Gilded Age Travel: The Mill Family, Friends & Servants

During the 2025 holiday season, the mansion was decorated with a travel theme to recognize the importance of travel to the Mills family, their servants, and friends.  Rooms featured specific countries where family or friends traveled as well as countries reflecting the origins of collections within the house.  Ruth and Ogden Mills traveled to Europe nearly every spring.  They often went to visit family, but they also traveled to see landmarks, museums, and the natural beauty of other lands.  Technological advancements during the Gilded Age created the ability for wealthy Americans to travel for leisure purposes and as the era progressed, more middle class families also began to travel for vacations. 

World Map, Circa 1900

Eulabee Dix: Gilded Age Miniaturist

In 2023, the site received an amazing donation from a Mills family descendant, Dorothy Fell Farrelly, a granddaughter of Dorothy Fell Mills, widow of Ogden Livingston Mills. She and her husband Louis donated three miniature portraits of family members including Margaret Lewis Livingston, Darius Ogden Mills, and a painting never before seen by us, of Ruth Livingston Mills. After some research, we were able to find out that the artist who painted the portrait of Ruth was a woman named Eulabee Dix (1878-1961), an artist who specialized in miniature portraits.

"Mrs. Ogden Mills" by Eulabee Dix, 1907, Watercolor on Ivory

Groundbreaking Women in the Guestbook: Eleonora Randolph Sears

Since receiving the amazing gift of an original Staatsburgh guestbook in 2017, the site has been researching all of the people who signed its pages. The guestbook covers the years 1899-1908 and includes approximately 150 individuals who visited Staatsburgh. There are many different people who signed the guestbook including relatives, friends, and neighbors of the Mills family as well as politicians, businessmen, sportsmen & women, and even the President’s daughter! This essay will look at one of the remarkable and barrier breaking women who signed the guestbook, Eleonora Randolph Sears (1881-1968).

Eleonora Randolph Sears, circa 1901, Bain News Service

Cover of Staatsburgh's guestbook dating from 1899-1908

Hidden Treasures of the Collection: "Mehemet Effendi, Ambassadeur Turc, arrive aux Tuileries, 21 mars 1721"

The walls of Staatsburgh’s drawing room are covered with many paintings that are nearly impossible to examine from the tour carpet. Continuing with our “Hidden Treasures of the Collection” series, this essay will take a closer look at the painting seen below, which is on the south wall of the drawing room. The oil on canvas painting depicts Mehmet Effendi, the Turkish Ambassador, and his entourage visiting Paris for the first time to have an audience with King Louis XV. It is one of many objects in the collection that is French or depicts France.

Painting in the style of Charles Parrocel, "Mehmet Effendi, the Turkish Ambassador, Entering the Tuileries to go to his audience with the King, March 21, 1721," Staatsburgh State Historic Site, NYS OPRHP

Patriots, Prisoners & Passengers: Women's History Month

“I long to hear that you have declared an independency ... I desire you would remember the ladies” - Abigail Adams to husband John, 1776

At Staatsburgh, portraits of Ruth Livingston Mills’s ancestors feature prominently throughout the house. This was by design, as Ruth’s pedigree—alongside her family’s generational wealth and her impeccable hostessing skills—was one major factor in her quest to become queen of Gilded Age Society. On a tour of the mansion, the accomplishments and prominent offices held by the men in her family are highlighted, as they feature so greatly in American revolutionary history. But the women associated with Ruth’s family—Elizabeth Lewis, Margaret Livingston, Catherine Livingston, and Mary Lincoln—have their own stories of courage, duty, and perseverance amidst the turmoil of revolutionary America.