Bellefontaine

Giraud Foster lived at Bellefontaine for nearly fifty years and died in it at ninety-four. Four years later the house burned. The shell stood, the photographs survive — including eight taken in the ruins — and the building is now the center of a health resort.

I. Built for one couple, 1896–98

Bellefontaine was built between 1896 and 1898 for Giraud Foster and Jean Van Nest Foster, who had married in 1893. The architects were Carrère & Hastings of New York, later the architects of the New York Public Library.

Lenox History describes the rear entrance as showing “some obeisance to the Petit Trianon at Versailles,” with interiors “furnished in the manner of various Louis’s.” The Lenox Library’s photographs are catalogued by elevation — south façade, north façade, porte cochère — which is a fair description of how the house was meant to be seen.

II. The gardens

The grounds were the other half of the performance: a reflecting pool, a fountain, statuary along the paths, an entrance allée of paired trees, a gate with lions on it, and a range of greenhouses. The Detroit Publishing Company sold views of the flower gardens, the fountain and the lily pond to the traveling public between 1908 and 1910.

A second campaign of photographs, much of it dated 1931, shows the same ground more than thirty years on, the trees grown and the statues still in place.

III. Fifty years

Foster was born on 8 November 1850 and died on 22 September 1945. He lived at Bellefontaine for the greater part of his long life, and was known for the birthday parties he gave there. His wife had died in 1932.

The estate was sold after his death. Wikipedia records the price as $80,000 in 1947, “together with all its furnishings and 182 acres of land”; Lenox History puts the sale in 1946.

IV. 1949

The Society of the Fathers of Mercy bought the place in 1947 and opened it as a minor seminary, Our Lady of Mercy. The fire came two years later. The seminary’s own history dates it to 14 February 1949 and quotes the school paper: “It took three years to build Bellefontaine, ‘the beautiful fountain’, but in two hours it was destroyed by fire.” The Berkshire Eagle gives 13 February, with twenty-two people escaping and everything but the rotunda and the library lost. Rebuilding took a year and was finished in October 1950.

The Lenox Library holds eight photographs made after the fire — columns standing over rubble, a doorway open to the sky, plaster and beams collapsed into the rooms.

The Priests of the Sacred Heart took the seminary over in 1960 and opened it that autumn as the Immaculate Heart of Mary Seminary; a new wing of 1963 took it to two hundred students, and the last class graduated in the spring of 1979. Then a succession of owners, then the exterior restoration and interior rebuilding that made the house the center of Canyon Ranch. Lenox History notes that most of the garden statuary and the greenhouse complex were destroyed by one of the religious orders that held the place after Foster’s death.

Sources

Photographs: Lenox Library Association, 60 items via Digital Commonwealth, titles and dates quoted as catalogued — thirty-one of them from the Edwin Hale Lincoln Photographs collection, whose rights the Library gives as “No known copyright restrictions,” asking that it be contacted about reuse; Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection, five plates (LC-D4-72953 to 72956 and LC-D4-500663), no known restrictions on publication. Text: lenoxhistory.org, “Bellefontaine,” for the building dates, the architects, the Petit Trianon comparison, the 1949 fire and the fate of the gardens; Wikipedia, “Giraud Foster,” for his dates, the marriage, the 1947 sale and the later uses. The accounts differ on when and for how much the estate was sold: Lenox History says 1946; Wikipedia says $80,000 in 1947 with the furnishings and 182 acres; The Berkshire Eagle has the mansion and 96 acres to the Fathers of Mercy for $45,000; American Aristocracy gives $123,000 in 1947. Bellefontaine IHM’s own history, at bellefontaineihm.org, supplies the 1947 purchase by the Fathers of Mercy, the seminary name Our Lady of Mercy, the fire of 14 February 1949 and the school paper’s line about it, the rebuilding finished in October 1950, the Priests of the Sacred Heart from 1960, the Immaculate Heart of Mary Seminary, the 1963 wing and the closure in 1979 — and gives the estate as 200 acres and the house as three years in the building from 1896. No Olmsted job for this estate appears in the firm’s Berkshire list.