Roseland Cottage is a palace of illusion built by a pious influence peddler who wrapped himself in the flag.
ON A SUMMER EVENING in 1870 —the Fourth of July, to be exact—Henry C. Bowen, and his wife, Ellen, hosted a party at their cottage in Woodstock, Conn., a country town that even today has a population of only 8,220. The president of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant, was the Bowens’ guest and several hundred people attended.
Under a sky of exploding fireworks and amid the trees flashing with fireflies, bands played on the lawn, notables made lofty speeches, and Grant strolled with his cigar, which Bowen had forbidden in the house. Bowen was also a teetotaler. Where the president got his liquor that night is anyone’s guess.
The Bowens had built a new two-seat privy behind the house to accommodate the president and his security detail. During his stay, Grant bowled a game in the Bowens’ indoor bowling alley—one of the first in the country—and made a strike.
The event was the first of 25 annual Independence Day celebrations hosted by the Bowens that prompted legions of political luminaries and ordinary citizens from around the country to make the pilgrimage to tiny Woodstock. In 1876, the centennial year, Bowen moved the party to a 60- acre park he created, several miles down the hill from the cottage, with a rowing lake and gilded fountains. Ten thousand people showed up. Woodstock, in what is still known as “the Quiet Corner of Connecticut,” had become the nation’s capital of patriotic display. And the executive mansion was not white. It was pink.
Roseland, the Bowens’ cottage, is a 6,000-square-foot house, built in 1846 in the newly fashionable Gothic Revival style, sitting on six acres landscaped to the principles of Andrew Jackson Downing, that era’s most influential tastemaker. The cottage is a phantasmagorical sight, with swordlike spires and full fancy-dress costume of ornamental bargeboards and chimney pots. Situated across a two-lane country road from Woodstock’s 17th-century village green, Roseland appears never to have understood what it means to live in a small town. Porcelain doorknobs, decorated to look like Delft china, open and close all the doors; matching miniature pulls open and close all its diamond-paned windows.
The house is the embodiment of Henry C. Bowen: an extremely successful, self-made man, and a duplicitous, highly political beast whose star rose, fell and rose again. Nothing was ever as it seemed for Bowen, who made his fortune as a dry goods salesman in New York City. He built Roseland as a peaceful summer refuge for his young family and a forceful demonstration of his wealth and ambition. He went on to become the publisher of the nation’s leading abolitionist newspaper, The Independent, as well as a confidant and appointee of President Abraham Lincoln’s. He was also the great friend of the century’s most famous minister, Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, and a star witness in Beecher’s trial for adultery, one of the century’s greatest scandals. With his reputation challenged and his political influence waning, Bowen retreated to Woodstock, initiating a brilliant offensive. He became a showman’s version of a patriotic hero—draping himself, with a flourish, in the flag. It was a flourish that has served so many so well, before and after him.
Henry Bowen was a native son of Woodstock. Born in 1813, the eldest of a general store owner and tavern keeper, he was of the eighth generation of Bowens in America. They had immigrated to Boston from South Wales and arrived in Woodstock in 1686 as members of the original colony.
Bowen left Woodstock at 21 to take a job as a clerk in New York with Arthur and Lewis Tappan’s dry goods business. After five years, he turned down a partnership with the Tappans and set himself up as a competitor. He made a different sort of alliance with Lewis Tappan. In 1844, he married Tappan’s daughter, Lucy, 19—pious, pale, a Sunday school teacher, rich and well connected.
Two years later Bowen, then 33, built Roseland for Lucy and their young son, Henry. His thriving emporium, which specialized in silks, did business in a marble faced mansion in lower Manhattan. With a suitcase full of cash, Bowen bought the only remaining empty lot on Woodstock’s commons—the center of the town’s provincial universe—and hired Joseph C. Wells, an English architect practicing in New York City, to design a house. Wells was one of 12 men who would found the American Institute of Architects in 1857.
The five-bedroom cottage—plus a full complement of auxiliary buildings, including a large carriage barn with a bowling alley built to Bowen’s specifications— was to be designed in the Gothic style, a newly popular revival of medieval motifs from churches and castles. The Gothic Revival became fashionable in England in 1749 thanks to man of letters and parliamentarian Horace Walpole. Strawberry Hill, the crenellated curiosity piece Walpole built in the town of Twickenham, exerted a great influence on architectural and decorative taste, which now turned to antiquarianism as the newest thing.
By the mid-19th century in America, the Gothic Revival reigned in smart circles. It was fresh yet respectful of the past, fanciful yet imbued with a moral tone by virtue of ecclesiastical references that were pleasing to temperate Victorians like Bowen.
The Quiet Corner of Connecticut had never seen anything like it. Roseland was extravagantly modern— a cathedral of spires, crockets, verge boards, arches, finials, trefoils and stained glass. It was also structurally modern: Because of technological innovations like balloon framing, interiors could meander into nooks and wings and asymmetrical room arrangements that strayed from the entry hall as far as they liked. Roseland was big.
And, it was pink—Lucy Bowen’s favorite color.
Hand in glove with the Gothic Revival was a dawning nostalgia for simpler times, and the purer values of an earlier, Edenic America. Ongoing westward expansion demonstrated to the nation its own restlessness and created a sense of impermanence. The new Industrial Revolution, with its unsettling costs, like child labor, and the social fracture of slavery and suffrage created a yearning for untroubling touchstones like the home. Be it ever so humble, there was no place like it.
Home was everywhere at the heart of the nation. Andrew Jackson Downing, a garden and landscape designer, essayist, editor of The Horticulturist and author of four successful books published between 1841 and 1850, did the most to promote that precept. To be house-proud was to be patriotic. Bowen owned a copy of Downing’s A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, which sits on a shelf at Roseland. And Roseland adhered to Downing when it could.
The house was provided with an abbreviated version of the winding, picturesque carriage approach that Downing prescribed, groups of specimen trees—tulip, ginkgo, hawthorn, shagbark hickory—grazing like becalmed cattle to the sides.
Embraced by the approach is the garden: Roseland’s crown jewel. Originally a rosarium, the present plot was laid out in 1850. It adheres to the design of the day, also detailed by Downing: closely massed perennials and annuals, in 21 beds, whose pattern and colors were to approximate a fine carpet, stitch-hemmed with 600 yards of low boxwood.
As confectionary as the house looked, iced pink like a cake and trickled with carved trim, Roseland was the unblushing representative of Bowen’s vaunted sense of his self-worth, and would serve as the stage for his ambitions. In the process of putting it up, Bowen hired and fired tradesmen freely, apparently more interested in driving hard bargains than generating local goodwill. He was by all accounts tight-handed and brusque, with a head for figures and his eyes always on the prize.
As the nation was swept into the storm of the Civil War, Bowen stepped into the turbulent winds of abolitionist politics, adopting a strong, public antislavery stance.
The year after Roseland was completed, Bowen, a Congregationalist, founded Plymouth Church in Brooklyn Heights, where he lived most of the year, with a group of fellow merchants. Joseph Wells, Roseland’s architect, designed the building. Bowen eventually bought the Heights’ most elegant mansion from David Leavitt, a financier who made a fortune in lead paint.
Piety was good posture. Neighboring real estate investment was improved by the presence of a church, which was also an influential social platform.
Bowen realized he needed a compelling minister to pack the church, and enlisted a young preacher from Indiana whose reputation for igneous antislavery speeches had traveled east: Henry Ward Beecher, a brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe. In 1850 Bowen, like his father-in-law, Lewis Tappan, denounced the Fugitive Slave Act, to the detriment of his business.
Beecher, set loose, with new clothes and a new haircut, and more suave Wall Street broker than Midwestern Bible-thumper, set fire to his new congregation with a blaze of oratory.
“Mr. Beecher is a remarkably handsome man when he is in the full tide of sermonizing,” observed Mark Twain, who like thousands of others took the ferry from Manhattan to Brooklyn to see him at work.
In 1848 Bowen founded The Independent, a weekly newspaper that provided a voice for his political and social beliefs. It also, conveniently, provided a place to publish and sell Beecher, with a regular column that became best-selling books. And it was a place for Bowen to surreptitiously promote his business interests. He personally wrote the financial pages.
In 1860, as part of a lecture series at Plymouth Church, Bowen invited a spirited debater from Illinois the lawyer Abraham Lincoln, to come to New York. Arriving on a Saturday, Lincoln visited Bowen at The Independent’s office, accompanied him to hear Beecher preach on Sunday, and spoke at Cooper Institute in Manhattan on Monday to an audience whose thunderous response to his speech secured him the Republican Party nomination and the presidency.
Declining the opportunity of a more prominent appointment in Lincoln’s presidential administration, Bowen showed his desire to be the tax collector in New York’s Third District, which covered most of Brooklyn. His black tin collection box now sits on display in the library at Roseland. The shadows of power were more lucrative than the limelight.
At Roseland, Lucy and the children read French, sewed, napped, rode. By 1850, there were four live-in servants—young Irish girls who dried the bed sheets on the lawn behind the aviary and before the meadow, where the farm animals fed. By 1854, there was a governess, Edna Dean Proctor, a teacher at the Woodstock Academy and a published poet.
In New York City, Bowen’s professional life had become complex. Beecher, “The Most Famous Man in America,” as his latest biographer, Debby Applegate, declared him in her Pulitzer Prize–winning book of that title, was now an errant contributor to The Independent and a spendthrift in continuous debt, who was happy to cut deals for money that did not include Bowen, his de facto financial manager.
It got worse.
To a growing number of eyes, Beecher’s charisma had been working its wonder privately with the ladies of Plymouth Church. Then in 1858, Edna Proctor, the Bowens’ governess, accused Beecher of rape. Proctor recalled to Bowen her virgin’s cry, “Oh I am covered in blood.”
Bowen buried the confidence. Ever the businessman, and politician, he was quick to protect the revenue that flowed from Beecher’s reputation and to protect his own position as Beecher’s patron. But the scandalous accusations multiplied, culminating in a charge of adultery by Theodore Tilton, The Independent’s editor, between his wife, Elizabeth, and Beecher.
Bowen drew the two men into a pact that involved both the promise of bribery and the threat of blackmail, to buy their silence. Tilton silenced his wife.
The pact didn’t hold. In a rage, Tilton bared his wounds to a rival newspaper, the Brooklyn Eagle, and took Beecher to court. The six-month trial, which ended with a hung jury, was an international sensation. In the course of it, the Eagle scraped the barrel on Henry Bowen, bringing to light not only his behavior during the Beecher debacle, but every ethically tenuous transaction he had entered into since the 1840s. He was “a malicious, malignant and cunning old rat,” the Eagle concluded.
But Bowen was already down the road. In 1863, Lucy died, at 38, after giving birth to her 10th child. There are strong suggestions, in correspondence between Bowen and Beecher, that Lucy may also have been seduced by Beecher, and that Bowen suppressed that secret too.
Bowen remarried, on Christmas morning, two years later. His bride, Ellen Holt, was a doctor’s daughter from Pomfret, Conn., 20 years his junior and eager to begin realizing her own far-ranging ambitions with the help of her new husband, and her new home, Roseland Cottage.
Few Americans needed a second act more than Bowen. Roseland provided it, now representing an age of innocence and stately grace.
The Bowens revived an observance that had been more or less moribund since the Revolutionary War: Independence Day. During the Civil War, celebrations of the Fourth of July had disappeared. Bowen issued a national invitation to come to his house. Though it was Woodstock, he would be the king of his castle.
Swagged in red, white and blue bunting, Roseland annually hosted an expanding roster of patriotic events for the day in the quarter century following the initial party attended by President Grant in 1870. Two more presidents, Rutherford B. Hayes and Benjamin Harrison, ventured to Woodstock for the festivities. So did three past and future presidential candidates, John C. Frémont, James G. Blaine and William McKinley, in addition to a long list of senators, congressmen, governors and other prominent political, literary and social figures.
In the 1880s, the Bowens modernized and redecorated the house to befit its new role as a showplace, including the installation of gilded Lincrusta-Walton wall covering, developed by the English inventor of linoleum, Frederick Walton, which resembles embossed leather. The same material hung in the White House. From then on, as fireworks brilliantly set the sky ablaze outside, the lamp-lit corridors and parlors inside Roseland glowed like the gold of Aladdin’s cave.
Acquired in 1970 by Historic New England, a preservationist organization of 37 properties, Roseland Cottage, open for tour, is a remarkable survivor, like Bowen himself, who outlived the collapse of his business after the Civil War, the taint of Beecher’s unpunished sins and political death: Bowen was stripped of his government appointment after The Independent feuded with Lincoln’s successor in the White House, Andrew Johnson.
But Roseland resurrected him, hoisting him to the top of the country’s estimation, as the first father of the Fourth of July, like a flag up a pole.
William L. Hamilton writes about design for the Wall Street Journal and architecture and design for The Architect’s Newspaper.
Originally published in the April 2013 issue of American History. To subscribe, click here.
