Читать книгу American Adventures: A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' - Julian Street - Страница 13

Doughoregan Manor—The house was of buff-colored brick. It was low and very long, with wings extending from its central structure like beautiful arms flung wide in welcome

Though the house has been "done over" four times, and though the paneling was torn out of one room to make way for wall paper when wall paper came into style, everything has now been restored, and the place stands to-day to all intents and purposes exactly as it was. That so few changes were ever made in it, that it weathered successfully, with its contents, the disastrous period of Eastlake furniture and the American mansard roof, is a great credit to the Carroll family, and it is delightful to see such a house in the possession of those who can love it as it deserves to be loved, and preserve it as it deserves to be preserved.

Mr. Charles Bancroft Carroll, who is a graduate of Annapolis and a grandson of the late Governor John Lee Carroll of Maryland, now farms some twenty-four hundred acres of the five or six thousand which surround the manor house. He raises blooded cattle and horses, and, though he rides with the Elkridge Hunt, also keeps his own pack and is starting the Howard County Hounds, an organization that will hunt the country around the manor, which is full of foxes.

Of the innumerable family portraits contained in the house not a few are valuable and almost all are pleasing. When I remarked upon the high average of good looks among his progenitors, Mr. Carroll smiled in agreement, saying: "Yes, I'm proud of these pictures of my ancestors; most people's ancestors seem to have looked like the dickens."

Among these noteworthy family portraits I recollect one of "the Signer" as a boy, standing on the shore and watching a ship sail out to sea; one of the three beautiful Caton sisters, his granddaughters, who lived at Brooklandwood, in the Green Spring Valley, now the home of Mr. Isaac Emerson; one of Charles Carroll of Homewood, son of "the Signer"; and one of Governor John Lee Carroll, who was born at Homewood.

The Caton sisters and Charles Carroll of Homewood supply to the Carroll family archives that picturesqueness which the history of every old family should possess; the former contributing beauty, the latter dash and extravagance, those qualities so annoying in a living relative, but so delightfully suggestive in an ancestor long defunct. If anything more be needed to round out the composition, it is furnished by the ghosts of Doughoregan Manor: an old housekeeper with jingling keys, and an invisible coach, the wheels of which are heard upon the driveway before the death of any member of the family.

Of the Caton sisters there were four, but because one of them, Mrs. McTavish, stayed at home and made the life of her grandfather happy, we do not hear so much of her as of the other three, who were internationally famous for their pulchritude, and were known in England as "the Three American Graces." All three married British peers, one becoming Marchioness of Wellesley, another Duchess of Leeds, while the third became the wife of Lord Stafford, one of the noblemen embalmed in verse by Fitz-Greene Halleck:

Lord Stafford mines for coal and salt,

The Duke of Norfolk deals in malt,

The Douglas in red herrings.

As for Charles Carroll of Homewood, he was handsome, charming, and athletic, and, as indicated in letters written to him by his father, caused that old gentleman a good deal of anxiety. It is said that at one time—perhaps during some period of estrangment from his wealthy parent—he acted as a fencing master in Baltimore.

At the age of twenty-five he settled down—or let us hope he did—for he married Harriet Chew, whose sister "Peggy," Mrs. John Eager Howard of Baltimore, was a celebrated belle, and of whose own charm we may judge by the fact that General Washington asked her to remain in the room while he sat to Gilbert Stuart, declaring that her presence there would cause his countenance to "wear its most agreeable expression." The famous portrait painted under these felicitous conditions hung in the White House when, in 1814, the British marched on Washington; but when they took the city and burned the White House, the portrait did not perish with it, for history records that Dolly Madison carried it to safety, and along with it the original draft of the Declaration of Independence.

Charles Carroll of Homewood died before his father, "the Signer," but the house, Homewood, which the latter built for his son and daughter-in-law in 1809, stands to-day near the Baltimore city limits, at the side of Charles Street Boulevard, amid pleasant modern houses, many of which are of a design not out of harmony with the old mansion. Though not comparable in size with the manor house at Doughoregan, Homewood is an even more perfect house, being one of the finest examples of Georgian architecture to be found in the entire country. The fate of this house is hardly less fortunate than that of the paternal manor, for, with its surrounding lands, it has come into the possession of Johns Hopkins University. The fields of Homewood now form the campus and grounds of that excellent seat of learning, and the trustees of the university have not merely preserved the residence, using it as a faculty club, but have had the inspiration to find in it the architectural motif for the entire group of new college buildings, so that the campus may be likened to a bracelet wrought as a setting for this jewel of a house.