Another Day, Another Du Pont

June 30, 2012

Today we will continue our study of the du Pont family (and their wealth) as we tour Winterthur...the estate of H.F. du Pont. For those of you keeping track on a scorecard, here's how this one plays out...E.I. du Pont (the gun powder guy) bought the property and it passed to his daughter when he died; the daughter lived there and then died; E.I.'s son Henry (who ran lived at Hagley and ran the powder operation) buys the property from his nephew for his own son H.A. du Pont (who lived at Hagley and ran the powder mill after his father Henry); H.A. has a son H.F. who inherits the property and establishes it as a dairy farm and country estate. H.F. is the last owner and he turned it into a museum before he died.

Here's something that made us chuckle while we listened to the tour guides at Nemours, Hagley and Winterthur...the guides would say that this or that seriously wealthy du Pont was a "gardener"...well, I think if we are going to be accurate we should say that these guys were wealthy from family inheritance and spent a small portion of their vast fortunes on designing gardens and paying a staff of gardeners to create and maintain their gardens.

Now, to be fair to H.F., he did breed a type of dairy can that is now responsible for providing more than 80% of the milk produced in the U.S. today, so he did stay busy with something productive. But other than that, he really only spent his time and energy (and serious wealth) on planting an impressive array of trees, shrubs and flowers on his vast estate, and then buying an unnatural amount of early American furniture and household items...which is why he ended up building a 175 room mansion...so he had a place to put his 60,000 purchased items...

The Winterthur estate is a beautiful piece of property - 1,000 acres of rolling pasture and woodland, with a creek running through it. After parking at the visitor center we shuttle up to the mansion to take a look at an exhibition that immediately caught our eye...it's called Uncorked...so of course it's our first stop.

As we said, this H.F. guy bought everything he could lay his hands on, so when it comes to glasses, jugs, flasks, punch bowls, decanters and anything else that has to do with how earlier Americans enjoyed their wine. So we stroll through the exhibit, but cut it a little short so that we can visit the mansion itself.

The mansion is less of a mansion than the other places we've visited, and it is really more of a formal museum. We are guided through the house and most of the rooms are not accessible to us unless we upgrade our tickets to get us in to a more expensive and extensive tour. So we walk through the house and honestly, it is a little strange seeing random collections of furniture pulled together simply because they are from the same time period. Another thing H.F. would do is buy a house that was being torn down and move entire rooms (including walls, floors and ceilings as well as furniture) into a room in his mansion.

After we finish our tour of the house, we are a short walk to the atrium which connects the mansion to the research library...the atrium is where they display their collection of soup tureens that they got from Campbell's Soup...they have some awesome vessels for serving soup, kind of creates a pretty high level of expectation around the soup that's inside!

They even have a soup tureen for serving Turtle Soup!

We end our day on the tram that takes us around the grounds of the estate so we can see all the various sorts of gardens created by H.F. du Pont. These gardens are really more like areas than gardens...he chose particular areas to plant specific types of plants...like an azalea garden, or an area jammed with different kinds of bulbs. This is Ted, our tram driver and guide through the gardens...

Where we come from, this would not qualify as a garden, just a clump of evergreen trees...

After the open-air tram ride in nearly 100 degree temperatures with suffocating humidity we decide to head home and come back the next day to finish our perusal of the galleries. We head home for happy hour...

...then it's off to dinner for Italian! When the restaurant hostess asked us if we wanted to sit outside or inside, we didn't even pause to think...it feels like a pizza oven out there...!

To finish off the day we make a delicious stop at a local dairy farm that knows how to do ice cream...seriously good ice cream...and you eat it outside where you can smell the aroma of the cows who gave the cream!

As you can see in this photo, it is so humid this evening that the moon appears to be in a fog...

We returned to Winterthur the following day to take advantage of our two-day tickets, and to see the rest of the collection on display. On the drive home we took the scenic route and saw some quintessential rural northeastern scenery...a red covered bridge crossing a creek...

And this is a private train, operating on about four miles of track...and everyone on it seems to be in a great mood, they are all waving at us as we wait for them to pass...!

Another great day of seeing how the 1/10th of 1% lived back in the day...Combined with our last visit to Delaware when we saw our first du Pont home and gardens (Longwood, the 1,000 acre estate of Pierre du Pont, great grandson of E.I., ran du Pont Company and GM), we have now seen all but two of the du Pont family estates...we're still trying to get the family tree straight in our heads, so we'll save those for our next visit...

 

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