National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior

Historical Overview
moment of coming out until marriage. As Edith Wharton's orphaned heroine Lily Bart observes
in The House of Mirth:
A mother . . . knows how to contrive opportunities without conceding favours, how to take
advantage of propinquity without allowing appetite to be dulled by habit! . . . it takes a
mother's unerring vigilance and foresight to land her daughters safely in the arms of wealth
and suitability. 286
Lacking children, Frederick and Louise were not obliged to entertain for the sake of courtship
or to host frequent country house weekends for the younger set. In his introduction to the diary
of Maverick in Mauve, Louis Auchincloss describes the Vanderbilt "cousins," Frederick's nieces,
nephews, and their movement between their families' many homes in the preamble to courtship:
The reader is at all times very much aware of the flotilla of her first cousins: Vanderbilts,
Shepards, Webbs, Twomblys, Sloanes, many of them her exact contemporaries. They move
in an amiable, chattering flock from Lenox to the Adirondacks in New York State to Beverly,
on Boston's north shore, up to Bar Harbor in Maine, and down to Newport in Rhode Island
and further down to Asheville in North Carolina. We see them cantering through the hills in
the Berkshires on a crisp autumn day, riding a buckboard on the trails of Mount Desert
island, watching a sunset from the deck of a steam yacht. They are intent on pleasure, eager
to enjoy life, and yet at the same time curiously unspoiled, even naïve. 287
Hyde Park is somewhat removed from this "chattering flock." By the early 1920s, Eleanor
Worcester recalls few of the younger generation visiting Hyde Park having houses of their
own. 288 Worcester also recalled that the couple's childlessness was notable in the context of
society's emphasis on family life:
You were very aware of it. Probably it was a great disappointment. . . . I think she was a little
lonely, which is why, I think, when any of my age came along, that she was congenial. She
liked to have us come and talk to her, but not very personally on her part. It was more you,
she was interested in. She wanted to know what you were doing, and why you were doing it,
but very nicely. She was interested in the young. . . . She likes having young people
around. 289
Without children of her own, Louise's role in the social rituals of courtship was as
hostess to young engaged and married couples traveling the circuit of country houses to visit
with family. She received Miss Daisy Post and J. Lawrence Van Alen at Hyde Park in this
capacity in November of 1900, just after their engagement was announced by the Poughkeepsie
Sunday Courier. The couple stayed with the Vanderbilts for a week and were the guests of
honor at a house party. They married on December 12 of that year. 290 And, Miss Gladys
Vanderbilt and Count Szecheneji visited Hyde Park during their engagement in November of
1907 following a stay with Alfred Vanderbilt at Sagamore in the Adirondacks. 291 The couple
married in New York in 1908. Frederick and Louise were particularly close with Louise's nieces
Rose Anthony Howard and Daisy Van Alen. 292 They were frequent guests at Hyde Park and
other family residences.
286
Wharton, The House of Mirth, 91.
287
Sloane, 12.
288
Worcester, 49.
289
Worcester, 33.
290
Snell, "Preliminary Report," 7.
291
Snell, "Preliminary Report," 14.
292
Mrs. Howard died in the late 1940s and is buried at the St. James Cemetery. One of the Howards'
daughters married Robert W. Kean, of New Jersey, who was a member of Congress in 1949. George A.
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