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Stanford White in Saint James, New York

Magazine Antiques, July, 1998 by Samuel G. White

Saint James is part of an area first settled by the English and the Dutch about 1650 and claimed in 1665 by Richard Smythe on the basis of a patent he had received from the early colonist and military engineer Lion Gardiner. Once variation of a local legend has it that by riding over his property on the back of a bull, Smythe obtained the satisfaction of the local Nesequake tribe for his claim, which became the villages of Smithtown, Saint James, and Stony Brook. The most picturesque land overlooked the Nissequogue, a meandering tidal river that leads to Long Island Sound, and Saint James Harbor (also called Stony Brook Harbor), an irregular body of water protected by hills formed during the last Ice Age and separated from the sound by a substantial sand bar.

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By the late nineteenth century Saint James was still an agricultural community. With the extension of the Port Jefferson branch of the Long Island Railroad in 1872, it became considerably less remote from New York city, and, with a river, harbor, and beaches that were as attractive as any along Long Island Sound, Saint James eventually acquired a reputation as a minor coast-line retreat. It was never a grand social scene. Daily amusements for the leisure class must have been like the less glamorous moments of a Jane Austen novel, including outdoor sports for men and poetry for women. The development of the weekend, a phenomenon that arose out of the prosperity of the post-Civil War period, would have a significant impact on the life and landscape of Saint James.

The story of Stanford White in Saint James begins with Charles Follen McKim. The two met in the New York City office of Henry Hobson Richardson (1838-1886), where White succeeded McKim as Richardsons principal assistant in 1873. McKim had left the firm to set up his own practice, and his new offices at 57 Broadway were just down the hall from Gambrill and Richardson. During this period McKim and his wife Annie Bigelow were living in a small apartment building on Thirteenth Street. The flat next door was occupied by a similar pair of newlyweds, Prescott Hall Butler, an acquaintance of McKim's from Harvard, and his wife, the former Cornelia (Nellie) Smith, who was a descendant of Smithtown's original patentee. As Butler recorded in his diary, the two young couples had much in common, not the least of which was a high turnover in domestic help and the occasional need to do their own cooking in a pinch. Adjacency and compatibility led to lifelong friendship, multiple commissions, and a substantial network of contacts.

A significant turn in the parallel lives of Butler and McKim occurred in 1878. The Butlers began to build a small farmhouse they called Bytharbor [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE III OMITTED], designed by McKim on a site that Nellie had admired overlooking Saint James Harbor. That same year Annie McKim abandoned her husband for reasons that have never been explained, and the distraught architect fled to Europe in the restorative company of Stanford White. The trip transformed their friendship into one of America's most famous architectural partnerships.

Not long after White's return from Europe in 1879 and the establishment of McKim, Mead and White, the Butlers began to enlarge Bytharbor. McKim brought White out to Saint James to meet the Butlers, and in 1882, during the course of one of these trips, White met Nellie's younger sister Bessie Springs Smith. On February 7, 1884, after a courtship that tested the patience of her notoriously impulsive suitor, Bessie was married to Stanford White at the Church of the Heavenly Rest in New York City. The Reverend Joseph Bloomfield Wetherill, the husband of a third Smith sister, Kate, assisted at the ceremony

Within a year Bessie and Stanford White had rented a farmhouse [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 4 OMITTED] in Saint James, across the road from the Buffers. The Whites eventually bought the property and in 1892 began to enlarge the house, which they called Box Hill. Stanford White's incarnation as the proprietor of a country house was as much a testament to Bessie's family ties as it was to his own determination to live better than his clients. To the extent that the fortunes of his office were inadequate to finance his ambitions, White relied on Bessie's substantial inheritance from her aura Cornelia Clinch Stewart, the widow of the department store magnate A.T. Stewart.

The Saint James projects illustrate most of the principal phases in McKim, Mead and White's artistic development as architects of country houses, beginning with their earliest work in the shingle style. That style derives its name from the manner in which walls and roofs were finished with wood shingles, enclosing the building with a uniform material, which was then manipulated through the use of patterns and the introduction of a limited number of other decorative elements to create surfaces of considerable richness. The buildings of the shingle style are characterized by strong roof shapes, bold contrasts, and an air of genial informality. In the 1880s the style was a popular and highly picturesque choice for new designs in summer resorts. McKim, Mead and White were among its masters, creating buildings that ranged from the Newport Casino (18791881) in Rhode Island to the Montauk Point Association cottages and clubhouse (18821883) on Long Island.

Stanford White in Saint James, New York

Magazine Antiques, July, 1998 by Samuel G. White

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