In 1874, Thomas Wisedell began a smaller, private commission in Roslyn, Long Island, NY, to remodel the house of the poet and scholar, William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), owner and editor of the New York Evening Post. Though Bryant was a friend of Frederick Law Olmsted, it may have been through Calvert Vaux that Wisedell was given this commission. 1874 was one the busiest years in Vaux’ career and since this was a rather small commission, he probably recommended Wisedell to Bryant (though this is just speculation…).
Bryant’s house was originally constructed in 1787 and had major alteration in the late 1830’s when it was enlarged and given a Greek revival facelift, which was how the house looked when Bryant purchased the property in 1843. Over the next twenty-five years, Bryant made changes to the house, beginning in 1856 when he had the kitchen wing altered and enlarged by making it accessible to both the first and second floors of the main house. The biggest change came in 1860-61 when the third floor as added, the kitchen wing was enlarged to become a full servants’ wing with bedrooms, dining room and laundry with an added storage room for ripening fruits from the large orchards which Bryant had previously added to the estate. Bryant made further changes in 1867-68 when he hired Mr. Clark, a housewright from Easthampton, Massachusetts, to add bay widows, gambrel roofs and dormers. This was basically the state of the house when Thomas Wisedell was hired in 1874.
Wisedell’s task was to add indoor plumbing, remodel the butler’s pantry while also enlarging the third floor bedroom for Bryant’s daughter Julia. Along with other changes to the third floor, Wisedell also re-decorated the dormers. Unfortunately, there are no known descriptions of Wisedell’s designs for these spaces or if he also redecorated other parts of the house. To make matters more complicated, a fire in 1902 along with the repairs and renovations that followed (such as stuccoing the exterior, repairing the roof and remodeling the dormers), destroyed Wisedell’s work, basically leaving photos and documents as the only sources for understanding this project.
Acknowledgements:
All of the information presented in this post is thanks to the research done by Harrison and Linda Hunt and published in their book entitled William Cullen Bryant’s Cedarmere Estate published by Arcadia Press in 2016.
Further Reading:
- Hunt, Harrison and Linda, William Cullen Bryant’s Cedarmere Estate (Charleston, SC: Acadia Publishing, 2016).
- Powers, Horatio N., “William Cullen Bryant,” Scribner’s Monthly vol. XVI, no. 4 (Aug. 1878): pp. 479-495.
The Architecture of Thomas Wisedell 