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Let's explore the rest of the first floor at Hildene, the 24-room Georgian revival mansion built by Robert Todd Lincoln, President Abraham Lincoln's eldest son and former chairman of the Pullman Palace Car Company. Built in 1905 at a cost of $60,000 (USD), the Lincoln family homestead is nestled in the Green Mountains of beautiful Manchester, Vermont.
In Part 1 and Part 2 of this multi-part series, TechnoTourist explored woodworking and clock making techniques, early twentieth-century kitchen appliances, and a household communication system called an annunciator box. Now, let's visit Mr. Towers' office, Mr. Lincoln's library, and a downstairs bedroom that the patriarch of Hildene once used to hide documents about his mother's "madness", as her mental illness was called.
Mr. Towers' Office
Frederic N. Towers, Robert Todd Lincoln's attorney and personal secretary, maintained a corner office on Hildene's first floor. Armed with a letterpress (image below), Towers made copies of all Lincoln's communications, including letters from Lincoln's tenure as Secretary of War. To slow drying times and permit the creation of multiple copies, sugar water was added to the ink. Between 1865 and 1912, approximately 20,000 copies of correspondence were made.
Some of these copies were probably stored in the large "filing cabinet" that spanned most of a wall, and which featured a series of numbered or lettered drawers. The picture below is cropped, but it's clear that Mr. Towers' filing system wasn't purchased at Wal-Mart or Office Depot.
The office also included a typewriter, made by Densmore, which looks far less ergonomic than a modern computer keyboard.
The Library
While Frederic N. Towers copied correspondence, Robert Todd Lincoln wrote letters, browsed books, or enjoyed a drink and a cigar in the library. The upholstered furniture there is styled after the seats found in Pullman passenger cars. Above the fireplace is an engraving by Albert Bierstadt, a German-American artist known for his landscapes of the American West. At Hildene, the Bierstadt engraving is signed by the artist, and depicts the Rocky Mountains with a Native American encampment.
Engraving, a printmaking technique in which lines are cut into a metal plate and then filled with ink to transfer the image onto paper, was once a common method for reproducing images. Intaglio, the process of incising the design, is the opposite of relief printing.
The Lincoln Bedroom
After spending an evening in his library, Robert Todd Lincoln retired to his bedroom, a spare-looking place except for a bed fit for a king. The walnut one in Mr. Lincoln's bedroom once belonged to his father-in-law, Senator James Harlan of Iowa. The carvings on the headboard indicate the Senator's membership in the Masons, a fraternity which probably originated with guilds of stonemasons in the Middle Ages. The symbols in this carving consist of a square, a compass, and the letter "G", which stands for geometry.
Let's finish our tour by taking a look upstairs and then going outside to visit Mr. Lincoln's observatory, shall we?
Editor's Note: Click here for Part 4, the last installment in this series. Part 1 and Part 2 are already on CR4.
Additional Resources
http://www.amazon.com/Madness-Mary-Lincoln-Jason-Emerson/dp/0809327716
http://www.progressiveart.com/art_terms.shtml
http://www.trowel.com/flamason/what.htm
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Re: TechnoTourist Visits Hildene (Part 3)
