The Magazine Antiques

Byfield originally settled at Mount Hope Farm, but he sold the property to Mackintosh and moved to nearby Poppasquash Peninsula about 1714. In 1745 Isaac Royall Jr., who had married Mackintosh’s daughter in 1738, acquired the property and built a two-and-ahalf- story gambrel-roofed house (Fig. 3). The wealthy son of Isaac Royall Sr. (1672–1739), a slave-owning sugar planter from Antigua, Royall Jr., who was immortalized with his family in the famous painting by John Feke in Figure 4, multiplied his income through the distilling of rum and the slave trade. A British loyalist, he left the United States in 1775, and the colonial governments of Massachusetts and Rhode Island subsequently confiscated his properties.

Mount Hope was acquired in 1783 by William Bradford, the great-great grandson of the eponymous early Plymouth Colony governor.9 A physician, lawyer, and owner of a rum distillery in Bristol, the younger William Bradford served as deputy governor of Rhode Island (1775–1778) and later as a United States senator (1793– 1797).10 James DeWolf, who married his younger daughter, Ann Bowman Bradford (1770–1838), in 1790, followed a comparable course of civic service—as speaker of the Rhode Island House (1819–1821) and as a United States senator (1821–1825).

When the likes of the Bradfords and DeWolfs desired mansions that reflected their position and prosperity, they retained the architect Russell Warren, sometimes called the “Samuel McIntire of Bristol.”11 These men of the sea demanded houses as soundly built as their brigantines and schooners, and they appreciated decorative elements as carefully crafted as the Federal style furniture in their interiors. Warren, who was born in nearby Tiverton, moved to Bristol in 1800, drawn by its vibrant economy. Trained as a housewright by his father Gamaliel (1744– 1807), he quickly gained a reputation as a gifted architect. In 1808 he built a house decorated with superb architectural woodwork for James DeWolf ’s nephew John Howe, who practiced law and served as a state legislator for several terms. Ship captain Benjamin King Churchill later acquired the house (Fig. 7).

Bristol’s seaborne commerce declined precipitously after 1812, dropping by more than 50 percent in fifteen years from a high in 1810 of ninety-six vessels arriving from foreign ports, in addition to coastal vessels.12 Several factors contributed to the decline, including Bristol’s shallow harbor, which precluded deep-draft ships; the centralization of shipping at major ports; stronger laws and enforcement against the slave trade; the conversion of merchant vessels to whalers; and the transportation of prospectors to California aboard Bristol ships that were then simply scuttled in San Francisco Bay.13

Some DeWolf family members tried to sustain their maritime business, but failed. George DeWolf (see Fig. 11), a son of James’s brother Charles (1745–1820), for example, enjoyed great initial success in the West Indies trade and commissioned Warren in 1810 to build Linden Place, the grandest of the four mansions he ultimately designed for the family (Figs. 12, 12a). But in June 1825 the sugar crop on DeWolf ’s Cuban plantations failed, and banks began calling in loans. He buried his year-old daughter Julia Brown DeWolf on December 6, and fled to Cuba, before word of his bankruptcy reached the ears of his Bristol neighbors, who suffered catastrophic losses through their investments with him.14

Many of George’s relatives, however, retained their fortunes, in part because, before the War of 1812, the DeWolfs had begun diversifying, withdrawing risk capital from marine ventures and investing in the fledgling cotton industry. They entered cotton manufacturing with the benefit of well-established relationships with southern growers that stemmed from Bristol merchants having sent produce and livestock south on DeWolf sloops for more than a century. In addition, in 1804 James DeWolf ’s nephew Henry (1786–1857) had moved to Charleston and joined Charles Christian in managing the DeWolfs’ slave importations.15 In his role as a factor Henry met frequently with cotton plantation owners, and his daughter Anne (1815–1908) married Nathaniel Russell Middleton (1810–1890), thus joining the DeWolfs to one of Charleston’s most distinguished families.

In 1810 Charles and James DeWolf helped capitalize two water-powered cotton mills, the Arkwright Company in Coventry, Rhode Island, and the Bristol Cotton Manufacturing Company in Dighton, Massachusetts.16 Later, steam-powered textile mills were established in Bristol by other “lords of the loom,” including John Norris (1791–1866) of the Pokanoket Steam Mill and Jacob Babbitt (1809–1862) of the Bristol Steam Mill.

Other manufacturing began to take hold as well. Cornelius Royal Dimond (1821–1901) and Samuel Norris (1827–1902) jointly owned the Bristol Sugar Refinery, established in 1849, an offspring of the early sugar trade focused on molasses, rum, and slaves. And Norris later entered into the manufacture and sales of small arms, first on his own and later with E. Remington and Sons.17 Dimond was the son of Francis M. Dimond, formerly the United States consul to Mexico and governor of Rhode Island, who in the 1840s had bought the house William Bradford built on Hope Street in 1792. Francis Dimond passed the property to his daughter Isabella and her husband, Samuel Norris, who retained Russell Warren to remodel it. Warren added a third story with beautifully crafted balustrades (see Figs. 8, 8a).

Rubber manufacturing in Bristol began with the arrival of Augustus O. Bourn in 1864. After attending Brown University, he had joined his father in the Providence firm of Bourn, Brown and Chaffee, which manufactured India rubber shoes based on patents held by Edwin M. Chaffee (1806–1872), who had aided Charles Goodyear (1800–1860) in his discovery of vulcanization in 1839.18 Bourn organized the successor firm, the National Rubber Company, and in 1864 built a large plant in Bristol. He served as treasurer and manager of National Rubber from 1865 until 1887. To celebrate his good fortune, Bourn commissioned James Renwick Jr. to design a Gothic revival stone house called Seven Oaks, which was completed in 1873 (Fig. 15). Though best known for the Smithsonian Institution Building (1855) in Washington and Saint Patrick’s Cathedral (1858) in New York, Renwick also designed mansions for wealthy patrons such as Bourn.

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