Charles Lanier named his Lenox house after an Alpine village near Zurich and built it looking down at Laurel Lake. It stood for forty-six years. In 1928 the next owners pulled it down and built something else on the spot, and while they were doing it they rented the Frelinghuysen house on Kemble Street to live in.
I. Lanier
Charles D. Lanier (1837–1926) was a New York banker and president of the Jekyll Island Club, the shooting and golfing club off the Georgia coast whose membership was more or less the same list of people who summered in Lenox. His wife was Sarah Egleston (1837–1898). The house was built for them in 1882.
The name is Allenwinden, a village above Zurich. Lanier spelled it as two words.
American Aristocracy files the house under both Shingle Style and Victorian, and the photographs support that: a long low shingled front with dormers and a heavy square chimney stack at one end, the whole thing half-buried in creeper.
II. What the pictures show
Fifteen plates. Four of the house, several of them printed postcards — two hand-colored, with the flowerbeds tinted red and the roof green, and one captioned on the face, “Laurel Lake from ‘Allen Winden’ Residence of Mr. Chas. Lanier, Lenox, Mass.” Eight of the grounds: the drive curving in under trees, a long view across mown fields, the garden along the side of the house.
And three of the farm. Two show the stables — a shingled range with a cupola and arched carriage openings. The third is catalogued “Mr. & Mrs. Alfred H. Wingett at estate managers’ home, Allen Winden Farm,” about 1897–1901: an interior, lamplit, with framed photographs on the wall behind them. The people who ran these places are usually nameless in this material. Here are two of them, in their own sitting room, named.
III. 1928
After Lanier died the house and the sixty acres left with it were bought by Reuben Jay Flick and his wife Henrietta for $50,000. They had summered in Lenox for more than twenty years. In 1928 they demolished Allen Winden and built Uplands in its place. Flick died there in 1940, the estate was broken up, and most of the land is now the Winden Hill condominiums.
Sources
Photographs: Lenox Library Association, fifteen items via Digital Commonwealth, titles and dates quoted exactly as catalogued — fourteen licensed CC BY-NC-ND and one from the Edwin Hale Lincoln Photographs collection, whose rights the Library gives as “No known copyright restrictions.” Text: American Aristocracy, “Allen Winden,” for the 1882 build, Charles D. Lanier’s dates and his presidency of the Jekyll Island Club, Sarah Egleston’s dates, the Swiss village the name comes from, the view over Laurel Lake, the Flicks’ purchase of the house and sixty acres for $50,000, the demolition in 1928 and the building of Uplands, Flick’s death in 1940 and the Winden Hill condominiums. lenoxhistory.org, “2 Kemble St.,” independently records the Flicks using the Frelinghuysen house in the early 1930s while their own estate was under construction, which is the same episode from the other end. No Olmsted job for this estate appears in the firm’s Berkshire list.
