The American Country House by Aslet Clive

Author:Aslet , Clive
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-05-08T16:00:00+00:00

Between the extremes of running a first-class commercial enterprise and raising nothing at all lay, one suspects, the majority of gentleman farmers, who enjoyed keeping livestock as a hobby but had little serious hope of making it pay (Plate 132). As long ago as 1851, writing in his book Rural Homes, the architect Gervase Wheeler had recognized the propensity of some gentlemen “to raise potatoes at four dollars a barrel, when you can send to the city and buy them at three.”14 Half a century later market place economics had still failed to catch up with the farm group. Oliver Gould Jennings, the eighth generation of his family to live at Fairfield, Connecticut, spent rather more time on his hundred and twenty acres than other estate owners, but his house, Mailand, was conveniently placed for New York. The farm kept both town and country houses supplied with meat, vegetables, and flowers through the year, and Jennings was particularly proud of a prize Jersey bull with the happy name of Interested Laddie. Nevertheless, there was no suggestion that any of the Mailand activities should generate income. “This farming is a fad to which Mr. Jennings devotes much of his leisure, though he goes in for it simply as an amateur, the product being only sufficient to furnish his own table and satisfy the needs of the establishment.”15 For Washington E. Connor, formerly the chief henchman of Jay Gould, growing oranges and keeping a mixed herd of Holsteins and Jerseys on his Florida estate was again no more than the “favorite hobby of to-day.”16 Folly Farm was the name that the paper manufacturer Irwin N. Megargee gave to his model stock and dairy operation in Pennsylvania, because financially it had indeed proved to be a folly.

In the first full year of its existence, 1903, Country Life in America explained the idea on which the John Sloane estate, Wyndhurst in Massachusetts, operated: “No product of the farm is ever sold. Butter and cream are shipped every day to the family in New York. Vegetables and flowers are sent three times a week.” Later in its life the magazine was even franker about farm group economics:

The country gentleman of to-day does not farm for profit. He creates in the city and recreates in the country, and his herds and flocks are an investment in healthful diversion. He may, and usually does, exercise care in his expenditures and, once his establishment is equipped and manned, he maintains an orderly and economic plan of management. In the care and maintenance of his pedigreed herds, he is a specialist in a field which is little understood by the layman,… he is the man behind the pure-bred industry…. The dairy cow owes its present unequalled efficiency to him. He has been the largest single buyer and breeder…. He aspires to excel in the art of breeding great dairy animals – to attain the ideal which is ever eluding the grasp of the most persistent and skilful breeders. Regardless of what he may expend, his efforts result in quality breeding animals.

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