Streaming shows like HBO’s The Gilded Age and Apple TV’s The Buccaneers depict the lives of American elites in the late 19th century. Onscreen, this time period seems like an endless party: afternoon strolls in flamboyant hats; candlelit dinners featuring aspic and caviar; intrigue-filled society balls.
These streamers have fueled an uptick in tourism at historic house museums of the era, says Evan Smith, president and CEO of Discover Newport. The seaside Rhode Island resort is home to lavish fin de siècle mansions Marble House and the Elms, where scenes from The Gilded Age were filmed.
Until recently, these opulent estates hadn’t paid much attention to the dozens of servants it took to run the properties. But, “people have a natural curiosity about how a massive home was cleaned and maintained,” says Lauren Henry, a curator at the Biltmore, the 250-room Vanderbilt family mansion turned museum outside of Asheville, North Carolina.
The Biltmore’s “Backstairs Tour”—which delves into servant life and visits a two-story butlers’ pantry and snug maids’ rooms—is now the property’s most popular. Last summer, the Hearthstone Historic House (the Wisconsin mansion of a paper factory mogul) launched “The Other Side of the House,” a tour where costumed interpreters portrayed coachmen, maids, and other hired help.
Here’s how these museums explore both the glitz and the grit of Gilded Age households.
When was the Gilded Age?
Mark Twain first coined the term “The Gilded Age” in 1873 to describe a period of rapid industrialization in the United States, which introduced a lifestyle of opulence, materialism, and corruption. The wealth gap widened, and by the end of the 19th century, the country’s top one percent owned 20 percent of the country’s wealth.
Flush with old and new money, railroad barons, bankers, and entrepreneurs built palatial homes in styles like Queen Anne, Gothic Revival, Italianate, Beaux-Arts, and Renaissance Revival across the Northeast, the upper Midwest, and the West Coast. Marble was imported from Italy, white mahogany from Central America, and mosaics and rare artwork from France.
At the height of the Gilded Age, no expense was spared at these properties, including hiring large staffs to tend the properties. For instance, the Biltmore—designed in 1895 to mimic a chateau—required a staff of 30, including a trendy English butler and French chef.
In the Hudson Valley of New York State, the 65-room Staatsburgh State Historic Site, the jumbo country home of financier Ogden Mills and his wife, Ruth Livingston Mills, is now a museum. In its heyday, it employed 24 house servants (maids, footmen, kitchen workers) and dozens of staffers to maintain the landscaped grounds, gardens, yacht, horses, and carriages.
Southern house and plantation museums built before the American Civil War, from George Washington’s Mount Vernon in Virginia to the Redcliffe Plantation in South Carolina, have had to grapple with how to sensitively chronicle the roles of the enslaved people who kept these properties functioning. But the issues are different at Gilded Age estates, since most were staffed by Irish and German immigrants. “It was a white, Western European workforce,” says Donald Fraser, an educator at Staatsburgh.
(Diverse historic interpreters share their side of the story.)
Go inside Gilded Age mansions
In the 1980s, the Biltmore became one of the first Gilded Age historic homes to include the servants’ quarters on tours. “People were constantly asking to see the kitchen,” says Henry. Over the years, additional spaces were added, including the butler’s pantry, housekeeper’s rooms, and the fourth floor where the female staff lived.
Tours showcase the dramatic difference between life for the owners and their staff. Guides describe the everyday tasks of the head housekeeper, the butler, and the lady’s maids. Visitors use side entrances to the kitchens, pantries, and sewing rooms, then climb steep service staircases to the simple servants’ quarters.
Personal possessions (a German-language bible, family photos) give context to the workers’ private lives. At the end of the experience, attendees pass through the Biltmore owners’ chandelier-lit hallways, portraits-filled living rooms, and bedrooms with four-poster beds and silk draperies. The contrast is stark.
Staatsburgh’s “Life in Service” tours are guided by historic interpreters wearing period garb who take visitors into a dim basement where male servants slept, the outsized kitchen complex, and the unfussy servant’s lounge.
(See why this historic mansion spurred the haunted house craze.)
Telling the servants’ stories
The lives of rich swells like the Vanderbilts, Carnegies, and Rockefellers are extensively documented in newspapers, books, and portraits, as well as at their historic home museums. But accurately depicting the world of the maids, butlers, and cooks in these American palaces is more difficult, since a servant’s job was to be as invisible as possible. That means historians and curators must rely on census data, advertisements, and local newspaper archives, which list wedding announcements and obituaries.
Oral histories from the descendants of former staffers give guides more to work with. At the Elms, the 10-acre Newport summer estate of coal tycoon Edward Julius Berwind, the Servant Life Tour is based on the photos, archival materials, and memories of Gloria Pignatelli. Her father, Michael Pignatelli, was the superintendent of the Elms for 20 years. “It was fortuitous because we didn’t know much about the servants until quite recently,” says Trudy Coxe, CEO and executive director of the site. “We had a lucky break.”
On the Biltmore’s “Backstairs Tour,” travelers hear the Downton Abbey-esque tale of a lady’s maid and a butler who met at the house in the 1920s and got married. After receiving information from a distant relative, guides now mention how the couple’s young daughter received a gold locket from Edith Vanderbilt, the mistress of the house. “It’s always amazing to be able to hear more of the story,” says Henry.
Rachel Ng is a Hawaii-based travel and food writer. Follow her on Instagram.
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