Clover Adams by Natalie Dykstra

Author:Natalie Dykstra
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (www.hmhco.com)

CHAPTER 17

A New Home

IN MID-DECEMBER of 1883, Clover wrote her father her usual newsy Sunday letter, this time announcing she had sold her thoroughbred horse Powhatan to Anne Bayard, the young daughter of the Delaware senator Thomas Bayard. The horse had become “unmanageable,” particularly for Henry, who had neither Clover’s confidence nor skill with horses. Watching Henry get thrown off Powhatan at Beverly Farms was one thing, Clover decided, but “fighting a balking horse on the slippery asphalt pavements” was too dangerous for “both horse and rider.” She reported happily that Anne would be “a good mistress” for the “handsome beast” because the young girl had decided to buy him even though he had already run away with her, such that she had to “jump from his back to save her head from a tree trunk.” Clover also told how Possum, their Skye terrier, whom she called “our ewe lamb,” had been struck by a carriage on Pennsylvania Avenue earlier in the week. “He was brought home in a wagon in extremis,” Clover reported, and when she and Henry came home, they found him on his back. “He wagged his tail faintly and gasped out ‘I see them beckoning to me.’ I said ‘Possum the angels never take dogs who can wag their tails.’”

But Clover put the real news of the day in a postscript. She and Henry had decided to build a new house on Lafayette Square. “[John] Hay has bought the vacant lot next to us,” Clover explained, “the whole lot is 98½ feet east to west by 131¼ north to south.” Hay planned to build on the corner, at Sixteenth and H Streets, and she and Henry would build on land between his corner lot and their current house on H Street. The scheme had originated earlier in the fall. The Hays were interested in moving back to Washington, and when they stayed with the Adamses in November, they’d gone real estate shopping, wanting a house close by their two hearts. When it became clear that the corner lot was for sale, Hay gave Henry the go-ahead to purchase the whole lot on his behalf. Hay then turned around and sold to Henry—on Henry’s suggestion—a forty-four-foot portion of the lot for “⅓ the price of the whole tract.” The sale was completed on December 11 for “approximately $73,800” for both lots, with the Adamses paying $25,500 for their portion.

Clover wrote to Anne Palmer with the news that they wanted to “put up a modest mansion—44 feet wide—43 high.” The building plan was an enormous relief to Clover. The land had been bought previously by a developer who wanted to put up a seven-and-a-half-story apartment building, which would have made the back of the Adamses’ current house “dark and untenable.” She had been dreading losing three large trees that would have been felled to make room for construction. The real estate deal with John Hay had resolved these issues in one stroke, though Clover still wanted approval from her father and brother.

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