Chapter Two

As a child, I assumed the place had always been as I’d found it. I probably assumed, too, that it would be that way long after we were gone. Cut off from the march of subdivisions, car dealerships, and drive-through banking, it floated in an eddy, outside the whooshing of time. There were fields where my father had tobogganed as a boy, where he took us to discover the rapture of hurtling downhill on the brink of abandon. There was a hollow tree, which would still be standing when I had children of my own. There were ancient initials carved in the bark of beech trees, the letters swollen by the passage of years. Dug into the side of a small hill, there was a root cellar dating from some prehistoric era, ante synthetic refrigerants. Cows had claimed it, paving the dirt floor with dung. A sign nailed to the fence around that pasture warned to beware of a bull. As we passed by on the long driveway, the black mouth of the cellar beckoned. On rare occasions when we dared to slip between the fence rails and venture near, it exhaled dank, cold breath.

Back then, I experienced the place through the senses. I knew the burning of bare soles on baking macadam, and the clammy coolness of the paving-stone path to the pool in the woods. There was the sour sweetness of Concord grapes on the vines along the rusting iron fence that bounded our backyard, and the soughing of window fans buffeting the humidity around bedrooms at night. Mica glittered in the stone walls; mint grew wild beside the stream banks. Stinging nettles lurked beyond the barn. Later, in another country, I could lie in bed and summon the sensation of coasting down the driveway in my parents’ station wagon in the sweltering stillness of August. For a time, I had a treehouse in an elm in the field beside our house, where you could try to imagine how the place might appear from another angle. But Dutch elm disease took the tree, and the treehouse with it. The site, bouldered and brambled, became a boneyard for hamsters, dogs, and the ashes of my mother’s childless, irascible, out-of-town aunt.

A map of the area hung on the wall in my parents’ house for years before I examined it closely. It was in a downstairs bathroom—a powder room, if you used that term, which we didn’t. You entered the room from a paneled library, past a stuffed and mounted head of a hare, its incisors visible, stained like a smoker’s. The bathroom had a sink and a toilet but no tub. The wallpaper was dark red in a pattern that suggested overlapping slices of an exotic fruit. There was a tall, narrow closet in the bathroom, used as a liquor cabinet, with shelves that burrowed so deep into the wall, I imagined tunneling into the house’s hidden interstices. The bathroom light fixture was a wooden hand, flesh colored, jutting out from the wall near the pedestal sink, gripping a red, Statue of Liberty–style torch. Idling on the toilet seat, you could reflect on that curious assortment of bathroom accessories or gaze out the window toward a sea of alfalfa. Under the circumstances, I see why I overlooked the map. But it would have been a gate into the story, an opening to ask questions before the narratives ossified into myth.

The map came from an atlas, one in a series published around the turn of the twentieth century, tracking the buying and selling of land along the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Main Line. The railroad company had acquired, from the state, a line known as the “Main Line of Public Works,” and had turned in the 1870s to developing land on either side of the tracks. The company built a two-hundred-fifty-room resort hotel in Bryn Mawr for prosperous denizens of Philadelphia, one of the great industrial powerhouses of that age, which was busily spitting out new fortunes made in iron, steel, locomotives, banking, department stores, and shipping, the way Silicon Valley churns out tech fortunes today. Philadelphians took to summering at the hotel, and tycoons began buying farmland for country estates. They built fortresses with crenelated walls, stone-mullioned windows, porte cocheres, banquet halls, gargoyles, buttresses, peaked roofs. By the late nineteenth century, the railroad was running dozens of trains a day between seventeen stations along the Main Line, many of them named after Welsh towns, Welsh counties, Welsh saints. In Lower Merion, an iron and steel magnate erected an Elizabethan manor with seventy-five rooms, on five hundred forty acres landscaped by the Olmsted brothers. Sixteenth-century tapestries, imported from England, hung on the walls. Every five to ten years, a new edition of the Atlas of Properties on Main Line Pennsylvania Railroad from Overbrook to Paoli took stock of the rollout of what was becoming the country’s archetypal ribbon of railroad suburbs. In doing so, the atlases also traced Robert Leaming Montgomery’s conquest of Villanova.

A week before Christmas 1910, I now know, newspapers reported the sale of two hundred ten acres in Radnor, in what was said to be one of the largest real estate deals ever in that part of the Main Line. The land had a pedigree of a sort the buyer would have approved. It had been part of a grant made by William Penn, the founder of Philadelphia and the Province of Pennsylvania, to a family of Welsh Quakers. The mother of a Revolutionary War general, Anthony Wayne, had been born on the property. An outpost of the Continental Army had camped there during the winter of 1777 to 1778, when George Washington was at Valley Forge. The newspapers, for whom high-priced land deals on the Main Line must have been becoming more dog-bites-man than the reverse, saw no need to spell out what the buyer, Robert L. Montgomery, had in mind. They reported simply that he intended to “erect a handsome country residence for his occupancy”—a turn of phrase that I began to see, as I foraged in his correspondence, could have come from the aspiring laird himself.

Six years after my father’s death, I began piecing together the story of Robert L. Montgomery—known as the Colonel from World War I on, for reasons that I now suspect had been discreetly forgotten. In my apartment in New York, I’d become interested for the first time in the inventory that had turned up after my father’s death. I took to leaving the apartment as the sun was rising against the city skyline, and walking north on Broadway to the garage, passing a man in rags whose permanent home I knew to be the doorstep of Victoria’s Secret as I made my way toward the fifty-room ancestral manse. I’d leave the city, drive south on the New Jersey Turnpike, and cross into Pennsylvania, scudding past shopping malls and storage units. Sometimes, approaching my father’s family’s place, I’d try to see it the way a stranger might if he were catching sight of it for the first time—the way, after years in Southern California, I could still conjure how a certain bend in the Hollywood Freeway had first struck me. In Pennsylvania, I couldn’t do it. I’d lived away from the place for forty-four years. But my sense of it was too deeply ingrained to allow even a momentary override.

I’d park in a small gravel parking area behind the big house and enter the silent kitchen with its smell of polished linoleum and dark-stained wood. I’d cross what had once been the servants’ dining room and climb the back staircase that my father had used until his legs had failed him, after which he’d ridden the clanking elevator, incarcerating himself behind its gate. On the landing between the second and third floors, I’d turn right into a narrow corridor leading into what had once been the servants’ wing. Inside the ironing room, cardboard file boxes lined the shelves. Albums and scrapbooks filled the drawers. Dust swirled in the light from a single dormer window. The only furniture was a stepladder and a child’s desk. I’d haul a box off a shelf onto the desk, remove a stack of papers, sit on the stepladder, and read.

The truth is, I suffer from an almost promiscuous inquisitiveness. It’s an occupational hazard, I suppose. Though I can’t say whether the occupation or the inclination came first: Maybe newspapers were chicken and egg. In this instance, I had no idea, when I got started, where my digging might lead me. I knew only that there was a vein of paper to be mined. Arranging a heap before me, I’d angle myself over the pint-size worktable; by the time I’d look up, hours would have passed. By the following spring, I’d begun to sense a story taking shape—a narrative unwinding over multiple generations and one hundred years; spilling from the paneled chambers of the big house to the rice plantations of South Carolina and the palatial “cottages” of Mount Desert Island, Maine; tossing up its characters, from time to time, near the gurge of the historical moment; and leading me toward an answer to the question I couldn’t shake.

A story, of course, begins where the teller chooses to begin it. I’m starting this one with the making of a middling American fortune—a fortune that would pale by comparison to many, like those of Rockefellers or Carnegies or Kochs, but one sufficient, if shrewdly managed, to subsidize a generation or two or more to come. This story ends in the final years of my father’s life nearly one hundred years later—in his meticulous restoration of a mansion he didn’t own, and in his simultaneous self-destruction. The world that the Colonel constructed, and set to spinning on its axis, had shaped the lives of all who’d followed. His aspirations had marked his children, their children, their children’s children. If I could piece together the story of the inception of Ardrossan, and some of what followed, maybe I’d begin to see how my father’s charmed life had arrived at such a perplexing end.

A word of caution. In my father’s family, Ardrossan wasn’t the only thing that was passed down. Names rolled from great-grandparent to grandparent to parent to child: four Edgars, three Roberts, three Hopes, multiple Marys, Charlottes, Alexanders, and Warwicks—all of those in just four generations. For that reason, it might help a reader to know that there will be three central figures in this saga—the Colonel; his daughter Helen Hope; and her son Robert, my father. My paternal grandfather and great-grandfather will be important, too. While others will come and go, no reader need keep them all straight, hauling them around, as if in some overstuffed mental roll-aboard, from one chapter to the next.

My father’s forebears were not “the sort of people who leave few traces,” to borrow the words of Patrick Modiano, the Nobel Prize–winning French novelist who puzzles over questions of identity, gathering remnants of a buried past. The Colonel alone had left behind boxloads of correspondence, invoices, and other detritus that for some reason, or no reason, neither he nor anyone had seen fit to toss. There were communiqués to architects, landscapers, business associates, friends. There were letters drumming up support for a favorite cause, the repeal of Prohibition. Downstairs, in a corner of the library, his wife’s drop-front desk sat largely untouched since her death forty years earlier. In it were letters dating from early in her marriage, written by her young banker husband as he crossed the country negotiating financing deals—letters tinged with homesickness and dislocation as he peered into an unfamiliar American future. “I am greatly interested in the Pacific Coast in the way of its development, but the people you see are certainly queer,” he wrote from the Palace Hotel in San Francisco four years after the 1906 earthquake wiped out most of the city. “This is a very large hotel, one of the very largest in the country, yet you see the women come in quite dressed up and not a man in a dress suit.”

To me, the Colonel was a figure out of ancient history when I was young. He’d died just six years before I was born. But if you’d asked me, as a child, when my father’s grandfather had lived, I might have guessed around the time of Lincoln. He was the personage in the portrait, a figure in a fairy tale, a name invoked in toasts on Christmas Eve. When my grandmother occasionally mentioned her Dad, it threw me: I couldn’t reconcile the everydayness of the name with that legendary creature, monumental and remote. My aunt once described for me her first audience with him, which had occurred not long before she married my father’s brother. The Colonel, ailing, was scheduled to arrive at the Bryn Mawr train station, returning in a private railroad car from his plantation in South Carolina. An ambulance idled near the platform. The train rumbled into view, braked, shrieked to a halt. Then the great man, outsize and prostrate, his chest heaving, emerged on a stretcher, threaded through a train-car window, a camel through the eye of a needle.

Robert L. Montgomery was a proud, ambitious man. In his choice of spouse and business partners, he was strategic or fortunate or both. In his taste in architecture, art, costume, hobbies, sports, he leaned eastward toward Britain. He spent extravagantly but scrutinized every bill. He was capable of generosity, employing some of his less successful half siblings, but philanthropy appears not to have played a large part in his life. As the Depression dragged on, he railed increasingly against government spending. He complained that the township was making life difficult for the owners of big estates. As I pored over his papers, it seemed he’d carried on at times like a cartoon fat cat—not all that different from the present-day private-equity titans whose excesses I’d been contemplating with distaste.

The Colonel, before he was the Colonel, set out early to make a fortune. A great-grandfather of his had invested in property in New Orleans in the late eighteenth century, the value of which had skyrocketed after the Louisiana Purchase. The resulting windfall had benefited several generations but was drying up by the time of Robert Montgomery’s birth in 1879. His mother died when the boy was not yet two years old. His father, suddenly a widowed father of three, imported from the young state of Nebraska the daughter of an Episcopalian chaplain in Fort Omaha to serve as governess, then married her and fathered eight more. The blending wasn’t flawless. For the only photograph known to have been taken of the whole clan, dating from 1907, Robert’s father and stepmother gathered all eleven offspring on their summer farm and lined them up in descending order against the trunk of a fallen tree. The photograph that resulted, known as “The Family Tree,” is said to have marked the last time the entire family was together.

Growing up in his father’s increasingly populous household in Radnor, where his maternal grandmother would come and go in a carriage with a liveried coachman, the young Montgomery is said to have been conscious of the strain on his father’s resources. At sixteen, he left school and went to work as a stock clerk at a merchant bank, a branch of the House of Morgan. By twenty-seven, he’d started his own firm along with two well-chosen partners—a wealthy banker’s son, married to a granddaughter of a multimillionaire transit mogul and financier, and a son of one of the founders of the Philadelphia department store Strawbridge & Clothier. Together, the three partners had what it would take to flourish in the clubby world of early-twentieth-century investment banking—social standing and connections. The new firm opened seven months before the Panic of 1907. Soon, it was “buying and selling businesses with good prospects but little success—often very quickly and with enormous profit,” a half brother of the Colonel wrote later in a memoir. Robert Montgomery became a millionaire “almost overnight.”

“It was almost as though he belonged to another family—a cousin rather than a brother,” the half brother, Horace, wrote. “To my proud, wealthy and aristocratic half-sister and half-brothers, it was who you are and not what you are that counted most. One’s family was the all-important criterion. You could be undistinguished, dull, silly, even poor provided you came from or were related to a family that ‘belonged’.”

The Colonel’s talents in finance weren’t the sole source of his wealth. At twenty-two, he’d married Charlotte Hope Binney Tyler, the daughter of a Philadelphia businessman and bank cofounder. The latest in a long line of nearly a dozen firstborn Hopes, she was beguiling, stylish, and artistic. Her father served on the boards of corporations his ambitious son-in-law might hope to cultivate as clients; and, Hope’s mother having died, her father had married the daughter of a man whose serial successes in produce, oil refining, and transit had made him far richer even than Tyler père. On their first wedding anniversary, the young Montgomerys dined at the White House; Hope’s cousin Edith was President Theodore Roosevelt’s second wife. Soon, Robert Montgomery and his brother-in-law were in business together. Not long after that, Theodore Roosevelt Jr. joined them. All in all, it was an auspicious union. Asked years later how the Colonel made the money to pull together Ardrossan, a lawyer for the family is said to have answered, “He married Miss Tyler.”

The Colonel was thirty-one when he bought his first two hundred ten acres in Radnor. By the time the 1913 Atlas of Properties came out, he’d annexed ninety-nine more. By 1920, he owned five hundred forty-two; in 1926, he had seven hundred forty-two. His name arced like a necklace across a full third of Plate 22 in the atlas published that year; his holdings included manor houses, farm buildings, orchards, and three tributaries of Darby Creek. On the next plate, his latest acquisitions extended across Newtown Road and three-quarters of a mile north. By the time his shopping spree ended, his fiefdom encompassed some eight hundred acres, with frontage on four and a half miles of public roads. He was the biggest individual taxpayer in Delaware County. When a real estate broker wrote to him in 1930, offering to sell him a one-hundred-ninety-acre farm and a stone house near West Chester, all suitable for what the broker referred to as a “Gentlemen’s Country Estate,” the gentleman answered haughtily, “I am already owner of a vast estate in Villa Nova.”

To build a house suitable to his station, he hired a Philadelphia architect with a fashionable practice catering to what Michael C. Kathrens, an architectural historian and author of a book on the architect, has described as the desire of the extremely rich of that era “to flaunt their wealth with more grandiose and more expensively appointed old-world-style houses.” The architect, Horace Trumbauer, had made a name for himself in the Philadelphia area at the end of the nineteenth century by designing a forty-room castle for a sugar baron. From that modest beginning, he’d gone on to build a hundred-ten-room palace for a trolley-car titan; a Renaissance-style mansion with frescoed ceilings for the titan’s business partner; and an Elizabethan-style house for the business partner’s son. With a Trumbauer house, a man might hope to cement his business connections and build what Kathrens describes as dynastic alliances through the marriages of his children. When the Colonel hired Trumbauer, the architect had yet to undertake some of his best-known commissions, including Widener Library at Harvard, and Miramar, a summerhouse in Newport, which he equipped with a twenty-foot stone basin big enough to accommodate two hundred magnums of champagne on ice.

The house Trumbauer designed for the Montgomerys had no champagne basin. But modest it was not. The design was inspired by a house in Surrey that had been featured in Country Life, a British weekly read closely by country gentlemen, arrived or aspiring. The Montgomery house would have fifteen bedrooms, fifteen fireplaces, and accommodations for twelve servants. Trumbauer stretched the scale of certain features of the Surrey house to achieve what Kathrens calls a more monumental appearance. For interior decoration, the Montgomerys hired the London firm that had overhauled Buckingham Palace after the death of Queen Victoria. The Colonel’s wife hired that firm “with the understanding that everything was to be as plain as possible, but of a quality unsurpassed.” Her tastes, it seems, were simpler than those of her husband, whose birthday checks she sometimes parked in a bank account and forgot about for years. Occasionally, she called the palace he’d ordered up “my Taj Mahal.”

The Colonel didn’t stop at the house. He arranged for a fifty-foot-long swimming pool, fed by springwater that arrived through a spout at one end and spilled out the other end into a chute leading to a passing stream. He built a seventeen-hundred-foot-long stone wall along what was then the northern frontier of the estate. He called for a balustrade of Indiana limestone, decorated with sculptures, matching the trim on the house. He had the driveway circle expanded to accommodate the turning radius of a large touring car. He built a stone water tower—concrete-lined, shingle-roofed—and had water pumped from springs on the property into underground tanks. To design homes for farm employees, he sent his architects a book on British cottage architecture. The semidetached houses were to be surrounded by gardens, fruit trees, hedges, honeysuckle, roses. The architects wrote back, reassuring the client, “The whole group will be quite English in effect.” Because he’d long dreamed of a stable with a clock tower, he sent his architect a pencil sketch of what he had in mind. When the stable was completed, it had a stone tower with a self-winding Seth Thomas tower clock, an indoor exercise track, box stalls, a saddle room, a trainer’s room, a trophy room. Grain arrived, and manure departed, via carriers attached to a hanging track. Years later, my grandmother would say the stable was the part of her parents’ place she’d loved most when she was a child.

Poking through the Colonel’s papers, it occurred to me for the first time that the place I’d known from my earliest years was an invention. It had seemed to date from time immemorial; in truth, it was a creation of a fairly recent vintage—a product of one man’s imagination and will. The invention wasn’t simply the house with its towering gateposts decked out with lanterns with antique glass panels. The Colonel had ordered up farm roads, stone bridges, walls. He’d had boulders hauled out of the fields and woods, to be crushed into gravel for surfacing the roads in his preferred shade of gray. He’d selected the grasses—timothy, bluegrass, redtop, white clover—which were still growing in the pastures when I was young. He’d insisted upon Norway spruce along the boundary to the north—until he changed his mind and replaced them with white pine. In the heaps of correspondence, bills, and receipts, I could track his restless desire behind the thousands of man-hours spent clearing, blasting, hauling, digging, filling, grading, planting, transplanting, plowing, harrowing, seeding, paving, pumping, fencing. Even the landscape was, to some extent, the Colonel’s vision.

A year or two after moving into the house, he ordered up a forest. He enlisted the services of a nursery in New York that had developed a sideline in transplanting mature trees onto estates. The nursery sent a landscape architect to Pennsylvania to design a bespoke forest, then dispatched the superintendent of its tree-moving department to oversee the operation. For three weeks in February 1915, men uprooted trees, swaddled roots in burlap, and hauled transplants from one end of the Montgomery property to another. As George S. Kaufman said of the hundreds of trees transplanted onto Moss Hart’s estate, “Just what God would have done if He had the money.”

But, several weeks in, the Colonel aborted the maneuvers. The cost was turning out to be much higher than he’d expected. It had taken thirteen days to move just six trees. What’s more, the trees, once transplanted, weren’t tall enough to fulfill their intended purpose, which, it seems, may have been to erase the sight of another very large house rising on an estate a mile away.

The following spring, the planting extravaganza resumed. Ten thousand rhododendron bushes were ordered for the woods on the Montgomery holdings. Seven hundred linear feet of privet went in along the boundary to the south. On the high banks of the long, straight road that served as the property line to the north, one thousand, two hundred fifty climbing roses took root. Seven hundred fifty honeysuckle plants arrived from a local nursery. In April and May, landscapers installed two dozen purple beech trees, two dozen junipers, three dozen white dogwoods, four dozen hemlocks, and dozens of snowballs, lilacs, forsythias, mock oranges, hydrangeas, and box trees. For the landscaping around the new swimming pool, nine hundred ferns were trucked in. The lawns spilling away from the big house were planted with nearly five hundred trees. Six hundred cowslip, rock cress, white stonecrop, and other small, flowering perennials arrived from a nursery in Vermont, along with instructions from a famous landscape architect in Manhattan to plant them in the cracks of rocks.

The Colonel furnished himself, too, with the ultimate gentleman’s accessory, a herd of cows.

When I was young, mine was the only Main Line grandmother I knew of with three hundred cows. But in her father’s day, I’ve since learned, a dairy herd was prized accoutrement for the gentleman farmer on several Main Line estates. Percival Roberts, the iron and steel man with the Olmsted landscapes, had Ayrshires at his place in Penn Valley and Gladwyne. Another estate, with a house modeled on a Tudor castle in Warwickshire, had its own dairy, too. The Colonel, who’d already dabbled in sheep and poultry, bought approximately a dozen Ayrshires—hardy, economical, long-lived producers of superior milk—from a friend who’d imported them from Scotland. In a photograph from the early years, the original cows stand in a row, facing away from the camera, their posteriors on display. The unpronounceable names they brought with them—Auchenbainzie Katie, Lessnessock Violet II, Muiryhill Sally III, and so on—read as though lifted from a Scottish gazetteer.

By 1920, the herd had multiplied sixfold with the cooperation of the Colonel’s prizewinning bull. The Colonel wanted his dairy to be state-of-the-art, so he sent an emissary to gather intelligence at an innovative farm in the Hudson Valley. He experimented with crop rotations; he tried a portable barn for milking, to save money on bedding—then ditched it, having realized his cows were wasting energy growing winter coats. By the time a reporter from Field Illustrated Advertiser showed up in 1920, the farm was said to be turning a small profit. But the Colonel insisted that making money mattered less to him than superior milk. To his sister, he wrote, “My personal pride prompts me to sell a better product, if I can, than anyone else, as I never like to have to do with anything unless it is the best.”

Brandy from Berry Bros. in London, picnic baskets from Asprey, jodhpurs from Huntsman & Sons of Savile Row: The laird of Ardrossan prided himself on his standards and taste. Once, he instructed his grown son to return forty-one cases of Gordon’s gin: Only Bellows would do. He fished for salmon on a river in Canada where Micmac fishing guides escorted the world’s richest men. His black cloth overcoat was lined with mink. And when rodents turned up in the big house, no garden-variety pest-control specialist would suffice: Horace Trumbauer wrote to his exacting client, “With reference to exterminating the rats at your residence I have made inquiry as to who did this work at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel.”

The big house required a battalion to run it. Thirteen servants—young immigrants from Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland, and France—lived in the house at the time of the 1920 census. When the household was in full operation, my father said, sixteen men and women sat down to the midday meal in the servants’ dining room. There were cooks, maids, butlers, valets, chauffeurs, handymen, gardeners, watchmen. The pantry housed enough silver to keep busy a polisher chasing tarnish full-time—candlesticks and candelabras, hot dishes with covers, footed bowls, fish platters, compotes, bouillon spoons, ice tongs, chop plates, toast racks, chafing dishes, gravy boats, candlesnuffers, and old-fashioned glasses etched with the word “Achievement.” The staff didn’t simply clean, cook, wait on tables, wash dishes, wash laundry, drive, cultivate the gardens. They were essential to the raising of children. My great-uncle Aleck had not one baby nurse but two. When his mother’s breast milk couldn’t keep up with demand, the family summoned the fashionable wife of the fashionable French chef of a fashionable French restaurant in Philadelphia to fill in as a wet nurse.

Extravagance in genuflecting to the past was not, it turns out, exclusive to our Colonel Montgomery. A distant kinsman of his occupies a rarefied niche in British history for having mounted an ill-fated medieval jousting tournament on the grounds of his imitation Gothic castle in Ayrshire, Scotland, in 1839. At a time of Romantic infatuation with chivalry and other things medieval, Archibald Montgomerie, the thirteenth earl of Eglinton, trained forty earls, viscounts, marquesses, and so on to play the role of medieval knight, and dressed them in medieval costume and armor. He had pavilions and grandstands constructed. A glittering roster of guests, including the future Napoleon III, turned out for the event. Four thousand people were expected; as many as one hundred thousand are said to have shown up. Then, as knights and their entourages pranced forth in the opening-day parade, lightning crackled and a sudden downpour swamped the festivities. Guests ended up having to flee on foot. At the time, the earl’s effort was admired for its pageantry and ambition. But ridicule followed. The Eglinton Tournament has been remembered more recently as “one of the most glorious and infamous follies of the nineteenth century.” It took a large bite, too, out of the thirteenth earl’s cash.

It had never occurred to me to wonder what our Colonel had been thinking. There was the story of his fall from the rented horse and his resolution to build a house on the spot—a story that every journalist who ever encountered my grandmother swallowed whole and served up in print. But that tale didn’t really explain the serial annexations or the magnitude of the Main Line Taj. The Colonel hadn’t merely bought a hilltop with a view that had caught his eye. He’d made a statement about himself, his family, his place. As decades passed and generations piled up, Ardrossan appeared to embody assumptions about family—for example, the responsibilities of each generation to those that preceded and came after. Had my father’s grandparents, both motherless at a young age, shared a dream of an indissoluble, multigenerational clan? “On Ardrossan, unity is strength,” the Colonel’s wife, whose children and grandchildren called her Muz, wrote upon hearing that her eldest grandson was decamping. When they locked up their land and houses in trusts that couldn’t be tampered with for a hundred years, were they envisioning a family compound that would endure intact far into the future?

I ran that hypothesis by my uncle. My father’s only sibling (and the third of the four Edgars), he’d known his grandparents longer than any member of his generation. He’d grown up on Ardrossan and returned to it after the Marines, Harvard, and marriage—until it had become clear that his wife’s happiness wouldn’t survive being cooped up on the same eight hundred acres as his mother. He’d spent his career in the stockbrokerage that his father and the Colonel had founded. He was as likely as anyone to know his grandparents’ motivations. When I went to see him, he was in his late eighties, living with his wife and their dogs, cats, and horses at the end of a gravel road in the rolling countryside near the Brandywine River valley in a landscape that three generations of Wyeths had painted. Fifteen years earlier, while foxhunting at age seventy-five, he’d found himself parallel to the ground, halfway out of the saddle, on a galloping horse after it stumbled on a fence. Seeing no alternative, he’d let go and fallen, breaking a piece of bone that projects upward from the second vertebra in one’s neck. Thinking nothing was seriously wrong, he’d accepted a ride, from a photographer with a jeep, to a trauma center, where a nurse, wheeling him out of the room where a technician had just X-rayed his back, assured him he was lucky because nothing appeared to have been broken. “Well, I’m certainly glad to hear that,” he’d remember saying, “but, I must say, I’ve never had such a sore neck.” The broken bits, he discovered after the nurse executed a volte-face with the gurney, had not displaced. So he’d avoided paralysis and/or death. The day I went to visit, big yellow dogs bounded to the door of his house, tails wagging with enough vigor to upend a small child. We sat in a room with a picture window, beyond which hills plunged and climbed into the distance. When I asked him if he thought his grandparents had conceived Ardrossan and set up the trusts out of a commitment to some idea of the enduring family, he seemed to doubt it. The Colonel was dynastic, he said. But my uncle said what my father, the former trusts and estates lawyer, had occasionally said: Their grandparents’ intention was to avoid taxes.

The first trust was set up in 1912—the year before the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment gave Congress the authority to tax income. The second was dated 1917—one year after the Revenue Act of 1916 created a tax on the transfer of wealth from an estate to its beneficiaries. A third was dated 1933—the year Congress created the gift tax to stop the rich from dodging the estate tax by handing down wealth during their lifetimes. The Ardrossan trusts had other benefits, too. They’d protect the Colonel and his well-situated wife in the event of losses in his business: Any creditor who came after them would have no claim on anything held in trust. In the meantime, the estate might be made self-sustaining. The rents paid on the houses could be used to cover expenses without having to be declared as income. Though many of the houses went to family members for rents that seemed minimal, my uncle told me those rents “damn near did maintain the property for years.”

The Colonel had become an investment banker at an opportune moment. He’d gone into finance just as the market for industrial securities was being born. Until 1890, Americans with capital to invest had mostly put it in real estate. If they’d wanted to buy securities, railroad securities had been almost the only option; industrial firms had tended to be small, closely held, and not publicly traded. In the early 1890s, that began to change. With railroads covering much of the country, the demand for investment capital for the rail system had become less urgent, and a market for industrial securities emerged. Dozens of industrial companies issued investment-quality, dividend-paying preferred stocks in the early years of that decade, through mergers, incorporations, and recapitalizations. A business grew up in the distribution of industrial stocks. After those stocks performed better on average than railroad securities during the depression of 1893 to 1897, investors embraced them, enabling manufacturing and other industrial firms to grow. A wave of large-scale mergers took place. By the early twentieth century, investment banking firms were underwriting new issues of industrial securities, selling the stock to investors, and making money on the sales. When Montgomery, Clothier & Tyler was formed in 1907, that was the firm’s business.

How successful the Colonel’s firm really was proved almost impossible for me to determine. Newspaper articles and advertisements from the period make it clear that the firm was busy with stock offerings, bond issues, syndicates, mergers. But, as a private partnership, it wasn’t required to keep records or file reports; how much money the partners made on individual deals was not recorded. Until the advent of the income tax, the partners kept what they made. But because the firm was an unlimited liability partnership, their own money was at stake. If they paid more to underwrite an issue than they made distributing the stock to investors, they swallowed the loss. My uncle, the third Edgar, told me he’d heard that the firm lost money for the first seven years, then more than made up for it in each of the following seven. A cousin of my father’s remembered his grandmother, Muz, telling him, “You know, your grandfather went bankrupt twice, and I bailed him out both times.”

At thirty-two years old, the Colonel landed at the center of one of the biggest deals of the time—the reincorporation, restructuring, and recapitalization of what had been the leading firm in the locomotive industry. The Baldwin Locomotive Works had for a long time produced more than a third of all the locomotives built; in its best year, 1906, it had turned out two thousand, six hundred sixty-six engines, running its Philadelphia plant around the clock and employing seventeen thousand men. In 1909, Baldwin had incorporated as a privately held company with a capitalization of twenty million dollars. Two years later, the directors took the company public. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Colonel prepared the financial plan for the new corporation, whose capitalization doubled overnight to forty million dollars. Though Baldwin’s officers eventually enlisted two larger and better-known firms to work with Montgomery, Clothier & Tyler, the Colonel himself was reported to have made a killing. “According to reports current in financial circles at the time, and which were not denied, Mr. Montgomery made one million dollars by his work on the project,” the Inquirer later reported. A banker who’d advised Montgomery, Clothier & Tyler on the deal resigned as president of his bank amid criticism of his sharing in the profits of the financing. The underwriters were said to have been paid in common stock, and the adviser’s share was rumored to be valued at five hundred thousand dollars. Baldwin’s net profits averaged 9.8 percent of sales between 1910 and 1915, rising with the advent of World War I.

With war orders surging, the Colonel engineered the merger in 1915 of two major manufacturers of guns, shells, caissons, and other ordnance—advance word of which sent the price of the stock of one of the firms to its highest levels ever. His firm took the lead, with a New York firm, on the reorganization and recapitalization of the world’s largest manufacturer of trucks. In 1916, a syndicate led by the Montgomery firm and one other acquired nearly all the stock in one of the oldest and best-known independent oil-refining and petroleum products companies in the East and reorganized it under new ownership. In 1917, it led the restructuring and recapitalization of one of the world’s largest consumers of copper, which the company used to produce cable for telephone and telegraph, and electrical, companies. And during the war years, when American machinery firms became targets for Wall Street stockjobbing operations—the buying and selling of securities in pursuit of quick profits—the Montgomery firm was a principal in the purchase, reorganization, and recapitalization of one of the only two United States producers of armored steel, used to make battleships.

On the evening of March 1, 1917, ten years after the partnership had been announced in the Wall Street Journal, the firm celebrated itself with a banquet in the ballroom of the thousand-room, French Renaissance–style Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in downtown Philadelphia. Three years earlier, the partners had opened a New York office with Theodore Roosevelt Jr. in charge; a year after that, they’d opened branch offices in Pittsburgh and Hartford. One hundred twenty-five firm members and guests turned out for the tenth-anniversary blowout at the Bellevue-Stratford, described at its opening a decade earlier as the most luxurious hotel in the country. In the two-tiered ballroom, with light fixtures by Thomas Edison and chandeliers by Lalique, the Colonel, in white tie and tails, sat on the stage beneath the proscenium arch, at the midpoint of a feasting table draped in white linen and decorated with floral centerpieces, silver place settings, and candelabras. His cofounders sat on either side. Their fathers, the city’s banking and department-store bigwigs, flanked them. Below the high table, men in tuxedos and women in evening dresses sat at round tables filling the room. The menu for the occasion listed nineteen dishes, including fillet of sole, breast of guinea, sweet potatoes, and a dessert called bombe pompadour. A photographer captured the event—the sea of pale faces turned upward toward the camera, frozen momentarily above crystal glasses, linen napkins, oysters on the half shell, dinner rolls yet to be touched. Some seven hundred fifty oysters were consumed that evening in celebration of the Colonel and his firm’s dazzling success. I wonder if anyone there that evening imagined even for a moment that the partnership would begin to crumble within six months.

Helen Hope Montgomery, with two of her siblings

Helen Hope, the Colonel’s eldest child and my father’s mother, used to say she was raised to go to parties. That’s how she put it. “I’m just a party girl,” she’d say, chasing the confession with a percussive laugh. Her parents wanted her to know a lot of people, she’d say; they wanted her career to be marriage. On one level, the declaration was matter-of-fact—a data point along the lines of “Dad flew autogiros.” The laugh that followed was an invitation to see the humor in the situation: If you found it funny, good. So did she. By the time I knew her, she was fully aware that changing times had stolen some of the luster from her assigned vocation. But she can hardly have regretted how it had worked out. She’d aced the party-girl exams, no question. As for her career in marriage, she was CEO of a blue-chip domestic union. She’d made herself into a dairy farmer of some renown, disregarding her father’s stated position that cows weren’t for women. She’d appeared on best-dressed lists alongside Babe Paley. She’d judged horses at Madison Square Garden. She’d honored her parents by doing more than anyone else to keep Ardrossan going, the farm operating, and four generations of family members on much better than speaking terms.

Helen Hope Montgomery had been named for her mother but she took after her father. She had his big, dark eyes, pronounced eyebrows, dark wavy hair. Headstrong and competitive, she had a pony at four, rode in horse shows at eight, competed in jumping classes at thirteen. “I was terribly ambitious,” she said. “I wanted to be the top of everything.” She had a fine affinity with animals. In a scrapbook, I find a photograph of her at about eight months, in a white linen dress with puffy sleeves, propped against a long-haired dog named Cauliflower, twice her size. She sits in the curve of the dog’s long torso, eyes wide, one tiny fist lost somewhere in the dog’s flowing beard. Child and dog meet the gaze of the camera, appearing mildly affronted, as though the photographer has interrupted a moment of intimate consultation between cousins. In a published account of the activities of a local foxhunting club—an enthusiast’s diary of miles covered, fences cleared, noses bloodied, port consumed—I find the trail of the Colonel and his then adolescent eldest, Helen Hope. They would set off together before dawn on fall mornings, riding for miles across frosted fields to join the hunt that her great-uncle had founded.

On a cold day in the winter of 1910, the girl who would grow up to sing a naughty song to the Duke of Windsor and win a Charleston contest judged by Josephine Baker gazed for the first time at the rolling expanse that was to become her family’s place. Helen Hope was six years old that day. Her family had been living in Haverford, a half dozen station stops out from Philadelphia on the Main Line. Governesses, cooks, maids, chauffeurs—nine in all—attended to the needs of two parents, one auntie, and two daughters. (Two more children were yet to be born.) On that day, which Helen Hope would recall vividly eighty-some years later, the family set off in a French touring car, with an open top and a French chauffeur, to survey Dad’s latest acquisition. (“Americans were not supposed to be capable of driving a car in those days,” my grandmother would note.) To its six-year-old passenger, the car seemed to tower above the ground. Sunlight flashed on its brass fittings. The party sallied forth in the gravy boat with its uniformed driver. He headed northwest, intending to approach the property from the south, and maneuvered the vehicle onto Godfrey Road. Soon the road, unpaved then, turned into a ribbon of mud. The wheels began to spin, sending clods of dirt shooting into the air, burrowing deeper into the muck. The young gentleman financier with his fancy car, enviable wife, beautifully turned-out little girls, and grand dreams ended up having to summon four horses he’d just bought. Pressed into service as draft horses that day, the hunters hauled automobile, chauffeur, children, wife, and paterfamilias from the ooze.

School in any formal sense was not a priority. Some Main Line parents sent their offspring to boarding school at six or seven, aping the child-rearing customs of the British upper classes; the husband of one of my father’s cousins was sent away at five. The Montgomery children were spared that fate. “My mother, a strong believer in both practicality and charm, regarded education for women as a rather unnecessary waste of time,” my grandmother once explained. Instead, a French governess taught her to read and write in French. Tutors taught her and her siblings other subjects at home or in the houses of other families nearby. A dance instructor was imported to hold classes in the then unfurnished ballroom in the big house. Boys in knicker suits and dancing pumps and girls in dresses and ballet slippers arrived from neighboring estates. A liveried butler met them at the door, escorted them past several large dogs, and delivered them to the ballroom to shake hands, in front of the fireplace, with Muz. Helen Hope’s brother, Aleck, eventually went to boarding school and from there to Harvard. But the first test their sister Mary Binney would later remember having taken was a Red Cross test, during World War II. She was in her midthirties.

Unconstrained by the obstinacy of school calendars, the Montgomery family was free to travel. In December 1921—by which time there were four children, ages seventeen, fourteen, ten, and nine—the family set sail for Europe on the last of the four-funneled ocean liners, the Aquitania. On his passport application, the Colonel wrote that the family would return “within eight months.” Their itinerary, as Aleck reported it later on sheets of yellow legal-pad paper, was listed as follows: “British Isles, Egypt, India, Gibraltar, Madeira, Portugal, France, Italy, Greece, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, Algiers, Czechoslovakia and other countries en route.” A year and a half after returning, the family set off again, minus Helen Hope, on a circumnavigation that took them to England, France, Egypt, Aden, Ceylon, Burma, Singapore, Hong Kong, Macao, the Philippines, China, and Japan. During a month-long emergency layover in Hong Kong, the matriarch recovered from what was said by several American newspapers, which saw these facts as newsworthy, to be “an attack of India fever.”

In a book about the Bund, the waterfront quarter of Shanghai, I came upon a mysterious reference in a chapter on the Astor House Hotel, which was said to have been the first Western hotel in China, advertised as “the Waldorf-Astoria of the Orient.” The author recounted the hotel’s history as a magnet for foreigners and expatriates. “Notable Guests”—from Albert Einstein to the Maharaja of Kapurthala and the last Hawaiian king—were enumerated. Buried in that list was the following item: In 1924, a British woman and her daughter stayed at the hotel “pretending to be Charlotte Hope Binney Tyler Montgomery and her wealthy socialite daughter Helen Hope Montgomery.” The pair “made a fortune duping Shanghai’s foreign community. The daughter, who was supposedly coming into a huge fortune, courted marital proposals and was swift to lose or run off with engagement rings, whilst her mother borrowed many expensive fur coats on the pretense of having them copied, but which were never seen by their owners again. The couple made a safe escape to Hong Kong before the hotel was besieged by their debtors.”

When I knew her, my grandmother had a storytelling style that inclined sharply toward antic capers and skillfully calibrated overstatement. But she professed to have been painfully shy as a child. Her mother had cured her, she said, with two pieces of advice—the first, about the importance of always giving people the best possible time; the second, about the futility of excessive self-awareness. “It is stupid to always be thinking of yourself,” my grandmother would remember her mother telling her. “Point yourself at something and then get going.” Whether she’d really suffered from shyness, I can’t be sure. If she did, it seems conceivable that she cured herself by force of will. She had the discipline to override whatever mild anxieties might have caused what she called shyness. If that worked for her, she probably assumed that the rest of us could benefit from similar advice. The language of emotional nuance was not her mother tongue. Once, she turned to a granddaughter, not quite emerging from adolescence, and offered a bit of blunt, less-than-tender grandparental advice. “You know, it’s not enough to look good,” she said. “You have to say something.”

By her own account, Helen Hope put her mother’s advice to work: “So the first thing I did was to get some girlfriends with plenty of boyfriends. On Sundays our courtyard was full of the most disreputable cars imaginable.” Her parents were horrified, at least in her telling: “I had become very interested in boys and I think my parents were worried that I was going to be old news by the time I was a debutante at eighteen.” So they found a boarding school that took not only girls but their steeds. They promised her a horse if she’d go. She took the bribe. Before leaving for school, she asked her mother what she should do about Latin, the existence of which was news. No problem, Muz assured her: “You’re fluent in French!” The horse arrived at the school first; rider followed. She lasted less than two years. Her parents, she said, “snatched me out to polish me off in Europe. I was delighted about that since I missed the final exams, having cleverly avoided tests in the past by getting chicken pox and pinkeye.”

Of Muz’s four children, Helen Hope most closely resembled her father. She adored him and, it seems, he adored her. If he had one criticism of his admired eldest, it was that she might benefit from grappling more seriously with life. When she looked in the mirror each morning, the Colonel would say, Helen Hope would ask herself, “How much fun can I have today?” My grandmother liked to tell that story. But, from the way she told it, you might have concluded that she took her father’s critique as a point of pride.

Mary Binney, three years younger, was the artist. A pianist and a dancer, she traveled, as a teenager, into Philadelphia every Friday afternoon and Saturday evening to hear the Philadelphia Orchestra perform under Leopold Stokowski, then at the height of his nearly thirty-year run as the orchestra’s music director. Aleck, four years younger than Mary Binney, suffered from an unhappy relationship with his father. Aleck’s son described Aleck’s Navy enlistment as running away from home: “My grandfather’s somewhat brutish personality was not particularly helpful to my father.” The youngest of the children, Charlotte Ives, eighteen months younger than Aleck, was the most daring and the most tragic. Widely loved, she rode horses that no one else would attempt, became a recreational pilot, made a spectacularly bad and brief marriage, ended up in a wheelchair for reasons no one ever seemed quite able or willing to pinpoint, and was outlived by all three of her siblings.

To mark my grandmother’s 1922 “launch” into society—that’s the society writers’ vernacular, conjuring visions of a luxury liner gliding decorously down a ramp, champagne bottles shattering across the prow—her parents organized a day of point-to-point races in her honor. An import from Ireland and England, point-to-point racing was new. Amateurs raced hunting horses on a course that took them across open fields and over fences and ditches. In his scarlet coat, top hat, and breeches, the Colonel greeted his guests at the front door of the big house. They sailed across the carpeted hallway, through the living room, out the French doors onto the terrace. One woman, it was reported later, wore a red-and-white-check gown; a black velvet box coat at hip length; a small hat with a black velvet crown and silver metal brim; a fox fur scarf; and high, laced, tan shoes, their fronts embroidered in red. Men and women gathered on the greensward, which stretched into the distance before ending abruptly at a recessed retaining wall designed to keep cows off the lawn without interrupting the view. In a black-and-white photograph apparently taken that day by a photographer hired for the occasion, riders gallop their horses flat-out across a pasture, coattails flying. The house looms behind them on the hilltop, half-hidden by not yet fully grown trees. In a second photograph, a horse and rider clear a high post-and-rail fence, as two more horses approach from behind. In the distance, spectators watch from a ridge. “Never in the annals of society in this city has a debutante been honored in such an unusual way or been the recipient of so much social attention,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reported breathlessly the following day.

The infatuation of society reporters with Helen Hope, and her attentiveness to their needs, commenced in earnest that fall. Newspaper readers learned that the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Montgomery would “never grow wildly enthusiastic over a new recipe, or skip with glee over a brand new way to put up tomatoes.” She preferred dancing and golf, though she said she was no good at the latter. She was the one debutante who defended bobbed hair; she favored longer dresses over shorter ones because they made her look dignified and tall. Her “crowning shame, of which she is not ashamed,” the newspaper said, was a tendency to fall unexpectedly and deeply asleep. “When it comes to the question of husbands, Miss Montgomery tells her preference with the same engaging smile,” the newspaper reported. “The ideal HE must be tall, good-looking, good-natured. He must have a million, and, last but not least, he must . . .”

The final qualification for the job had been torn off of the clipping.

At just over six feet, Edgar Scott was tall enough. He was stylishly tailored and slim, leaving the impression of an extra inch or two. My father once described him as resembling “a latter-day Roman emperor—benign, intelligent.” He was good-looking, if not in the chiseled, caveman way. He had blue eyes, a fair complexion, a curved nose, and light brown hair combed back from his forehead. His long face, at rest, settled into a slight smile. To me as a child, he had the look of a creature in a children’s book—a debonair fox. He was good-natured: What most people saw most of the time was a gentle charm, though he, too, had a temper. If he didn’t “have a million” in the year of Helen Hope Montgomery’s debut, there was reason to expect that one day he would. His grandfather Thomas Alexander Scott, the railroad president, had left behind a fortune estimated in 1881 at between five and ten million dollars. At a dinner party in Rosemont, Pennsylvania, in November 1922, my father’s parents laid eyes on each other for the first time. She was eighteen; he was twenty-three. Refining her account of that evening over the decades that followed, she polished it into the smoothest of romantic chestnuts. “I looked at him across the table,” she would say. “I thought he was divine.”

They saw each other twelve times before they decided to marry. Or was it six? Maybe four. As a precautionary measure, her parents mandated a nine-month engagement and removed her temporarily to Shanghai. In the first of the scrapbooks in which she preserved the paper record of their life together, mementos crowd the first page. “Looking forward with pleasure to this evening,” reads his handwriting on a cream-colored card—the kind that arrives with flowers—which she’s annotated, “First token ever from ES to HS.” Three place cards, pocketed after a dinner party and fitted into photographic corners, find Mr. Edgar Scott seated between Miss Yarnall on his left and Miss Montgomery on his right. In a telegram sent from Cambridge, Massachusetts, not long afterward, he signs off, “Miss you painfully. Oceans of love.” By Thanksgiving: “I’m spoiled by now—and a dinner at which I don’t sit next to you seems like nothing on earth.” By Christmas, all is settled. “Life isn’t what it was; and the most important trouble is that life isn’t what it will be,” he writes to her. “I can’t help thinking and thinking about that—and realizing that every minute of life without you is a minute of life lost.” His cousins, he reports, have fired questions and insinuations at him all evening: “God knows how I had the strength not to scream at them: ‘Yes! Yes!—And she loves me!’”

The Colonel was evidently not overjoyed. It seems he’d made a point of pinning down the lineage of the man who’d captivated his eldest. He knew that Edgar’s mother was a member of an admired Boston family of bankers, writers, and so on. She’d grown up in Philadelphia’s desirable Rittenhouse Square. But Edgar’s paternal grandfather, the railroad baron and an assistant secretary of war, had started out as a mere tavern owner’s son. “At least the mother is from a good family,” the Colonel is said to have sniffed, sideswiping the most accomplished forebear in memory on either side of the family.

That wouldn’t be the last dig he’d take at a man one of his daughters hoped to marry. Mary Binney, who played at Carnegie Hall at seventeen and recorded the Carnival of the Animals with the Philadelphia Orchestra, fell in love with Stokowski. Divorced and twenty-five years older than her, he’d go on later to marry an heiress, divorce again, and marry another heiress. Visiting the big house, he’s said to have been so appalled by the piano in the ballroom that he bought Mary Binney a Steinway. “He may have bought it, but I paid for it,” the Colonel is said to have snarled. Stokowski was not the husband the Colonel or Muz had envisioned for their second daughter. A butler at the big house would later tell the story of a visit by Stokowski. Heading out for a walk, Mary Binney offered him one of her father’s hats. Later, after Stokowski had returned the hat, her father instructed the butler to have it cleaned—and, once it was cleaned, is said to have commanded, “Now burn it.” The Montgomerys forced Mary Binney to break off the affair with Stokowski—an act said to have nearly killed her. “I will not have you marry a fiddle player,” the Colonel is said to have told her. In another version of the story, he says, “I will not have you marry that Polack.” Maybe he said neither, or both.

Edgar Scott was not from Poland and he didn’t play the fiddle. But his grandmother on his father’s side was the daughter of a banker and onetime mayor of Pittsburgh named Riddle. The Colonel, it seems, had doubts about the Riddles. Perhaps the prospect of his eldest daughter leaving the nest had gotten him thinking. Maybe he was feeling, at that moment, that he’d accomplished much of what he’d set out to do. He’d reversed the sagging trajectory of the Montgomery family fortunes. He’d married a woman with the temperament and inheritance to indulge him. He’d constructed a world grand enough to match his sense of himself. He’d created a structure, in property and trusts, that could minimize the exposure of his wealth to taxes and hold his family together into the future. Did the prospect of his eldest child’s marriage leave him to wonder about forces beyond his control?

“She can’t marry him,” the Colonel is said to have fumed. “He’s a Riddle, and the Riddles are drunks.”