Rhode Island

Hopedene’s story begins with Robert Hale Ives, a merchant with the firm Brown and Ives, who began assembling what would become 60 acres along Newport’s Eastern shore just south of Easton’s Beach in the 1850s. During the following decade, he began dividing the land among his heirs, and this continued after his death in 1875. Elizabeth Hope Gammell Slater, his granddaughter, received a lot in 1896 and hired Peabody and Stearns to build a stately and luxurious house adjacent to the Cliff Walk just north of Forty Steps.

Mary Lundie Bruen (1828–1886) was the daughter of Mary Ann Davenport Bruen and Reverend Matthias Bruen, the first minister of New York’s Bleecker Street Presbyterian Church. At one point, her grandfather, Obadiah Bruen, was the wealthiest man in New York, so when her father died a year after her birth, the infant Mary was well provided for.

Margaret B. Sigourney was the widow of Boston lawyer Henry Sigourney (1783–1849). In 1864, just as the Civil War was coming to a close, Sigourney purchased a lot of land on Bellevue Avenue from Abraham L. Peckham, one of Newport’s important developers.

In 1881, Mary M. Stevens and Abby W. Stevens purchased a lot on an unpaved country road known at the time as “Lover’s Lane.” The sisters were the daughters of John Austin Stevens Jr., former consul general to Paris, a commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, and founder of the Sons of the Revolution. While the sisters owned the land, the house they built on the property was intended as a retirement residence for their father.

Matilda Lieber was the widow of Francis Lieber, a professor of history at Columbia University who died in 1876. That year Matilda moved to Newport with her daughter-in-law Henrietta (Harriet), who was also a widow. Eventually the two women decided to build their own houses. In April 1881, Matilda purchased property from the Van Zandt estate for her house; Henrietta purchased the lot next door (67 Rhode Island Avenue) a few months later. Both houses were under construction at the same time, along with the nearby Mary M.

In 1874, Julia Eldridge was suddenly widowed: according to her husband’s obituary, Thomas P. Eldridge, age 45, had been in good health, but an attack of inflammatory rheumatism developed into rheumatic fever and he died quickly. Thomas was a partner in the dry-goods firm, Eldridge, Dunham and Company, and he left a sizeable fortune to his wife and five (of eight) surviving children.

Natalie Bayard Brown was the widow of John Nicholas Brown, a wealthy real-estate investor and the grandson of Brown University’s eponymous benefactor. John died unexpectedly in 1900 after a sudden illness, leaving Natalie with a six-month-old son (also named John Nicholas Brown) and an extensive inheritance. A Newport native, Natalie decided that she and her son would move to Newport to live year round, in a house that she would build for them on the southern edge of the harbor.

Fairlawn has a complicated architectural history that has yet to be fully understood or documented. Seth Bradford designed the original house in 1852–1853 for Sophia Harrison Ritchie, the wife of Andrew Ritchie and the daughter of Harrison Grey Otis, a U.S. Congressman and the first secretary of the U.S. Senate. Members of Boston’s intelligentsia, the Ritchies vacationed in Newport during the 1840s, several decades before the city became a Gilded Age destination.

Susan James Weaver was a Newport native and daughter of John Goddard Weaver, the builder and proprietor Newport’s premier Gilded Age–era hotel, the Ocean House. Weaver, who never married, was an active member of Newport’s year-round community, and she worked for Channing Chapel, on the Newport Waterworks, and with various other local groups during a career of volunteerism and philanthropy.