertained, so  the house remains in dignified use to this day.

[00:07:05]The Wakefield estate followed a far more winding  path. It passed in 1959 to a Catholic religious order, which used it first as a convent and then  as a boarding school, and after the school closed in 2012 the great stone manor sat empty for  the better part of a decade while its gardens grew wild. Then, in December 2020, the abandoned  36-acre estate was bought and restored, reopening as Shepherd's Run, a winery, inn, and event venue. And on that happy note I’ll turn it over to you.

[00:07:34]Which of these 2 houses was your favorite? Let  me know down below in the comments section. and while you’re there, make sure you’re subscribed so  you never miss an exciting episode of This house.