tried unsuccessfully to persuade Leland Stanford and his wife to establish an extensive national program of
scholarships and fellowships instead
of founding a university.
The gardens to the east of the
House have gone through periods
of splendor and of relative neglect.
Little was done in the early years,
but White’s second wife was an
enthusiastic gardener and employed
a full-time gardener for many years.
The gardens were further developed
during the presidency of Livingston
Farrand and his popular wife, Daisy.
The Cornell Archives have photographs of the White House and
gardens during this time made by
Margaret Bourke-White 1927, early
in her career. The white or secret garden, in honor of Mrs. Farrand, has
recently been replanted and partially
restored in memory of Professor
Morris Bishop, through the generosity of Mrs. Alison Kingsbury Bishop,
her sister, Mrs. W. Rowell Chase, and
Mrs. Virginia Scheetz.
The north wing of the mansion was
originally the servants’ quarters. On
the first floor, beyond the kitchen,
were a servants’ hall and two small
bedrooms. This area has been
converted into a guest suite, with a
private entrance, for use by visiting
scholars.
Besides White and Farrand, only
one other Cornell president lived in
the house, Edmund Ezra Day, who
headed the University from 1938 un-
til 1949. When Charles Kendall Adams became president, after White’s
sudden resignation in June of 1885,
he moved into a house the university
owned at 41 East Avenue, occupied
earlier by Professors Bela Mackoon
and Herbert Tuttle, and later by
President Schurman. That house has
long since been demolished. For two
brief periods when the Whites went
to Berlin in 1879, the vice-president,
William Channing Russel, and his
family moved in. While White was
in St. Petersburg in 1893, a group of
bachelor professors, including Burr,
Ernest Huffcut, and Duncan Campbell Lee, lived at 27 East Avenue,
still the street address of the Andrew
Dickson White House. The mansion served from 1953 to 1973 as the
University Art Museum.
The present use of White’s old
mansion, on what Willard Fiske
called Breezy Knoll, as the home of
Cornell’s Society for the Humanities, seems particularly appropriate.
White’s plan for awarding fellowships at Cornell, although included
in his early drafts, was not put into
effect until funds became available
in 1884-85. White was closely associated with President Gilman of
Johns Hopkins University, a newly
founded institution oriented toward
graduate study and research, and he
The Society for the Humanities administers two fellowship programs.
The Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowships, a continuing program under
a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation, provide postdoctoral
fellowships for nontenured scholars
and teachers in the humanities. The
program is designed to encourage
the academic growth of promising
humanists with recent Ph.D. degrees. The appointments are for one
year. While in residence at Cornell,
postdoctoral fellows have department affiliation, limited teaching duties, and the opportunity for scholarly research. The Society Fellowship
Program has a “focal theme” each
year. Applicants should be working
on topics related to the year’s theme.
Their approach to the humanities
should be broad enough to appeal
to students and scholars in several
humanistic disciplines.
By restoring the home-like character
of the first floor rooms, the Society
for the Humanities has created a
welcoming background for fellowship programs, university lectures,
seminars, conferences, luncheons, receptions, and dinners. The two front
rooms are used during the academic
year as classrooms. During the summer, the Andrew Dickson White
House provides space for special
programs, most recently the summer
sessions of the School of Criticism
and Theory. It is also widely known
as a splendid facility for wedding
ceremonies and receptions. Over the
south wing of the building there is a
combined seminar room/reference
library used by Society Fellows. The
many bedrooms on the second and
third floors have been converted into
studies that now house the Society
Fellows, the Director of the Society
and administrative staff.
Andrew Dickson White House
A
ndrew Dickson White,
Cornell University’s
first president and cofounder, had his Victorian villa built for his
use as president of the
university in 1871. He announced
at the time that he would spend
$50,000 on the house, and give it to
the university for use of future presidents when he retired. Work began
in July and by mid-January of 1872
the chimneys were finished and the
roofs boarded, though the slates
were not yet in place. White’s papers in the Cornell archives contain
many letters and accounts concerning construction and furnishing of
the house. In late April 1872, White
wrote his wife that the house was
coming on satisfactorily except for
the steam heating, “and that is an
utter failure from top to bottom.”
For two years, White struggled with
the heating. Inadequate systems
were altered, amplified, tested, and
replaced. A lawsuit was brought
against the first supplier in Syracuse,
and the Cornell vice-president, William Chaining Russel, sent White
reports on room temperatures,
steam pressure, outside temperature, and amount of coal consumed
in attempts to warm the house. The
house obviously needed its five
fireplaces. In June of 1874, the entire
family, servants and all, moved
from Syracuse to the new house. In
addition to A.D. White and his wife,
Mary Outwater White, there were
four children ranging in age from
two months to fifteen years.
An English stone carver, Robert
Richardson, did his first Ithaca work
on the White villa. His fine stone
corbels and capitals flank the front
entrance to the house and carry a
moral reminder, “Do men gather
grapes of thorns or figs of thistles?”
The carving on the left side includes
birds, butterflies, fruit, and flowers,
while those on the right reproduce
poisonous plants and repellent
creatures. White felt that art should
serve a moral purpose. Through his
half-century’s association with the
university, he had stained glass windows, sculpture, paintings, benches,
bells, fountains, and memorial
plaques placed about the grounds to
remind students of the accomplishments of the past.
An old newspaper clipping reports
that the balcony floor above the
vestibule of the villa was “of Cleveland stone, weighing over two tons,”
and that it supported a “balustrade
of twenty small stone pillars, no two
of which are carved similar.” The
balcony served as more than “an
elegant frontispiece to the dwelling,”
for White used to address victorious crews from the balcony on their
return to Ithaca, and on several occasions stood upon it to acknowledge
serenading students who came to
welcome him back after his frequent
absences.
After passing through the small
vestibule, visitors enter a broad,
forty-two foot central hallway,
which is open to the ceiling of the
second floor hallway through a
central balustrade “well hole.”
It was White’s announced intention to furnish the hallway with a
“number of richly carved Florentine
chairs,” and to cover the walls with
pictures. At the rear of the hall is a
gently rising stairway with rail and
balusters leading up from a walnut
newel. The staircase is particularly
inviting to children; and, indeed,
White’s granddaughter, Pricilla
Ferry, recalled that she “used to slide
down the banister and land on a big
white polar bear rug.” The heavily
carved sideboard may be a seventeenth century German piece that
White mentioned in an early will;
it appears in photographs of his St.
Petersburg dining room.
The large parlor to the left of the
front door, now called the Andrew
D. White Room (Room 110) served
as a music room. The heavily carved
pieces on the inside wall came from
the estate of White’s daughter Karin.
This room was the formal living
room during the early years, and
the weddings of White’s daughters, Clara and Ruth, took place
here against the background of the
bay window garlanded with vines
and roses. A broad veranda (now
screened) extends along the north
side of the music room.
Directly across the hall is a smaller
parlor, originally called the morning
room, which served the White family as an informal family room. It has
been named the Bullis Room (Room
109) in honor of Mr. Gardner Bullis
1908. It was here that Mary Amanda
Outwater White died very suddenly
on a June morning in 1887. The demands of entertaining at commencement time combined with difficulty
with a servant evidently precipitated
a fatal heart attack. The gilt mirror
came from the Cornell family and is
a gift of Mr. Hunt Bradley, for many
years Alumni Secretary.
The doors between the morning
room and the former library may
be closed for privacy or opened to
form an archway between the two
rooms. The library is now called the
Guerlac Room, in honor of Henry
Guerlac, Director of the Society for
the Humanities (1970 – 1977). Guerlac
was instrumental in saving the A.D.
White House from destruction in the
1970s by applying for and receiving
National Historical Registry status for
the building. Under his direction, the
restoration of the building and the acquisition of the furniture were accomplished through many contributions.
The Guerlac Room, which is fortythree feet long, has seen many changes. Originally, the entire wall surface
was covered with bookcases. When
the addition to the south end of the
house was added, White considered
making the old library into a dining
room. A letter from William H. Miller
answered White’s inquiry, telling him
that by removing the bookcases, the
room would be large enough to seat
forty guests for dinner.
After the death of White’s last surviving daughter, Karin White, in 1971,
a number of family pieces – a wing
chair with a rampant lion stitched to
its upholstered back (known to be
White’s favorite chair), and a pair
of embossed leather chairs – were
acquired for the house. The Eastman
Johnson portrait of Andrew D. White
hangs above the fireplace. Considered
a fine painting and a good likeness,
the work was commissioned by the
family in 1887, and was owned by
Karin White until it passed by the
terms of her will to the Cornell University Archives. It is now on permanent loan to the House where alumni,
faculty and visitors view it each year.
The fine mahogany mantel piece,
with the name ‘Samana’ across its
face, is a souvenir from White’s stay
in the fishing village of the same
name in Santo Domingo in January
of 1871. He was a member of the
commission President Grant sent to
study the island’s annexation. The
mantel has small brass plates affixed
to it commemorating distinguished
visitors to the house. President Grant
and his wife came in September
1876. The President, according to
White’s diary, stood directly in front
of the mantelpiece to receive guests.
In October of 1878, General Garfield
visited for a night. Other visitors
recorded are three Regius Professors
of History from Oxford, including
Goldwin Smith, James Anthony
Froude and Edward Augustus Freeman. The plate commemorating the
visit of President Eisenhower was
added during President Malott’s
term.
In 1912, when the addition was
made to the south end of the house,
including a first floor secretary’s
office, White ordered copies of the
crests of various colleges with which
he had been associated, including
Hobart and St. Andrews, to decorate
the windows of his new den. The
den is not generally open and has
served Cornell Presidents as a useful
sanctuary. It contains some objects of
special interest, including the President’s Chair in which Ezra Cornell
and the early presidents of Cornell
were photographed. A medallion
on the back of the chair came loose
during a Board of Trustees meeting in the president’s office. When a
workman started to replace the medallion he found a foil-covered slip
of paper in the small hole behind it.
On the paper was a message written
in German script and dated Spandau, September 24, 1868. Professor
George Lincoln Burr rendered the
message in English as, “Go out into
the world and testify to what is born,
even in prison walls, from strength,
from patience, and from loving toil.
The United Workmen.”
Opening from an east door of the
living room is the conservatory. Built
in the angle between the old library
and the dining room, it affords a fine
view of the gardens at the rear of the
house. Pricilla Ferry once recalled
“the fountain in the conservatory
tinkling away and perfumes from
the flowers making every meal elegant and festive.” In 1989, the Class
of 1952 donated funds to restore the
conservatory to its original splendor and maintain it with plants and
orchids.
Photographs of the original dining room show simple light walls
with a dado and a handsome ceiling
patterned with a lacing of walnut
moldings and turned pendants. The
only piece of furniture that survives
from the original dining room is
the small folding serving table with
spiral legs, the gift of Mr. Courtney
Crawford, Law 1954. The studded
leather chairs of that time have been
replaced by a set of more elaborately
carved chairs found in Seneca County for the House by Mr. Jay Cantor
1964, an art historian and preservationist who served as artistic director
during the renovation of the House.
The present dining room was
installed at the behest of President
Malott in 1953 under the supervision
of another Cornellian, Mr. Searle
von Storch, Architecture 1923. This
reconstructed dining room was
originally part of the New York City
home of Peter Cooper, the 19th century industrialist. The dining room
was constructed after Peter Cooper’s
death in 1883 when Stanford White
remodeled the entire house at the
request of Cooper’s daughter, Sarah,
and her husband, Abram S. Hewitt.
The elaborately hand-carved oak
wall and door paneling is Flemish, inscribed with the date “1655.”
The allegorical mural incorporated
into the woodwork is 17th or 18th
century and came from the Venetian palace on the Grand Canal. The
ceiling is Moorish and later in date
than the paneling. It is interesting
to speculate whether or not Andrew
D. White actually saw and admired
this room in Hewitt’s home. In his
diary for April 5, 1897, he wrote, “In
evening to Hon. Abram S. Hewitt
and had a most interesting visit. Mr.
H. showed me his improved house,
which is very handsome.”