Vaucluse

 residence, farm, estate (manor / mansion land), historical layer / disappeared object

In 1784, Gervais Elam, a Newport merchant, built the house and country estate known as Vaucluse. His nephew, Samuel Elam, an English merchant from Leeds, England, inherited Vaucluse, which he remodeled in 1803-1805, spending $80,000 on the house and formal gardens alone. There were rare trees and shrubs, six miles of winding walks, a Roman temple, and seventeen acres of formal garden. The large manor house and property later became the property of Charles DeWolf of Bristol and of the Hazard family. Thomas R. Hazard, known-as "Shepherd Tom," a prominent South County industrialist, philanthropist and social reformer, retired from manufacturing in 1840 and settled at Vaucluse. Hazard lived here and continued his work as a leader in enlightened movements, particularly in reforming the management of the poor and insane in Rhode Island, until his death. Famous throughout the nineteenth century, Vaucluse gradually deteriorated in the twentieth.

Both Vaucluse and Metcalf Bowler’s summer house were destroyed, but parts of both--the doorway of Vaucluse and the paneling from the parlor of the Bowler House--survive in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art.