About Those Joneses
When I was writing the post about Rosalie Gardiner Jones's family and their summer house on Long Island, it occurred to me to wonder if these were the Joneses who had inspired the expression "keeping up with the Joneses." The same thing occurred to a reader. So I did a little research and discovered that, according to the Edith Wharton Society, Elizabeth Schermerhorn Jones and Wyndcliffe, the house she built in 1853 here in the Hudson Valley in Rhinebeck, occasioned the expression. This picture of Wyndcliffe, now a magnificent ruin, is from Rob Yasinsac's site Hudson Valley Ruins, where you can see more photographs of the house and learn about its fate.
Maybe 15 years ago some excited young people came into my shop.
ReplyDeleteAppreciating my interior they then invited me to a Halloween Party / fund raiser in the ruins. It was all lit in candles as one could still safely explore several rooms. The central living space had collapsed, but across the vast cavern was a room with the pocket doors left open, revealing a totally furnished room.