Cliffside Inn - Swann Villa (c. 1876) (Newport, Rhode Island) | place with historical importance, mansion / manor house / villa, bed and breakfast

 place with historical importance, inn, mansion / manor house / villa, bed and breakfast

Second Empire Victorian Manor House, built for spec by real estate developers John Kendrick & L. Davies before 1876. It was sold to Thomas W. Swann who named it Swann Villa. By 1883, the house was owned by John and Elizabeth Whipple who sold it before 1898 to John Dinman.
By 1901, Swann Villa had been converted to a schoolhouse; the first home of St. Georges School, then a private prep school for boys. St. Georges later moved to its permanent campus, “on the Hill”, in nearby Middletown, RI

In 1907, the Turner family of Philadelphia bought Swann Villa and turned it back to a summer home; naming it Cliffside. Andrew Turner was a successful cotton merchant and his wife Adele was a prominent Philadelphia socialite descendant from Jacob Shallus – the engrosser of the Constitution of the United States in 1787. The Turner’s only child was Beatrice Turner, who would become an artist and a Newport Legend as a woman. She was 18 years old in 1907 and summered at Cliffside until her death in 1948 when the house was sold out of the Turner family.

www.cliffsideinn.com/cliffside-history.html