Linden Place Museum Opens for the Season

Linden Place Mansion, built in 1810 by the seafaring General George DeWolf, will open for visitors for the 2009 season beginning on Saturday, May 2nd. Guided tours of the estate, featured in the film The Great Gatsby with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, w

Built in the Robert Adam inspired Federal style, popular in the early decades of our new American nation, Linden Place magnificently reflected the prosperity of the DeWolf merchant princes and the exquisite Adamesque Federal taste inspired by the architecture of ancient Greece and Rome. Visitors will see one of the best examples of Federal architecture in New England, from the magnificent Palladian windows to the fluted Corinthian columns, which gracefully flank the front entrance to the mansion. Also of architectural significance are the later added gothic conservatory and four-story spiral staircase.

Tour highlights include tales of DeWolf family exploits, from their privateering and slave trading to their financial ruin and triumphant return to prosperity during Victorian times. Docents introduce visitors to family members Pomeroy Colt, founder of United States Rubber, now Uniroyal, his mother Theodora DeWolf Colt, who as Madam Colt ran Bristol Society from Linden Place as if she were Queen Victoria and the great actress Ethel Barrymore who married in to this most prominent of American families. At the tour’s end, visitors are welcome to stroll the sculpture-filled gardens where they will find Greek bronzes and an 18th Century gazebo.