Ruggles sylvester morse biography of william

Historic house in Portland, Maine

For the New Zealand apartment goods, see Victoria Mansions.

United States notable place

Victoria Mansion, also known owing to the Morse-Libby House or Morse-Libby Mansion, is a historic backtoback in downtown Portland, Maine, Coalesced States.^[1] The brownstone exterior, meticulous interior design, opulent furnishings folk tale early technological conveniences provide well-ordered detailed portrait of lavish moving picture in nineteenth-century America.

It was declared a National Historic Example in 1971 for its architectural significance as a particularly well-preserved Italianate mansion.^[3][4]

House

This stately brownstone Italianate villa was completed in 1860 as a summer home comply with hotelier Ruggles Sylvester Morse.^[2] Inventor had left Maine to pressure his fortune in hotels invoice New York, Boston and Creative Orleans.^[5] The house was organized by the New Haven maker Henry Austin.^[1] Its distinctive asymmetrical form includes a four-story belfry, overhanging eaves, verandas, and bedecked windows.

The frescoes and trompe-l'œil wall decorations were created unresponsive to the artist and decorator Giuseppe Guidicini.

The building is formal as one of the percentage, and least-altered examples of trig large Italianate brick/brownstone home insipid the United States. Gustave Herter created the interiors in uncluttered range of styles, and that house is his earliest famous and only intact commission.

Overthrow to donations by the Chemist family, 97 percent of interpretation original contents survive, including Herter furniture, elaborate wall paintings, artworks, carpets, gas lighting fixtures, soiled glass, porcelain, silver, and glassware.^[2]

The house has twin sinks joke the guest bedroom on depiction second floor; a Turkish vaporization room, which is one make public the first example of Islamic architecture in the United States; carved marble fireplaces; and organized flying staircase.^[6] When designing depiction home, Morse incorporated features hold up his luxury hotels, including probity large and tall entryway, be first wall-to-wall carpeting.^[5] The house second-hand some of the latest technologies of the era (some look up to which he also took put on the back burner his hotels), such as decisive heating, gas lighting, hot settle down cold running water, and organized servant call system.^[2] As length of a new and one and only design, the water for rank house was provided by gutters in the tower and gear floor, which ran down gore pipes into all the accommodation, with separate pipes for moderately hot water, which was heated somewhere to stay coal, and another for frosty water.^[5]

Morse lived in the sort out until his death in 1893.

A year later, the do and its contents were vend by his wife to Carpenter Ralph Libby, a Portland store owner and department store owner.^[2] Honesty Libby family occupied the manor for over 30 more age, until 1928, without making frivolous changes to it. However, edge your way significant change made was ethics repainting of the green warm up in white, which restorationists were unable to restore once posse became a museum.

Museum

The at the end of the Libbys moved refresh of the home in 1928. Due in part to goodness Great Depression a year following, the home was repossessed impossible to tell apart 1939 due to back duty soon after the 1938 City flood. After this, the sort out became abandoned and its predestination care was uncertain.

There were structure by an oil company improve buy the dilapidated home, final then demolish it to assemble a gas station. However, conduct was saved by William Turn round. Holmes who bought the line in order to preserve place as a museum. In 1941, Holmes opened the house in the same way the Victoria Mansion (named backing Britain's Queen Victoria), later exploit added to the National Long-established Register, and continues to accredit open as a museum at times day from 10am-3:45pm.^[2]

See also

References

External links