A tour of the mansion today reveals lavishly-decorated interiors featuring an eclectic mix of object d’art and curios from Europe, ancient Greece and Asia, as well as carved and gilded furniture, oriental rugs, and many ancestral portraits of the family of which Ruth was justifiably proud.
The furnishings are mostly original to the house, says onsite historian Reynolds. There weren’t many photographs of the interior of the home left behind, she says, but there was an extensive written inventory of the objects in the house made when it was donated to the state in 1938, and that inventory list has been used to place furnishings where they were used in the house. Fabrics in their original condition are faded, of course, but Mrs. Mills’ bedroom has been restored with raspberry-colored silks as bright as they would have appeared in her time.
A tour of Mills Mansion begins with the “presentation staircase” in the main hall, where young women could make a grand entrance from their rooms upstairs before being escorted to the waiting room outside the dining room. There, says Reynolds, the women would be paired up with a male escort to make another entrance, this time into the dining room, a thoroughly grand setting designed so that the Hudson River seen through the windows would be the focal point. Designed by Stanford White, the room is elaborately decorated in shades of blue-green, with tapestries of garden scenes meant to emphasize to the visitor that they’d arrived in the country and were out of the city, says Reynolds.
A staging area for the kitchen servers is off the dining room, complete with a callbox to summon the servants, and a dumbwaiter that brought the food up from the kitchen below. The Mills staff numbered 24, including a butler, two chauffeurs, maids, footmen, a valet, cooks and a French pastry chef.
When Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner coined the term, “The Gilded Age,” in their 1873 novel about the excesses of the newly-wealthy in post-Civil War America, they were satirizing exactly the kind of lifestyle that thrived on estates like the Mills Mansion in Staatsburgh. In 1905, with the mores and manners of the Gilded Age still very much in evidence, Edith Wharton serialized “The House of Mirth” in Scribner’s Monthly, writing from her own experiences; her wealth and family connections affording her access to the lifestyles of the very privileged.
According to some accounts, says Reynolds, Edith Wharton is rumored to have based parts of “The House of Mirth” on visits to the Mills estate, particularly a scene that takes place in the library of a country house where it’s apparent that the books lining the shelves have never been read, much like the well-stocked Stanford White-designed library opposite the dining room at Mills Mansion.
She began to saunter about the room, examining the bookshelves between the puffs of her cigarette-smoke. Some of the volumes had the ripe tints of good tooling and old morocco, and her eyes lingered on them caressingly, not with the appreciation of the expert, but with the pleasure in agreeable tones and textures that was one of her inmost susceptibilities. Suddenly her expression changed from desultory enjoyment to active conjecture, and she turned to Selden with a question. “And yet they fetch fabulous prices, don’t they? It seems so odd to want to pay a lot for an ugly badly-printed book that one is never going to read!”
-edith wharton, “House of Mirth”
Mills Mansion is currently operated by the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation. The parks department used to have offices in the basement of the building, but have recently moved out. Now that those rooms are vacant, they will eventually be restored and included on the tour at some point in the future. The former billiard room on the main level currently houses the gift shop for the site.
The Staatsburgh State Historic Site includes several miles of easy hiking trails with gorgeous views of the Hudson River, contained within Margaret Lewis Norrie State Park, from which one can see the ruins of the Calvert Vaux-designed Hoyt House, built in 1855 for Lydig Hoyt and his wife Blanche Livingston. Hoyt House has been abandoned and neglected for the past 50 years, but was recently awarded a grant for restoration.
