Read Ebook: The Taylor-Trotwood Magazine Vol. IV No. 6 March 1907 by Various Moore John Trotwood Editor Taylor Robt L Robert Love Editor

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Ebook has 553 lines and 68331 words, and 12 pages

Editor: Robt. L. Taylor John Trotwood

Release date: December 4, 2023

Original publication: United States: The Taylor-Trotwood Publishing Co, 1907

THE TAYLOR-TROTWOOD MAGAZINE

SUCCESSOR TO BOB TAYLOR'S MAGAZINE and TROTWOOD'S MONTHLY

PUBLISHED BY THE TAYLOR-TROTWOOD PUBLISHING COMPANY, 11, 13, 16, 19 VANDERBILT LAW BUILDING, NASHVILLE, TENN.

GOVERNOR BOB TAYLOR and JOHN TROTWOOD MOORE, Editors

.00 A YEAR MONTHLY 10c. A COPY

Contents for March, 1907

FRONTISPIECE--From a painting by Gilbert Gaul

SOME BEAUTIFUL WOMEN OF THE SOUTH 587 Illustrated.

MEN OF AFFAIRS 606 Illustrated.

WITH BOB TAYLOR 649 SENTIMENT AND STORY THE PARADISE OF FOOLS

WITH TROTWOOD 654 THE RIGHTS OF CHILDHOOD

WITH OUR READERS 667

THE FAMILY SCRAP BOOK 671

BRANDON PRINTING COMPANY BLANK BOOK MAKERS

A SHIELD AGAINST INFERIORITY

Brandon's name on a blank book means that it is well seasoned, well made, of the best materials obtainable.

A book that falls to pieces before it is used up is dear at half the price of a good book.

We make ours right, sell them right--in fact, they are the right books for you to use.

Brandon Printing Co. Lithographers, Printers and Blank Book Makers NASHVILLE, TENN.

CATALOGUE OF OUR 50c BOOKS. Hunter & Co., Nashville, Tenn.

THE TAYLOR-TROTWOOD MAGAZINE

FAMOUS THRESHOLDS IN WASHINGTON

THE OCTAGON HOUSE

At the northwest corner of New York Avenue and Eighteenth Street, within a stone's throw of the War, State and Navy Department, and almost within the shadow of the Corcoran Art Gallery, is a queer old red brick structure, with stone steps leading up to the white-pillared portico, which is known in Washington as the "Octagon House."

As a historic mansion, as a "haunted dwelling," and as a unique piece of Colonial architecture, the Octagon has a triple claim to a place in the catalogue of "famous thresholds."

Back in 1798--that same year in which George Washington laid the cornerstone of his "two buildings" on North Capitol Street--another Virginian, Colonel John Tayloe, moved by the persuasive arguments of our first President and first real estate boomer for the Federal City, decided to build his "town residence" in Washington, instead of Philadelphia, as was his original intention.

Colonel Tayloe's Virginia estate, "Mt. Airy," comprised eight thousand fertile acres along the Rappahannock, with five hundred slaves and a superb villa, all inherited from his father, a member of the House of Burgesses, who built the Mt. Airy country seat in 1758, on a scale of magnificence unsurpassed at that period in this country.

The site of the Octagon was purchased from Mr. Benjamin Stoddert, our first Secretary of the Navy, an office created by the first Adams.

It is related that General Washington was much interested in the Octagon, frequently riding by on horseback to watch the progress of its building, though he was not permitted to witness its completion. Singularly enough, it was begun in the same year, finished in the same year and designed by the same architect as his own house on Capitol Hill. The Octagon was well and strongly built and set in a triangular lot which conformed to the street lines. The rear premises, in which were located the stables and servants' quarters, were enclosed by a high brick wall, now broken in places, and ivy-grown.

When finished, this was the finest private residence in the Federal City, as it antedated the more stately Van Ness mansion by a number of years, and from its unique style of architecture was regarded as the show house of the surrounding country.

The irregular perimeter of its walls--whence the name "Octagon"--includes five sides and six angles for the main body of the house, with two short sides, and a circular swell across the front--demonstrating that the owner had to strain a point and round a curve for its christening. The exterior exhibits many windows of the old-fashioned, small-pane pattern, and from the rear giant old trees fling their flickering shade athwart them.

The interior of the house was modeled to fit the outward circumference, the doors, sash and glass in the circular vestibule being made on the circle and all still in working order.

In the niches prepared for them are exhibited two old cast-iron wood stoves, which crackled their good cheer for generations long past, but which evidently owe their present lustre to more recent furbishings. The doors on the ground floor are all of mahogany, and in an excellent state of preservation, as is likewise the railing to the stairway leading from the main hall up to the third story--a frail, insubstantial-looking affair with its slender wooden pilasters and narrow rail; yet, owing to the fact that every fourth pilaster is of iron, and the railing of mahogany, this old stairway has stood the test to which more massive balustrades have succumbed.

The rooms, eleven in all, are few, as compared with the size of the building, but the area of some of them might easily accommodate a modern housekeeping apartment. To the right of the main hall is the spacious drawing room, which has been the scene of many a brilliant assemblage in the days long gone, where the bas-relief figures on the mantel imported from London, watched the going and coming of the men and women who made history. Upon the estimate of an expert, it is said that the cost of reproducing this mantel in marble nowadays would be two thousand dollars.

Opposite the drawing room, to the left of the hall, is the long, high dining room, studded with windows and flooded with western light. Turning back the clock of time for almost a century, one sees gathered around this generous board a distinguished company, including Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and John Quincy Adams; Hamilton, Marshall, Jay and Pinckney; Webster, Calhoun, Clay and Randolph; Decatur, Porter, Lafayette, Steuben, Sir Edward Thornton and other notabilities.

Although it is not recorded that any of the Tayloes shone very conspicuously in their country's annals by reason of any great service rendered in positions of public trust, yet because of their great wealth and social prominence, their lives touched at various points many of the great names which emblazon the pages of history. At the time he took possession of his Octagon home, in 1801, Colonel Tayloe's income was seventy-five thousand dollars a year--three times as much as the President's salary at that period--and the unbounded hospitality dispensed from his two households at Mt. Airy and the Octagon, embodied the most splendid features of the regal Old South.

He was married at the early age of twenty-one, to Miss Ann Ogle, daughter of Governor Benjamin Ogle, of Maryland. Descended from the Corbins, Gwynnes, Platers and Fauntleroys, connected by the marriage of his sisters with the Lees, Pages, Washingtons, Carters, Beverleys and Lomaxes of Virginia, and by his own marriage with the Bladens, Taskers, and Ogles, of Maryland, Colonel Tayloe's social prestige was limitless.

One does not live long in Washington ere he learns to uncover and speak softly before a lineage which reaches to the "Eastern shore," either of Virginia or of Maryland; and when a line is discovered which connects both these aristocratic strongholds--well, words are but poor things, and a solemn hush is the most approving corollary.

Colonel Tayloe was educated at Eton and Cambridge, England. He was noted for the urbanity of his manners, for the splendor of his equipages and for his lavish hospitality. In 1802, conjointly with Governor Ridgeley, of Maryland, Colonel Tayloe laid out the Washington City Race Course on the Holmead Farm, about two miles north of the President's house, near the present Mount Pleasant. For a number of years, the Colonel was at the head of the turf in his native state at a time when the turf was much affected by the aristocratic sportsmen of the old r?gime. He kept in his stables at Mt. Airy a large number of blood horses. He owned the celebrated Leviathan, Gallatin, Sir Charles, Sir Archy and others; and from his imported thoroughbreds were descended the most famous coursers in the early annals of the American turf. From the Tayloe stables came Eclipse and Henry--"the North and the South"--who ran the celebrated sectional race on the Long Island course in 1823, in which Henry was beaten, and the success of Eclipse was attributed to the manipulation of a jockey named Purdy. The victory was received with uproarious shouts, Eclipse was led to the stand amid the strains of "The Conquering Hero," and there followed a jubilee in New York. Whereupon, John Randolph, of Roanoke, who was present, remarked: "I am glad no one on the course thought of nominating Purdy for the Presidency, for it would have been carried by acclamation!"

In 1818 Colonel Tayloe built the old Willard Hotel, on Pennsylvania Avenue and Fourteenth Street, which was enlarged and improved by his son, Mr. Benjamin Ogle Tayloe, in 1844, when it became and has since continued the most fashionable hotel of the Federal City.

Colonel Tayloe was in his day the largest contributor to St. John's Episcopal church, which was the first building erected on Lafayette Square after the War of 1812, and is popularly known as "the President's church," from the fact that more Presidents have attended it than any other in the city, probably because of its proximity to the White House. Colonel Tayloe presented to this church the massive silver service which formerly belonged to the old church of Lunenburg, in Richmond County, Virginia.

Colonel Tayloe's occupancy of the Octagon embraced the administrations of four Presidents--Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and John Quincy Adams--and ceased in 1828, just as the picturesque figure of "Old Hickory" rose above the Presidential horizon. In 1814, after the burning of the White House by the British, the hospitality of the Octagon was tendered to the homeless President and his bewitching "Dolly," and for six or eight months it was transformed into "the President's house," Colonel and Mrs. Tayloe retiring to their country seat for the nonce. In the circular room over the round vestibule, Madison signed the Treaty of Ghent, February, 1815, which closed our second war with Great Britain. The table at which the treaty was signed is still in the possession of the Tayloe family.

The fact that Madison is esteemed one of our most intellectual and scholarly Presidents, that his state papers exhibit not only statecraft, but literary construction of a high order, and that a distinguished Southern Senator in a recent speech in Congress named him "more than any other man the author of the American Constitution," gives peculiar piquancy to the following story, which is vouched for by Mr. Benjamin Ogle Tayloe:

When a member of Congress in Philadelphia, Mr. Madison boarded in the house of Mrs. Payne, the mother of "Dolly," at that time the beautiful Widow Todd. Mr. Madison, attracted by the personal charms of the fascinating young widow, sent her a book to read and requested her opinion of it--presumably with a view to sounding her mental depth. Whereupon, Mrs. Todd, who, Mr. Tayloe says, was always more remarkable for beauty, tact and manner than for depth of intellect, asked Colonel Burr, who boarded there, also, to write her reply to Mr. Madison, which he accordingly did.

Shortly afterward, Madison offered himself to the handsome and intellectual widow, and was accepted. This story tallies with the statement from other sources that Burr made the match between Madison and the sprightly Dolly, but if our accomplished fourth President really was ensnared by the schoolgirl ruse, he certainly had no occasion to complain of his matrimonial bargain. For in the judgment of her contemporaries and of all succeeding generations, no lady has ever done the honors of the White House more gracefully and acceptably to all parties than the gracious and lovely Dolly Madison. Her brilliant levees and various functions at the Octagon during her brief sojourn there are among the richest traditions of early official life in the Federal city.

Dr. William Thornton, the architect of the Octagon, was remarkable for his talents, benevolence and eccentricities. He was the first architect of the Capitol at Washington, and was appointed one of the three original commissioners to lay off the city. At the request of Jefferson, he furnished designs for the University of Virginia. He was born in the West Indies, of Quaker parentage, and educated in England and Scotland. A man of science, he was head of the Patent Office from the time of Washington's administration to that of Monroe, and claimed to have preceded Fulton in the application of steam as a propeller of boats, and to have made experiments on the Delaware before Fulton made his on the Hudson.

This claim naturally brought the two into collision, and their quarrel consisted in writing pamphlets against each other, apropos of which, Thornton is said to have declared: "I killed Fulton with that last pamphlet of mine!" Dr. Thornton married the daughter of an English lady who kept a fashionable school for young ladies in Philadelphia, and is reputed to have stood much in awe of both his wife and mother-in-law--a condition of mind which finds scant compensation in worldly honors. The ladies were allies in their opposition to his leaning toward the turf, to which, despite his Quaker blood, the Doctor was passionately addicted. This brought him into close association with Colonel Tayloe, and their deaths occurred in the same year, 1828.

After her husband's death, Mrs. Tayloe retired from society, although she continued to make the Washington house her principal home until her death, nearly thirty years later. One of her granddaughters, yet living in the District, is authority for the fact that for more than fifty years the Octagon was lighted solely by candles. Although gas was introduced prior to Mrs. Tayloe's death, she would never permit its use in the Octagon, looking upon it as a "dangerous innovation," and clinging to her candles to the last. The granddaughter remembers as one of the distinct impressions of her childhood, the sockets over the doorways which held these wax illuminators.

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