Part 25 (1/2)
[Ill.u.s.tration: THOMAS PETER]
When the Peters moved to their new home in George Town they used the western wing, already built, with its addition on the east, as their home, and the eastern wing was their carriage house and stable. This fact has been proved by finding below the floors the signs of the old stalls, and up in the rafters the corncobs of long ago. I have known people who remembered the old yellow coach which often stood out in the stable yard, and I've been told that if one dug deep enough its cobblestones would still be found.
Mr. and Mrs. Peter decided to use the fortune left her by her grandmother, Mrs. Was.h.i.+ngton, to build a stately mansion. They certainly succeeded. They engaged as architect Dr. William Thornton, whose plans for the Capitol had been accepted in the second compet.i.tion, as the first yielded none sufficiently good.
Dr. Thornton and his wife were intimate friends of the Peters, and a beautiful miniature of him, done by her, is now in the possession of one of the family. Mrs. Thornton was with Mrs. Peter when the British soldiers set fire to the Capitol in 1814, and the two ladies sat at the window of what is now the dining room of Tudor Place--the low part between the main building and the western wing--and watched the conflagration. You can imagine their grief as one saw the work of her husband destroyed, and the other, the building which had been so much in the mind and heart of her revered grandfather.
There is in existence a very lovely painting of Mrs. Peter at about the time of her marriage; a sweet, young girl with light curls, and the embodiment of daintiness. Suspended about her neck is, I think, the miniature which General Was.h.i.+ngton had painted for her as a wedding gift. When he asked her what she wanted she replied ”a replica of himself.” He was much pleased that a young girl would want a portrait of an old man! The photograph reproduced of Thomas Peter is from a portrait done by him by his son-in-law, Captain William G. Williams.
While on a visit to Tudor Place occurred the death of Mrs. Peter's mother, the former Eleanor Calvert. She was fifty-three years old, and had borne twenty children.
[Ill.u.s.tration: MRS. THOMAS PETER (MARTHA PARKE CUSTIS)]
Mr. and Mrs. Peter had a family of eight children. Three of the daughters had striking names: America, Columbia, and Britannia.
When General Lafayette paid his visit to Georgetown in 1824 it was, of course, most natural that he should be entertained at Tudor Place, as Mrs. Peter had known him in her childhood at Mount Vernon. At that time America met her husband, Captain Williams, who was acting as an aide for the Marquis. In later years, as chief of engineers on the staff of General Zachary Taylor, Captain Williams was killed at the Battle of Monterey. On that same visit Lafayette presented the youngest child, Britannia, a little girl of nine, with a lovely little desk, now in the National Museum in the loan collection of her grandson, Walter G. Peter.
On its under side it has an inscription in the handwriting of Martha Custis Peter, telling her daughter its history.
Britannia Wellington Peter was born on January 27, 1815. She died the day before her ninety-sixth birthday, and this editorial, from _The Baltimore Sun_, gives a fine picture of the changes in the world in the years covered by the span of her life:
A LONG AND INTERESTING LIFE
Mrs. Britannia Wellington Kennon, who died at Tudor Place, her historic home in Georgetown, on the 26th instant, and who will be buried today, was for many years a most interesting figure in the social life of Was.h.i.+ngton. She was the last in her generation of the descendants of Mrs. Martha Was.h.i.+ngton. John Parke Custis, Mrs.
Was.h.i.+ngton's son, left four children. One of his daughters, Martha, married Thomas Peter, and Mrs. Kennon was their daughter. She married Commodore Beverley Kennon, of the United States Navy, whose father was General Richard Kennon, of Was.h.i.+ngton's staff, a charter member of the Society of the Cincinnati, and a grandson of Sir William Skipwith. Commodore Kennon was killed in 1844 by the explosion on the U. S. S. _Princeton_, so Mrs. Kennon was a widow for more than sixty-six years.
Tudor Place, Mrs. Kennon's home, was famous for the distinguished guests that were entertained there, among them being General Lafayette, who visited there in 1824. She was the center of an intellectual and cultivated society, and was always in touch with the progress of events in the world.
Mrs. Kennon was born three weeks after the Battle of New Orleans, and several months before the Battle of Waterloo. Her life spanned the period of the great advance in the appliances of civilization in this and the last century. It was very important that the news of the battle of Waterloo should reach London without delay, and yet with every appliance and speed then known, it took three days for the news to reach England. Indeed, when Mrs. Kennon was thirty-two years of age, it required eight months to travel from New England to Oregon. At the age of fifteen she could have been a pa.s.senger on the first pa.s.senger railroad train that was ever run; until she was five years old, there was no such thing as an iron plow in all the world, and until she was grown up, the people were dependent on tinder boxes and sun gla.s.ses to light their fires. She had reached the age of twenty-three years when steam communication between Europe and America was established, and when the first telegram ever sent pa.s.sed between Baltimore and Was.h.i.+ngton she was still a young woman.
If all the advances in civilization which took place during the lifetime of this remarkable lady were catalogued, they would make a singularly interesting list.
Mrs. Kennon was left a widow when less than thirty years of age, with her one child, Martha Custis Kennon. To Mrs. Kennon and her daughter Mrs. Thomas Peter bequeathed Tudor Place, having long survived her husband, and her other children having received their inheritance.
Martha Custis Kennon married her cousin, Dr. Armistead Peter, the son of Major George Peter, and so the original surname came back to the place, which has never been out of the one family.
Until the death of Mrs. Kennon when they were, of course, divided, there was at Tudor Place a very large and valuable collection of Was.h.i.+ngton relics, fascinating things, among them Mrs. Was.h.i.+ngton's seed-pearl wedding jewelry and dress, a set of china made for and presented to General Was.h.i.+ngton by the French government, the bowl given him by the Order of the Cincinnati, and numberless other interesting things. In a corner of the central room, the saloon, as it is called, was the small camp trunk always used by the General. The room on the east, off of which opens the conservatory, is the drawing room; that to the west, the parlor. The saloon opens out onto the temple, the round porch on the south. The two large rooms at each side have lovely cornices, beautiful marble mantels and handsome crystal chandeliers; long group windows to the floor and very unusual doors of curly maple. At the debut tea of Mrs. Kennon's granddaughter, I was helping to serve, when, seeing two dear old ladies, one very short, the other very tall, both dressed in simple black with big bonnets and long veils, looking about in the crowd as if they were trying to see something particular, I went up and asked them if I could bring them some refreshments. They said, ”No, thank you, we really don't want anything, we are just trying to see if there are the same ornaments on the table as when Britannia was married.” I found out afterward that the ornaments were three beautiful alabaster groups of cla.s.sic figures. The two old ladies were Miss Mary and Miss Rosa Nourse, of The Highlands.
Britannia Peter was a first cousin of Mary Custis, of Arlington, and was one of the bridesmaids at the wedding there which united the daughter of George Was.h.i.+ngton Parke Custis to the handsome United States army officer, Robert Edward Lee. The friends.h.i.+p was an enduring one, and General Lee visited Tudor Place when he paid his last visit to Was.h.i.+ngton City in 1869.
Britannia Peter was bridesmaid for another first cousin, Helen Dunlop, when she was married at Hayes to William Laird.
From the descendant of another one of those bridesmaids at that famous wedding at Arlington who, as a young girl, paid long visits to Mary Custis, I heard this delicious story: ”There being no telephones, when the girls at Arlington and at Tudor Place wanted to get together they had a series of signals. Hanging a red flannel petticoat out of the window meant 'come on over'. A white one had another meaning. This method was not popular with the owners of the two mansions, but persisted, nevertheless.” To prove this, not long ago I went to Arlington with the person who told me the story. The room there used by the girls of those days does look toward Georgetown. There is a forest of tall trees there now but trees can grow very tall in a hundred years.
When my father built his house at the foot of Mrs. Kennon's place, she told him she was so glad to have him near by, but chided him for cutting off her view of the river.
Until only a few years before her death, Mrs. Kennon sat perfectly erect in her chair, never touching the back, and I can remember her as quite an old lady, almost flying up the hill of Congress (31st) Street, always, of course, in bonnet and long, crepe veil. She was a member of Christ Church, and once many, many years ago when a parish meeting was announced to decide some important question, the rector and gentlemen were very much surprised on entering the vestry to find Mrs. Kennon there waiting for the meeting. She said she wished to have a say in the matter, and having no man to represent her, had come herself. So she was the original suffragette! Mrs. Kennon was one of the early presidents of the Louise Home, and was the first president of the National Society of Colonial Dames of America in the District of Columbia.
Before the day of country clubs there used to be a very fine tennis court at Tudor Place, on the flat part to the north of the house not far from Congress (31st) Street, and it was much used. The Peter boys were champions of the District several times. In the first administration of President Cleveland, Mrs. Cleveland, a bride, used to drive her husband in from Oak View or, as it was popularly called, Red Top, to his office at the White House nearly every morning in a low, one-horse phaeton. No secret-service entourage in those days! In the evenings she came again in style in a Victoria, and frequently they would stop opposite Tudor Place and watch the game in progress. There was a good deal of intimacy between Tudor Place and ”Red Top” in those days.
The only football I ever heard of being played at Tudor Place was by a team of which my youngest brother was a member. They had nowhere to play, so he walked up there one day, and being a very engaging young man of about ten years, with big, blue eyes and a charming smile, he asked the old lady for permission, which she gave. She used to sit by the long window in the parlor and watch them with great interest and pleasure.
Some other boys thought they would like the same privilege and asked for it, but she told me she always asked, ”Are you a friend of my little cousin?” Only his friends could play there.
Mrs. Kennon lived all her long and active life at Tudor Place, with the exception of two brief periods. The first was the year and a half when she was living at the Was.h.i.+ngton Navy Yard with her husband while he was stationed there. And the second was when her daughter was at boarding school in Philadelphia, just before the Civil War, and she leased the place to Mr. Pendleton, a Representative in Congress from Virginia. Of course, after the secession of that State, Mr. Pendleton left Was.h.i.+ngton City--but very hurriedly. Mrs. Kennon heard that her home was to be taken over by the United States government to be used as a hospital so she hastened back and occupied it herself. She took as boarders several Federal officers on the one condition that the affairs of the war should not be discussed.