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The Southampton History Museum is bringing guests back to the Gilded Age with a lecture series focused on the pivotal time in Southampton history.
Tom Edmonds, the executive director of the museum, said he is excited to remind the village of its past and the beginnings of the mansions lining the streets today.
“Because I’m so slow to come around, the Rogers Mansion is actually a Gilded Age mansion, and I just hadn’t realized that until about two years ago,” Mr. Edmonds said of the main property owned by the Southampton History Museum. He said the realization that the museum was actually inside of a Gilded Age building was a factor that inspired him and his staff to create the lecture series.
The very first house built on the beach in Southampton was built right at the beginning of the Gilded Age, around 1870. It belonged to Dr. Gilliard Thomas, a gynecologist from New York City who built a huge house on the beach for his clients to relax post-procedure, Mr. Edmonds said. “The women came to rest and be under his care, and then they came back and built their own mansions.”
Though the house no longer stands today, it made a huge impact on the future of the village.
“Women really defined the Village of Southampton,” he said. As the village grew and more and more New Yorkers discovered it, a young heiress named Jessie Donahue built a gigantic mansion on Gin Lane—the subject of the first lecture.
The house now known as Wooldon Manor was Ms. Donahue’s attempt at breaking into the Southampton social scene, Mr. Edmonds said. “She had huge parties and threw her money around, yet nobody ever really liked her.” She eventually packed up and left, her house burned down, and all that remained was the pool house—a mansion in itself that still stands today.
Gary Lawrance, a co-author of “Houses of the Hamptons 1880-1930” and an architectural historian, will be giving the lecture on the manor and its history at the museum on Thursday, July 26.
The second lecture, taking place on Thursday, August 9, is about antique rugs and their own interesting histories. Hans Boujaran, owner of Antique Rug Galleria on North Main Street in Southampton, will be discussing the importance of decorative rugs in Gilded Age households and how they showed off wealth while simultaneously telling stories.
“He came into the museum one day and he just walked around with his head down. He started telling me stories about them, and what I thought were just pretty abstract patterns are actually donkeys and villagers. … They’re not what they appear to be,” Mr. Edmonds said.
William Merritt Chase, a prolific painter and founder of the Shinnecock Summer School of Art, is the subject of the third lecture on Thursday, August 23. Mr. Edmonds said that the Shinnecock School was the first outdoor painting school in America, following the European art trend of painting “en plein air.”
The final lecture of the series will be on Thursday, August 30, given by Mary Cummings, author of “Saving Sin City: William Travers Jerome, Stanford White and the Original Crime of the Century.” Ms. Cumming’s book, based on a true story of jealousy and opulence, was the factor that Mr. Edmonds said truly finalized the lecture series’s theme. “It’s all because of Mary, but it just makes so much sense.”
“Southampton’s Gilded Age: Summer Lecture Series” will take place on select Thursdays at 4 p.m. at the Rogers Mansion on 17 Meeting House Lane, beginning on Thursday, July 26. Tickets are $10 for each lecture and $30 for the entire series. Visit southamptonhistory.org or call 631-283-2494.
on Jul 8, 2018