Contained in a separate wing, built at a smaller more human scale, more familiar to us today, the service wing at Harbor Hill, truly was a realm apart, across a slender line.
Four footmen. Their silken liveries are ornamented by silver buttons and their shoes, by silver buckles
From an extraordinary article written by Grace Fowler entitled, 'The Servant Question at Harbor Hill', published in 1904, in Harper's Bazaar, we know an amazing amount about the first rate service facilities provided at The Mackay‘s country house. Servants are indispensable for the smooth operation of the house. But due to technology, the staff comprising around 103, is far smaller than the retinue required to keep up the admittedly larger chateau it was modeled after a couple centuries earlier.
Not surprizingly, the silver miner's son had masses of plate and flatware. To retard oxidation it was stored in felt-lined drawers and boxes, and on shelves behind heavy felt curtains
After 1920, when Clarence Mackay's mother moved to Harbor Hill to act as his hostess, she brought with her the famed Mackay, Tiffany & Co. silver. Her husband had sent a half-ton of ore from his own mine for it. Awarded a prize when exhibited at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1878, the dinner and desert service for 24, comprised, 250 pieces. It included as well hollowware and centerpieces. Flower-encrusted with thistles, shamrocks, and blossoms native to American, the unique creation took two years and 200 craftsmen to complete
We have arrived at a date when an internal and outside telephone network were found to be useful. Electrically powered lighting, elevators, mangles and refrigeration are also a given, at least in so affluent a household. A central vacuum-cleaning system, gas fueled clothes’ dryers and fireplace ‘logs’, are similarly, standard equipment.
Outside gasoline powered lawn mowers, rollers, water hoses and sprinklers save on labor. So do hoses and drains in the stable, a grease pit and turntable for cars, in the garage. Coal, for heating and for cocking, burned by the freight train car-load, have not yet been dispensed with however. In a house dedicated almost entirely to princely hospitality, there is always a great deal of preparation, clean up and service that’s demanded of the staff. Much as the garage has twelve cars, two vans and three trucks, in the big house, the sun around which all activity revolves, there are a dozen guests rooms and twenty-two bathrooms. Bed room water pitchers and wash basins, fireside hip-baths and chamber pots, may have all disappeared, but an unending amount of work in at so enormous an establishment, remains to be done.
Like a diminutive separate domain, Harbor Hill's service wing was made compact by fitting four rooms and more, into the space occupied by one in the main house. To further obscure this vital necessity, from guests and employers who felt that the most superior service, was all-but invisible, behind a screen of shrubbery, the service wing was sunken into a well for deliveries.
Four levels devoted to the enterprise of service, disguised as two
At the time of her girlhood, in the 1870’s and 1880’s, men servants with whiskers, butlers dressed in their ‘dress suit’ during the day and gentlemen wearing black and white waistcoats interchangeably with evening clothes, had all been acceptable. However now, even at the White House and at many other elegant houses, rules about watch chains and mustaches, have come to be relaxed to such a degree, they are not even remembered.
“In fashionable houses, the butler does not put on his dress suit until six o’clock. The butler’s evening dress differs from that of a gentleman in a few details only: he has no braid on his trousers, and the satin on his lapels (if any) is narrower, but the most distinctive difference is that a butler wears a black waistcoat and a white lawn tie, and a gentleman always wears a white waistcoat with a white tie, or a white waistcoat and a black tie with a dinner coat, but never the reverse.
Unless he is an old-time colored servant in the South a butler who wears a “dress suit” in the daytime is either a hired waiter who has come in to serve a meal, or he has never been employed by persons of position; and it is unnecessary to add that none but vulgarians would employ a butler (or any other house servant) who wears a mustache! To have him open the door collarless and in shirt-sleeves is scarcely worse!
Emily Post naturally, discusses race very little regarding servants. That’s because, in the communities she frequented, like their employers, most servants were white. After the Civil War among New York's bon ton, African American servants had been increasingly, deliberately, avoided. There were of course conspicuous exceptions. Customarily black household help were paid much lower wages than their white counterparts. Few love a bargain as much as the rich. Yet outside of the South, in lavish establishments like the Astors’, Vanderbilts’, or the Mackays’, more costly white servants, who were mostly Irish and other European immigrants, where hired for the greater cachet they conveyed.
At their Newport ‘cottage’, "Sherwood Lodge", for instance, southerners Mr. and Mrs. Pembroke Jones, always engaged black help. Proficient at expertly preparing 'down-home' delicacies, their cook indeed, was by far more widely renowned than the French chefs of the area’s most deluxe households. But more typically, nearby at the "Breakers", Anderson Cooper’s great grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, kept only white servants, with the sole exception of their laundresses. Living and working in a sequestered laundry building on the grounds, never seen by family or guests, these black women were responsible for the most arduous job there was associated with running an exacting and elite household. The luxury of fresh linen damask bed sheets daily, new napkins nearly a yard-square for dinners, for each person at each meal, and three changes of what one wore, every day, for everyone in the household, including servants, was not easily achieved.
The immaculate kitchen, with a gleaming Gustavino vaulted ceiling and a coal range imported from France
Copper pots and vessels for every preparation possible. Note the top row's molds for mouses, souffles, ices and aspics
One observer marveled over Katherine Mackay’s punctilious practice of having a daily change of fresh bed linen. If a look at her Harbor Hill household as enumerated by the United States Census in 1910 is instructive, unfortunately, it fails to reveal which of fourteen women working in the great house was responsible for laundering mountains of wash weekly. None at any rate are African American and like their male counterparts they are mostly classified with the vague designation “servant.”
Despite a phalanx of copper-ware, a battered enameled tin pot still has its place
Near the bottom of the heap in the pecking order was Edward Tumblin, the ‘odd man’. Born in New York, he was forty-years old. Englishmen, William Warndy at thirty-six was near the top of the heap. He was the fastidious Anglophile Clarence Mackay’s valet. Only identified as ‘house servants’ the other young Englishmen in the household might to have been footmen. There was twenty-three-year old Edwin Frost Agate, twenty-six-year old William H. Hulse, twenty-one year old Arthur Tuppen and twenty-four-year old John Walker. Henry Schlagel, thirty-two, was a New Yorker. Where employing a French chef was thought to be the ne plus ultra so far as providing for the pleasure of guests at one’s table, the Mackay’s cook, twenty-eight-year old John Domenico, was Portuguese, though assuredly French-trained.
Harbor Hill's servant's hall, where meals were taken and breaks spent
The dining room reserved for the small group of upper servants with supervisory responsibilities
At forty, Catherine Thompson, born in Scotland was the housekeeper. This was a time when whether married or not, housekeepers were addressed for the sake of their dignity and authority, as Mrs.---. At Harbor Hill in 1910, there are thirteen women servants who fall under her supervision. Elizabeth Prondboot twenty-nine and Isabella Macintyre twenty five, are also from Scotland. Twenty-five-year old Margaret Mcluse was born in Ireland. Theresa Stafutti, born in Austria, is twenty-one and Agusta Wesner from Germany, was thirty-seven. Rudolpha Rigelson, twenty-two years old, hailed from Belgium. Margaret Sweeney, thirty-six, is the only one of these women born in New York. Minnie Carson, a chambermaid is twenty and like thirty-six-year old Hilda Olsen, she was Swedish.
The butler's den. On the left, notice a cast-off rattan chair and whitw painted settee from the glass piazza
The housekeeper's bed-sitting room. Her bed sheilded behind a screen, the housekeeper had plenty of space for a comfortable office-sitting room, with plants, floers and a pet bird in her quarters
Cedar-lined, the linen room had glass doored shelves that made it possible to readily inspect the supply available
Away from the more boisterous servants hall, maids could sit talking together doing mending in the top lit sewing room
A maid's room at Harbor Hill. Only in the servant's rooms did wash basins and slop jars presist
I came across your blog when looking up Churchill J Brazelton. I found so much more here, this is fascinating. I've subscribed and am excited to come back and read more! Thank you for the enlightening!
Kelly Saadiq
Posted by: KSaadiq | 04/12/2014 at 02:36 AM
THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR SUCH AN ENCOURAGING MESSAGE...
Posted by: Michael Henry Adams, Style and Taste! | 04/12/2014 at 11:12 AM