Not only was our tour group of a dozen lingering, we were doing so in an area — the staff quarters and work spaces — that would have been off-limits when Berwind (1848-1936) held sway. As we walked the large rooms where sumptuous meals were prepared and laundry and linens were washed, Caldwell encouraged children on the tour to pick up one of the heavy irons and imagine wielding it all day, as one of the Irish immigrant women who worked under the head laundress would have done.
The tour, the only one of its kind among the Preservation Society of Newport County’s properties, does not traverse the typical audio trail of grand rooms. It starts in the foyer and proceeds outside through the service entrance, basement storage and laundry rooms, the coal and wine cellars, a two-floor storage pantry for china and glassware, a massive kitchen, and up a back staircase to the top-floor staff quarters. It ends with a rooftop view of the mansion’s grounds and Newport Harbor.
Nearly all of the work of the house was done out of sight, with measures including a huge wisteria tree which, in bloom, hid the service entrance from view, and a tiny underground tunnel and railroad track that led to the street where coal was delivered — Berwind-White Co. coal, of course.
“The Elms was designed in the spirit of the Gilded Age,’’ said Caldwell. “Nothing was allowed to spoil the illusion of being in a French chateau.’’
Berwind’s villa was based on the château d’Asnières outside Paris, which was built in 1752. The architect of The Elms, which replaced an earlier Victorian-style home of the same name on the property, was Horace Trumbauer of Philadelphia. Trumbauer was little known at the time, but he would go on to design Harvard’s Widener Library, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and much of the Duke University campus.
