Puslapio vaizdai
PDF
„ePub“
[graphic][merged small]
[blocks in formation]

TEARLY all country places in Amer

N

ica have developed along similar lines of gradual and natural evolution; most of them have some tradition going back to Colonial or Revolutionary beginnings, and have passed from periods of early crudeness, and come to full and perfect beauty only with the mellowing help Not so Tuxedo. Old-World

of age. and tradition-haunted as it looks, it is new, incredibly new.

A foreigner, standing on one of its smoothest terraces and looking down upon its lakes, its perfect roads winding among garden-covered hills, its chimneys rising seemingly from the depths of deep forest, remarked that this must be the oldest place in America. It was almost impossible to make him believe in the Aladdin-like miracle of its building-that from its first inception it took complete form within a single season of seven months.

Throughout one winter and the following spring an architect, directing eighteen hundred workmen, digging, hauling,

pounding, and blasting,-chiefly blasting, -transformed a tract of graystone boulders and uncultivated forest into a smooth park, with broad roads, commodious clubhouse, numerous cottages, and a complete village at its gates.

But the story begins on September 18, 1885, when, in the pouring rain, Mr. Pierre Lorillard and Mr. Bruce Price stood on the rear platform of the Buffalo express.

They had passed the thirty-five milepost from Jersey City, and the train was running through a wooded valley beside the little river of the Ramapo, the engine puffing hard on the up-grade, the wheels slipping occasionally on the dripping tracks. Regardless of the downpour, Mr. Lorillard leaned far out from the platform steps. "All right," he called up to the conductor; "signal to stop-now!"

The train slowed down, and Mr. Lorillard jumped. lard jumped. Mr. Price jumped after him, and the train, without coming to a standstill, left them in an apparently un

Copyright, 1911, by THE CENTURY Co. All rights reserved.

LXXXII- 99

795

inhabited valley, between hills that, seen through the veil of a pelting rain, looked indefinitely high and desolate. Mr. Lorillard nor Mr. Price had rainNeither coat or umbrella,-it had been sunny an hour before in New York,-so with shoulders and collars up, they climbed the bank, from the higher vantage of which they could see a small, red-brick house about an eighth of a mile away, with an old apple-orchard behind it. Except for this solitary house, the orchard, and the road, there was nothing to be seen but rain and rocks and small trees rising on the steep hills, up and up and up.

It was a typical lumber-country. The official name of the property, in fact, was the "Wood-Pile," its timber being then sold regularly to the Erie Railroad for fuel, which was then using wood-burning engines. As though the day had been the sunniest of spring, Mr. Lorillard pointed

99

up a forest brook,-the rain running up his sleeve as he did so,-saying, "I shall have the entrance there, with an important gateway and lodge.' He waved tothe station. ward the track. "Over there I shall have apple-trees- "I shall have a row of stores, There"-he indicated the and the village cottages beyond. I want half a dozen cottages. Perhaps I had betbigger-to hold two families. And the ter make it a dozen. Make some of them stables? Oh, yes, the stables-put them They might have sent one with a cover; on the hill. Ah, here comes the trap. but never mind."

A wagon appeared driven by a farmer Price, now as wet as water-rats, got into from Southfields. Mr. Lorillard and Mr. the trap.

far as the lake." The farmer protested "We will go up the old lumber trail as that he did not think a wagon could get

[graphic][merged small][merged small]
[graphic][merged small][merged small]

through; it was all rocks and underbrush, and too narrow for a team to pass. Mr. Lorillard took the reins out of the farmer's hands.

"You can wait at the brick house. Wherever a man can go, a team and wagon can go. I'll drive."

And drive he did, over bushes and rocks and stumps of trees, but always able to find space wide enough to worm the wagon through. Just as the hubs barked two saplings, one on each side, and then nearly turned over on a boulder, Mr. Lorillard said casually:

"This is the main road from the sta

tion. Better have it a good, wide macadam at the beginning; no sense in leaving it half done."

The ascent had been steady for nearly two miles, the winding in and out that day made the distance perhaps nearly three,-when at last they came out upon a broad ledge of rock from which they had a wide view of wooded hills surrounding a long lake that lay about 200 feet below them. There was no sign of cultivation except at the north end, where there were some narrow fields and a mountaineer's hut. Mr. Lorillard pointed toward the cleared space.

[graphic]

"That is a good site for the club-house," he said. "Don't you think so? And we can have a row of cottages between there and here."

Mr. Lorillard ordered houses in the same way that other people might order boots. He talked rapidly, and thought twice as fast as he talked, and he wished his orders carried out at a speed that equaled the sum of both. Once, just as he was leaving Mr. Price's office, he called back: "By the way, make it four cottages more, instead of two. Show me the plans to-morrow, and break ground for them next Monday."

If, when he saw the plans, he did not like them, he insisted upon new sketches being made then and there, before his eyes, rejecting or accepting them from a few penciled lines. He always knew what he wanted, never forgot a detail of a single one of the forty-odd buildings, and never changed his mind about them.

On the first of October thirty miles of macadam and dirt roads, engineered by Mr. Ernest Bowditch of Boston, were begun, and the main installation made for a sewage and water system that to-day cannot be surpassed. Sixty-eight teams

798

hauled the pipes and then hauled the lumber, which began to come at the beginning of November. Rows of hemlock shanties, covered with pink building-paper, made a regular streets, which they called by such small city of "Italian villas," built in One of the alleys was "Fifth Avenue.' names as "Broadway" and the "Corso." An eating-place was known monico's." as "Del

In beginning Tuxedo, the architect's surrounding woods, and the gate-lodge and idea was to fit in the buildings with the keep were built of graystone, with as The shingle cottages were stained the colmuch moss and lichen on it as possible. ors of the woods, russets and grays and dull reds, ugly to the taste of a quarter

[ocr errors]
« AnkstesnisTęsti »