Thursday, July 19, 2001
Gramercy history - the Fields brothers and Henriette Desportes
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
There is an interesting historical connection between Gramercy Park and Stockbridge, the elegant little vacation town in the Berkshires, popular with the Tanglewood crowd. Although best known as Norman Rockwell's residence from 1953 to his death in 1978 (he was there mostly because his wife was receiving treatment at the Austen Riggs Institute, a closely guarded local secret), and the home of Arlo Guthrie's Alice’s Restaurant (until recently Naji’s, now Teresa's; Arlo is still a neighbor, in nearby Washington, and has created a Huntington's Chorea research foundation and community center in an old church on the Housatonic), it was founded as a cottage colony of the rich and famous, not unlike Jekyll Island, GA, and Portsmouth, RI. Its 1884 St. Paul’s Episcopal Church has a Stanford White baptistery and Tiffany windows.
The Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards came in 1751, as the second minister in the Mission Church, 15 years after it was founded by John Sergeant, to serve the Mahican Indians. (Edwards's hexagonal slanted Lazy Susan writing desk is in on exhibit the Stockbridge Library; he was able to work simultaneously on six sermons 250 years before Steve Jobs and Bill Gates came up with the methodologies of swapping pages)
Stockbridge was the home town of the illustrious Field brothers. Their father, the Rev. David Dudley Field, came to Stockbridge in 1819, as the fourth minister of the Congregational Church. He had seven sons and two daughters. Stephen Johnson Field (1816-99) was appointed to the US Supreme Court in 1863 and served for 34 years. Jonathan Edwards Field (1813-680 was a NY lawyer, a MA State Senator and President of the Senate.. Our story mostly deals with three other brothers. Two of them owned connected houses at 49 and 50 Gramercy Park North, where now No. 1 Lexington Avenue stands.
David Dudley Field, Jr (1805-94), a successful NY lawyer, defended such rascals as Jay Gould, James Fisk and "Boss" Tweed. His world-wide fame in the history of law stems from the codification of NYS law, which he prompted in 1847. Within the next three years, he succeeded in codifying court procedure and civil procedure that became part of the law throughout the US, and of the 1870s English Judicature laws, adopted by many British colonies. He also prompted reform of the criminal procedure. An important reform was the abolishment of the distinction between law and
equity proceedings. Eventually he also reformed the NYS penal code (1881).
Cyrus West Field (1819-92) had a more dramatic impact on the world. He eschewed law and became a successful wholesale paper merchant, retiring in 1853, but a year later the idea of laying a communications cable across the Atlantic aroused his interest. He raised American and British
capital, obtained te loan of two naval vessels to lay the cable and successfully transmitted the first message in 1856 - but the cable died three weeks later. Undaunted, he went back to gathering more funds, and in 1866 the paddle-wheeler Great Eastern, a converted giant passenger ship, laid a cable that lasted. Fields continued, creating more communications lines, between Hawaii, Asia and Australia. In 1877 he built the 3rd Avenue Elevated line. Neighbors Peter Cooper and Samuel F. B. .Morse were Cyrus‘s unfailing supporters of his efforts.
Rev. Henry Martyn Field (1822-1907), who as a child had to wear the cast-off clothes of all of his siblings (country clergy are poor), followed his father's choice and became a minister. In 1851 he married the notorious Henriette Desportes (1813-75), teacher of French at Miss Haines School for Girls at 10 Gramercy Park East. She had been the governess of the children of Fanny Sebastiani, the Duchesse de Choiseul-Praslin, for six years. The latter was found, brutally murdered in her boudoir, on August 18, 1847, a few months after she fired Henriette. While on trial for the murder, her husband the Duke, Theobald de Praslin, killed himself by swallowing strychnine, a horribly painful death that burns out the insides of the victim. Some form of coverup was suspected.
The popular disgust with the French aristocracy fed by this event contributed to the causes that led to the Revolution of 1848, abolishing the monarchy of Louis Philippe..Henriette was rumored to have been the mistress and accomplice of the Duke. Acquitted but living under a cloud of suspicion, in 1849 she came to New York to teach. Stories of her daily march of young girls around Gramercy Park may have inspired Ludwig Bemelmans to write about Madeleine, the littlest of twelve girls "who lived in a house covered by vines and walked two-by-two in straight lines."
New York was difficult for the newlyweds, Mrs Cyrus Field refused to receive her sister-in law "the murderess," and the couple moved to West Springfield MA where Henry was installed as the minister in 1851.In 1854 Henry accepted the editorship of The Evangelist, and they moved back, to an apartment at 102 East 18th Street (now 215 Park Avenue South). . Although Henriette had to tutor French, teach art at Cooper Union (she was a painter) and accept boarders to make ends meet, the house became a literary salon, frequently visited by such luminaries as William Cullen Bryant, Richard Watson Gilder and both Harriet Beecher Stowe and her brother Henry Ward Beecher . In 1855 the Fields moved back to Stockbridge, with Henry commuting to New York every other week. Henrietta died at 62, in 1875. Henry outlived her by 32 years, wrote some dozen books on travel and Irish, Mideast and Far Eastern politics, a history of the Atlantic Cable. and a biography of his father. His library was auctioned in NYC in 1912.. Henrietta’s writings, Home Sketches of France and Other Papers, were published posthumously. A perky Judy Garland type in an early picture, the late portrait by Eastman Johnson shows a mature calm face. This was not a Mrs Siddons as portrayed by Joshua Reynolds, nor a Maya by Goya, that would launch violent passions.
Henriette’s life has been much romanticized. Rachel Fields Pedersen (1894-1942), grand-daughter of Matthew Dickinson Field, the least-known brother, wrote All This And Heaven Too (1940, Lippincott), a biography that defends Henrietta. Rachel's friendship with Bette Davis prompted a
1940 film of the book, with Charles Boyer portraying the handsome Duc de Praslin, and Jeffrey Lynd as Henry. Though long and deemed tedious, it was nominated for Academy Awards. Another book, A Crime of Passion, by Stanley Loomis (I have no copy), indicates its thrust by the title.. A 1942 article in the New England Quarterly by Nathalia Wright associates Henriette with the character of Miriam in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860), with some justification. Contemporary writings variously defending and attacking Henriette abound - Victor Hugo was a partisan.
Wally Dobelis thanks Barbara Allen, Curator of the Stockbridge Library, for assistance and the use of their material.
There is an interesting historical connection between Gramercy Park and Stockbridge, the elegant little vacation town in the Berkshires, popular with the Tanglewood crowd. Although best known as Norman Rockwell's residence from 1953 to his death in 1978 (he was there mostly because his wife was receiving treatment at the Austen Riggs Institute, a closely guarded local secret), and the home of Arlo Guthrie's Alice’s Restaurant (until recently Naji’s, now Teresa's; Arlo is still a neighbor, in nearby Washington, and has created a Huntington's Chorea research foundation and community center in an old church on the Housatonic), it was founded as a cottage colony of the rich and famous, not unlike Jekyll Island, GA, and Portsmouth, RI. Its 1884 St. Paul’s Episcopal Church has a Stanford White baptistery and Tiffany windows.
The Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards came in 1751, as the second minister in the Mission Church, 15 years after it was founded by John Sergeant, to serve the Mahican Indians. (Edwards's hexagonal slanted Lazy Susan writing desk is in on exhibit the Stockbridge Library; he was able to work simultaneously on six sermons 250 years before Steve Jobs and Bill Gates came up with the methodologies of swapping pages)
Stockbridge was the home town of the illustrious Field brothers. Their father, the Rev. David Dudley Field, came to Stockbridge in 1819, as the fourth minister of the Congregational Church. He had seven sons and two daughters. Stephen Johnson Field (1816-99) was appointed to the US Supreme Court in 1863 and served for 34 years. Jonathan Edwards Field (1813-680 was a NY lawyer, a MA State Senator and President of the Senate.. Our story mostly deals with three other brothers. Two of them owned connected houses at 49 and 50 Gramercy Park North, where now No. 1 Lexington Avenue stands.
David Dudley Field, Jr (1805-94), a successful NY lawyer, defended such rascals as Jay Gould, James Fisk and "Boss" Tweed. His world-wide fame in the history of law stems from the codification of NYS law, which he prompted in 1847. Within the next three years, he succeeded in codifying court procedure and civil procedure that became part of the law throughout the US, and of the 1870s English Judicature laws, adopted by many British colonies. He also prompted reform of the criminal procedure. An important reform was the abolishment of the distinction between law and
equity proceedings. Eventually he also reformed the NYS penal code (1881).
Cyrus West Field (1819-92) had a more dramatic impact on the world. He eschewed law and became a successful wholesale paper merchant, retiring in 1853, but a year later the idea of laying a communications cable across the Atlantic aroused his interest. He raised American and British
capital, obtained te loan of two naval vessels to lay the cable and successfully transmitted the first message in 1856 - but the cable died three weeks later. Undaunted, he went back to gathering more funds, and in 1866 the paddle-wheeler Great Eastern, a converted giant passenger ship, laid a cable that lasted. Fields continued, creating more communications lines, between Hawaii, Asia and Australia. In 1877 he built the 3rd Avenue Elevated line. Neighbors Peter Cooper and Samuel F. B. .Morse were Cyrus‘s unfailing supporters of his efforts.
Rev. Henry Martyn Field (1822-1907), who as a child had to wear the cast-off clothes of all of his siblings (country clergy are poor), followed his father's choice and became a minister. In 1851 he married the notorious Henriette Desportes (1813-75), teacher of French at Miss Haines School for Girls at 10 Gramercy Park East. She had been the governess of the children of Fanny Sebastiani, the Duchesse de Choiseul-Praslin, for six years. The latter was found, brutally murdered in her boudoir, on August 18, 1847, a few months after she fired Henriette. While on trial for the murder, her husband the Duke, Theobald de Praslin, killed himself by swallowing strychnine, a horribly painful death that burns out the insides of the victim. Some form of coverup was suspected.
The popular disgust with the French aristocracy fed by this event contributed to the causes that led to the Revolution of 1848, abolishing the monarchy of Louis Philippe..Henriette was rumored to have been the mistress and accomplice of the Duke. Acquitted but living under a cloud of suspicion, in 1849 she came to New York to teach. Stories of her daily march of young girls around Gramercy Park may have inspired Ludwig Bemelmans to write about Madeleine, the littlest of twelve girls "who lived in a house covered by vines and walked two-by-two in straight lines."
New York was difficult for the newlyweds, Mrs Cyrus Field refused to receive her sister-in law "the murderess," and the couple moved to West Springfield MA where Henry was installed as the minister in 1851.In 1854 Henry accepted the editorship of The Evangelist, and they moved back, to an apartment at 102 East 18th Street (now 215 Park Avenue South). . Although Henriette had to tutor French, teach art at Cooper Union (she was a painter) and accept boarders to make ends meet, the house became a literary salon, frequently visited by such luminaries as William Cullen Bryant, Richard Watson Gilder and both Harriet Beecher Stowe and her brother Henry Ward Beecher . In 1855 the Fields moved back to Stockbridge, with Henry commuting to New York every other week. Henrietta died at 62, in 1875. Henry outlived her by 32 years, wrote some dozen books on travel and Irish, Mideast and Far Eastern politics, a history of the Atlantic Cable. and a biography of his father. His library was auctioned in NYC in 1912.. Henrietta’s writings, Home Sketches of France and Other Papers, were published posthumously. A perky Judy Garland type in an early picture, the late portrait by Eastman Johnson shows a mature calm face. This was not a Mrs Siddons as portrayed by Joshua Reynolds, nor a Maya by Goya, that would launch violent passions.
Henriette’s life has been much romanticized. Rachel Fields Pedersen (1894-1942), grand-daughter of Matthew Dickinson Field, the least-known brother, wrote All This And Heaven Too (1940, Lippincott), a biography that defends Henrietta. Rachel's friendship with Bette Davis prompted a
1940 film of the book, with Charles Boyer portraying the handsome Duc de Praslin, and Jeffrey Lynd as Henry. Though long and deemed tedious, it was nominated for Academy Awards. Another book, A Crime of Passion, by Stanley Loomis (I have no copy), indicates its thrust by the title.. A 1942 article in the New England Quarterly by Nathalia Wright associates Henriette with the character of Miriam in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860), with some justification. Contemporary writings variously defending and attacking Henriette abound - Victor Hugo was a partisan.
Wally Dobelis thanks Barbara Allen, Curator of the Stockbridge Library, for assistance and the use of their material.
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 3:36 AM 
