Property
The house sits on a one-acre (4,000 m²) block of New Bedford, between County, Madison, Joli Gonsalves and Seventh streets, in the middle of the County Street Historic District, where its wealthy citizens built their mansions in the 19th century. It is a three-by-five-bay two-story yellow building with a front porch and balustraded balcony on either end and several tall chimneys emerging from the roof. Inside, many of the original mahogany doors and their walnut veneers remain. The cornerblocks and baseboards have elliptical echinus profiles of the kind commonly found in many Greek Revival interiors. The window muntins have a beaded knife blade profile and the plaster ceiling cornices and medallions also have finely carved ornamentation.
A circular driveway leads up to the house, set back a mere 40 feet (12 m) from the street to allow for outbuildings and the property's garden. It includes elements of all three of its periods of private ownership: a formal boxwood rose parterre garden with tall calla lilies, boxwood specimen garden, cutting garden and Woodland Walk surrounding a 19th-century wooden latticework pergola.
Read more about this topic: Rotch-Jones-Duff House And Garden Museum
Famous quotes containing the word property:
“For experience showed her that she had not, by marrying a man of a large fortune, obtained any great proportion of property which she could call her own or command at her pleasure.”
—Sarah Fielding (1710–1768)
“By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The charming landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men’s farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)