Three pages of this site now carry photographs from the same winter campaign — Brookhurst in February 1938, The Mount in January 1940, and this estate in February 1938 — all of them catalogued by elevation and by item number, and none of them saying who made them or why. Ethelwynde answers it. Among its photographs are three measured drawings, and one of them carries a title block.
I. The title block
It reads, in a draftsman’s hand:
ITEM #1
RESIDENCE OF HALSTEAD LINDSLEY, LENOX, MASS.
J. R. HAMPSON, INC., APPRAISAL ENGINEERS, PITTSFIELD, MASS.
BUILT 1930 · MEASURED FEB. 1938 · SCALE 1” = 20’-0”
Appraisal engineers. Not architects, not historians — a Pittsfield firm hired to put a number on a property, working through it building by building, measuring the floors, noting the specifications down the margin, and photographing every face of every structure so the valuation could be checked. The item numbers on The Mount’s photographs and Brookhurst’s catalogue of elevations take the same form, and this page reads them the same way — though only these sheets carry the firm’s name.
The drawings themselves record what the photographs cannot: the first and second floor plans of the house, and a third sheet giving the greenhouse, the barn and two further items with their total floor area and total cubage. Cubage is how appraisers price a building. These are not drawings of a design. They are drawings of an asset.
II. Ethelwynde, and the Winthrops
The estate was built in 1875 for Henri Braem, the United States ambassador to Denmark, and it was he who named it Ethelwynde.
In 1893 it passed to the household of Katharine Wilson Taylor Winthrop — a botanist and a famous hostess, daughter of the financier Moses Taylor, who was the first president of City Bank. Her husband Robert Winthrop descended from Governor John Winthrop.
Their son was Grenville Lindall Winthrop, who built Groton Place on the other side of this town and left four thousand works of art to the Fogg — the largest single holdings of Blake and of Ingres anywhere. He grew up in a family that summered here.
The postcard below names the house the way the period did: “Residence of Mrs. Robert Winthrop, Lenox, Mass.” It is worth setting beside the postcard on The Mount’s page, which calls Edith Wharton’s house the residence of Mr. E. R. Wharton. The convention could go either way, and which way it went is not a small thing.
III. The second house
The Victorian house in those two early views is not the house in the 1938 photographs. In 1925 the property was bought by Halstead Lindley — the Hampson title block spells him Lindsley — who put up a new mansion of Weymouth granite with hand-carved marble fireplaces and purpleheart brought from the Amazon. The estate’s own history dates the purchase to 1925; the measured drawing says BUILT 1930. Both are given.
After him: Isabella Hunnewell Dexter, a Boston philanthropist and horticulturist, from 1948; Sally Schieffelin from 1954, whose trust still supports the Lenox Library that holds these photographs; Dr. Milos Krofta from 1976, who made it the headquarters of his water-purification company; and Ethan and Jamie Berg, who have restored it since 2003. It runs to about forty-five acres and is a private retreat and event place now.
The Lenox Library catalogues the estate as Ethelwyn. The property itself, and the Berkshire Eagle, use Ethelwynde. Both spellings appear on this page as their sources use them.
Sources
Lenox Library Association, Local History Photograph Collection, via Digital Commonwealth: fifteen items, of which thirteen are CC BY 4.0 and two CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Titles and dates are the Lenox Library’s own, including the misspelled “elevaton.” The title block of the first floor plan is transcribed from the sheet itself. Winthrop Estate / Ethelwynde, “History of the Winthrop Estate,” for the 1875 house built for Henri Braem, the naming, the Winthrop acquisition of 1893 and Katharine Wilson Taylor Winthrop, Moses Taylor and City Bank, Robert Winthrop’s descent from Governor John Winthrop, Halstead Lindley’s purchase in 1925 and the Weymouth granite mansion with its marble fireplaces and purpleheart, Isabella Hunnewell Dexter from 1948, Sally Schieffelin from 1954 and her trust’s support of the Lenox Library, Dr. Milos Krofta from 1976, the Bergs from 2003, and the forty-five acres. Grenville Lindall Winthrop’s parentage is as cited on this site’s Groton Place page, from Wikipedia. No Olmsted job for this estate appears on the firm’s Berkshire list. The identification of J. R. Hampson, Inc. as the maker of the February 1938 and January 1940 photographic sequences at Brookhurst and The Mount is this survey’s inference from the shared form of the material; only the Ethelwynde drawings carry the firm’s name.
