About Tuxedo Park

The latter decades of the nineteenth century were known as the Gilded Age, a time when scores of men catapulted into the ranks of the wealthy, often from humble roots. While these men made money, their wives and daughters strove to enter the upper echelons of New York society, which was fiercely guarded by the Astors, Vanderbilts and those who had ruled for decades. In short, this was the time when the American Dream really did come true.

Into this scene in 1885, Pierre Lorillard IV experienced his own American Dream. His family owned 4,000 acres in the Ramapo Mountains forty miles northwest of New York City, and he wanted to create an exclusive country retreat where his society friends could gather in the spring and autumn for the manly sports of hunting and fishing, and where ladies could join them at dusk for dinner and conversation.

Lorillard hired an architect named Bruce Price (father of Emily Price Post), imported hundreds of workers, and in less than a year, Tuxedo Park was born. Mansions, called “cottages,” dotted the skirts of the lake, their manicured lawns perfect for croquet or badminton. Tuxedo Park offered a boathouse, stables, a private racetrack, stocked lakes, tennis courts, golf links, bowling lanes and hiking trails.

The most sought-after debutantes of every season came out at the Autumn Ball, a glittering event held each year around the first of November. The debutantes launched at Tuxedo Park were expected to make brilliant matches. Like the heroine of this story, many American heiresses sought after European titles, and at least four hundred acquired them and took hundreds of millions—billions in today’s dollars—out of the country.

Emily Post’s book, Etiquette, still used as a template for all that is gracious and socially correct, was first published in 1922. In this volume, she applied the manners and traditions she learned while growing up inside the fence that surrounded Tuxedo Park.