Running it
A finished house is a payroll. Inside and out, the people who made these places work once the builders had gone.
The household
The rooms rarely photographed
The archive holds dining rooms by the hundred and not one kitchen, laundry or servants’ hall. The absence is the record.
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Under glass
Thomas Proctor’s tomatoes
The head gardeners grew fruit out of season in a cold county, kept a society, and went down to New York to judge the largest flower show in the country.
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Under glass
Who had glass
The atlas gives greenhouses a color of their own, so the whole county’s glass is on the map. Forty ranges in eight towns — and a third of them are trade, not display.
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Stable and garage
The last coachmen
Eight coachmen left in South County by 1923, against seventy-eight chauffeurs. James Renfrew is holding the reins, and that is the whole of the record.
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The farm
The farm buildings came first
Seven hundred and fifty-six farmers and three hundred farmhands in ten towns, against eight coachmen. These were not houses with grounds. They were farms with a house on them.
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A rumor, and what it would have been
The coin of the realm
It is said at Elm Court that every employee was given a gold coin at the end of the season. No source has been found that says so — but there were only four gold coins it could have been, and against a chambermaid’s wage they run from four days’ pay to a month’s.
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Keep up with it
New properties go up here as the research turns them up.