Historic Buildings of Massachusetts

Ventfort Hall, a Gilded Age mansion in Lenox, was built in 1891 by George Morgan and his wife, Sarah, the sister of J. Pierpont Morgan. The house was designed in the Elizabethan Revival style by the Boston architectural firm of Rotch & Tilden. The name of Venfort Hall is from vent fort, or “strong wind.” The house stands on the site once occupied by the Italianate villa owned by the Haggerty family. Annie Haggerty married Col. Robert Gould Shaw, who commanded the famous black regiment, the 54th Massachusetts, in the Civil War. After the Morgans died, the house passed through various renters and owners, eventually serving as a dormitory for Tanglewood students, a hotel, a summer ballet camp and housing for a religious community. In danger of being demolished, the Ventfort Hall Association (VHA) purchased the house in 1997, restoring it and opening it for tours and exhibits. The mansion appeared as the orphanage in the film The Cider House Rules (1998).

65 Mount Vernon Street in Boston was the site of the residence of Henry Cabot Lodge, the senator and his son, George Cabot Lodge, the poet and dramatist. There is a 1911 biography of George Cabot Lodge, who died very young, written by Henry Adams, and an introduction to his works by Theodore Roosevelt. Although Henry Cabot Lodge is listed as living at 65 Mt. Vernon in 1894, in 1903 an apartment building, known as the Cabot, had been built at the address. One of the residents to move into the new building that year was Charles S. Hopkinson, the portrait painter and landscape watercolorist, who lived there from 1903, the year of his marriage to Elinor Curtis, to 1905. The building seems to have been inspired by the Jacobethan style.