Levi P. Morton in Rhinecliff
by Cynthia Owen Philip

When we left Levi P. Morton in About Town's last issue, he had risen from a general store clerk in New Hampshire to become a world class financier, a Congressman from New York City's silk-stocking district, the United States Minister to France and in the 1888 election had just won the electoral college—but not the popular—vote for Vice President of the United States on the Republican ticket with Benjamin Harrison. He had sired five daughters and, having sold his summer place in Newport, bought Ellerslie, a great, rundown gentleman's farm in Rhinecliff-on-Hudson. Here begins the last third of his life, during which he made his principal residence in the hamlet.

Ellerslie
To design a suitable mansion on this handsome river view property, Morton chose America's most fashionable architect, Richard Morris Hunt. Hunt had already built a ballroom for Morton's Newport house and a stable for his house in New York City. In the course of that work they had become close friends. Hunt tore down the deteriorated Ellerslie mansion built by the Maturin Livingstons and refurbished by William D. Kelly and, on the same commanding site, put up a house that was unlike any other in his extensive oeuvre. It bore no resemblance whatever to the French renaissance mansions he built for the Vanderbilts on Fifth Avenue or the neo-classical palaces he designed for them at Newport. Nor was it similar to the medieval fort genre Hunt was using for Crumwold Hall in Hyde Park, another estate Hunt was designing at the same time for Morton's friend, the New York City financier Archibald Rogers. It was most like his early stick-style houses and the Tudoresque block of shops at Newport that Morton must have developed a fancy for. (Hunt was proud of his reputation of giving his clients what they wanted.) The new Ellerslie's first floor was constructed of solid granite blocks; the second and third stories were stucco-ed and timbered. Ample verandas surrounded three sides. A very large and comparatively squat mansion, it fit well into the landscape. Superb photographs show the interiors to have been handsome but comfortable, well suited to family life.

The surrounding grounds were also delightful. Building on the tradition of fine landscaping established by Kelly, it had a network of gravel drives, a lake with a pretty bridge, and a boathouse and an Italian garden that reportedly required 14 gardeners to maintain. Hunt was commissioned to design barns, greenhouses, a laundry and a dairy/powerhouse for the end-of-the-century's new invention, electricity. He and his wife joined the Mortons at Ellerslie to receive the 1888 Presidential election returns via private telegraph wire and, along with Archibald Rogers and other friends, acted at the inauguration ceremonies as a guard of honor; "political bridesmaids and groomsmen" was how Hunt described them.

Disappointing Vice Presidency
Morton's tenure as vice-president was far from a complete success. Even before the inauguration he received wearisome solicitations for office, including ones from relatives. At the same time he himself foolishly wrote President-Elect Harrison asking that agriculture and navy be given to New York Staters and otherwise offering help him with his cabinet appointments. Harrison replied immediately: "Do not make the mistake of presenting a name for a place. Your New York friends should know that cabinet selection is not a state question." This interchange marked the tenor of Morton's relationship with Harrison throughout the term. Did Morton not realize that for Harrison, a Midwesterner and grandson of a former president, the idea of being beholden to a collapsing New York State machine was anathema? Morton, however, never stopped trying to form a relationship with the president. He persisted in asking the Harrisons to make use of his house in New York City and to visit Ellerslie, even arranging for a steam yacht to take their party up the Hudson; the president could never spare the time.

In his official capacity, Morton was said to preside over the Senate "as if they were guests at his dinner table." He did not seem to grasp that the best chance a vice president had to exercise power was in strong-arming senators; it simply was not in his temperament to do so. When the term was over, however, senators from both parties gave Morton a grand dinner with toasts to his honorable evenhandedness. Morton was proud of that event to the end of his life.

Despite his splendid country mansion and farm to which he could escape for respite from time to time, Morton's home life was far from serene. His wife Anna Livingston Street had gained a reputation as a wise woman and great hostess—which perhaps she was—but she collapsed as soon as hot weather came. In May of 1889 she journeyed first to Paris, then went on to Carlsbad and St. Moritz to take the waters. Their teenaged daughter Edith, who accompanied her, warned the father that he was courting danger by letting her mother stay abroad; an admirer was delighting her with presents of strawberries and flowers. Anna, however, wrote that she was escaping home life because her nerves were so weak. "O what will you do without me?" she wailed. "Who will take care of the children?"

In fact, Anna's frayed nerves were not a temporary condition. In 1892 she summered at Bar Harbor so as to be near Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, a forceful doctor who specialized in curing fashionable women of nervous complaints. His patients were required to lie prone in a darkened room and be fed by nurses; no stimulation —no sitting up, no reading, writing or sewing—was permitted until they showed marked improvement; if they did not improve it was because they had not sufficiently subjected their wills to his. Troubled by her persistent weakness, Morton wrote President Harrison that his wife might not return to Washington that winter. These long periods when she was off seeking cures perhaps explain the great welcome-home fantasies her daughters prepared each time she returned to Ellerslie: banners across the driveway, wreaths and garlands decorating the verandahs, and one of them playing "Home, Sweet Home" on the piano inside the flower-filled mansion.

The demise of Morton's political career in Washington came in 1892 when Harrison dumped him as his vice-presi-dential partner for the upcoming election and chose instead Morton's erstwhile friend and successor as Minister to France, Whitelaw Reid. Meanwhile Morton was kept on tenterhooks, during the election campaign in which he was not participating, as to whether he would be required to stand in for the president at the dedication ceremonies of the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago (because Harrison's wife was seriously ill). Not only did Morton dislike public speaking, but he felt humiliated to be required to do so as a last minute, and indeed cast-off, understudy. In the end, however, he made the dedicatory address. The only mitigating factor was that Richard Morris Hunt was the star of the occasion for having set the gleaming white neo-classical theme of the buildings and for having designed the dominant and much acclaimed administration building.

Governor of New York State
The Harrison/Reid ticket was a total failure; Grover Cleveland, who had preceded Harrison as president, was reelected by a wide margin. Morton and his family traveled abroad. On their return to the United States in 1894, Tom Platt, then the leader New York State's "stalwart" Republican machine, put Morton up for governor. Winning easily, Morton spent his single, two-year term as governor of the most powerful state in the nation exercising disinterested executive power based on good judgment. Month by month, he became more adept at wielding power in the public spotlight and at treading the tightrope between acceding to the wishes of "Boss" Tom Platt and running the governorship in his own conscientious fashion. He visibly began to enjoy the power the governorship gave him.

Nevertheless, Morton found two issues profoundly vexing. One was his inability to convince Brooklyn to agree to the merger envisioned in the Greater New York law that would eventually bring about the consolidation of the five boroughs into one powerful New York City. The second was the contention surrounding a bill which he eventually succeeded in having passed: the "Raines bill," legislation that limited the sales of liquor on Sunday to hotels that served meals and had at least ten rooms to rent. Although virtually all his long time business and social friends were firmly against the bill, and Morton recognized it would deprive a great many men of employment, he believed it would promote public morals and the welfare of thousands of families. Ironically for Morton, over the next decade "Raines hotels" sprouted myriad tiny rooms, known as "cribs," that were commonly used by streetwalkers.

Morton did not run for governor in 1896. I have uncovered no valid reason for his failure to do so other than the fact that during the second year of his term he was seriously considered by a group of gold-standard Republicans as their ideal candidate for president of the United States. Although he refused to acknowledge his candidacy publicly, he followed newspaper accounts of his growing number of supporters with unrestrained enthusiasm. In the end the nomination was won by William McKinley, an Ohio man whose campaign was run by the brilliant, soon to be famous, Mark Hanna. After a hard fought battle against the spell-binding orator William Jennings Bryan, who ran on a platform of "silver money," McKinley was elected president. Although Morton went through the polite forms of congratulating McKinley, he was obviously disappointed. In early 1897 he came home full-time to Ellerslie, which had often provided a haven during his two years in Albany. He never again ran for public office.

Home Life at Ellerslie
Morton did, however, take up banking again. In his usual style, he made a great success out of the Morton Trust Company. (In 1909, when he was 85, he sold it to his friend and sometimes rival J.P. Morgan, who re-named it the Morgan Guaranty Trust.) At the same time, he played an active role in its operations. His herd of Guernsey cows became renowned; men interested in scientific farming from all over the world came to visit it. His excellent milk and butter was in demand in New York City's fine restaurants and elite clubs. However, although expertly run, the farm was never a paying proposition. In fact, one of Morton's standard jokes was to offer his guests a choice of milk or champagne: they were, he explained, of equal expense to him. While Morton expected full dedication from all his employees, he treated each one with the same consideration as he did his friends.

With five eligible daughters, social life in the mansion was also brisk. There were weekend house parties with tennis matches, boating, swimming and balls. In 1900 Edith married William Corcoran Eustis of Washington; they would have five children, the first being born in 1903. Alice married Winthrop Rutherford in 1902 and had six children. (After Alice died of appendicitis in 1917, Rutherford married Lucy Mercer, who had been Eleanor Roosevelt's personal secretary and became Franklin Roosevelt's lifetime intimate friend.) Helen's brief marriage to a titled Frenchman was dissolved, it appears, because of his womanizing; she returned to the family fold, taking back her maiden name.

Holiday Farm
Two of Morton's daughters never wed. Instead Mary, the youngest daughter, launched Holiday Farm, the family's first philanthropic effort in Rhinecliff. Its purpose was to give tenement children recently released from New York City hospitals a chance to recuperate in a friendly, fresh air setting. Morton fitted up the old Hutton house north of the depot with running water, plumbing, a decent kitchen and, eventually, central heat and, in May 1902, it opened with 12 little patients recommended by New York City doctors. The first annual report called the charity a resounding success, except for a bout of whooping cough. "Kindness," it said, "worked wonders on their only too often hardened little natures."

The following year there were 70 children and every year thereafter both the numbers and scope of the programs grew. Hamlet residents pitched in. Henry H. Pearson took the children to the amusement park at Kingston Point and the Methodist church provided seven tickets for the Dutchess County Fair. The Rhinecliff Needlework Guild made garments for them. When, in 1912, the New York Central moved its railway station uphill from the riverfront, it also took 30 feet of Holiday Farm's river bluff to double its tracks, and Mary Morton realized it would make sense to move to more spacious quarters. With the help of the Vincent Astors they built a handsome building in Rhinebeck. Renamed the Astor Home for Children, the organization still provides a top-ranking live-in facility for children with special needs.

It was also at this time that Mary donated land at the junction of the Rhinecliff Road and Orchard Street for a hamlet playground that included a tennis court. For many years, it was a center of outdoor activity for Rhinecliff residents.

Morton Memorial Library and Community Building
The Mortons' second act of philanthropy was the Morton Memorial Library and Community Center given to honor his daughter Lena, who died in Paris in 1905. Few gifts have fulfilled their mission so completely as the $50,000 Levi P. Morton gave to build it and the $80,000 with which he endowed it. From its opening in January 1908 until the Second World War, it drew all ages, church affiliations and interests, offering a library, sewing and cooking classes, carpentry, and gymnastics. It fostered women's clubs and men's clubs which vied at giving fetes for each other. It had a fumigating room, probably for the district nurse to treat lice (still a school problem!) and baths, according to the Gazette, "showers for thin men and 'French tubs' for fat." (At that time few Rhinecliff homes had plumbing.) Open three afternoons a week and every evening except Sunday, school children did their homework there. The programs were steadily expanded; for instance, as early as 1912, a projector was bought for movies. Only the most confirmed rowdies were not touched by the activities at the Morton Community Center.

The costs of operating the center were covered by the income of an $80,000 endowment donated by Morton, gifts from the board, and whatever money the hamlet was able to raise. Although the pace of activities slowed down dramatically after World War II, the two are currently enjoying a sparkling renaissance.

Death Claims Levi P. Morton
Anna Livingston Morton, never completely strong, died in 1918. She was eulogized and missed. It was, however, Levi P. Morton's death two years later—on the evening of May 16, his 96th birthday—that was a terrible shock to the hamlet. He had celebrated that day with a party for all of Rhinecliff's children, just as he had always done. By then, Levi P. Morton was much more than a mere employer and benefactor to most Rhinecliffers: they had grown deeply fond of him as the honorable, caring individual that he was, and they missed him. He was interred next to Lena and Anna in a lovely section of the old Rhinebeck Cemetery. Much later, Mary and Helen would join them there. Even today, the luster his residence shed on the hamlet still glows.