The concerns of the estate, and the larger questions of the nation, had the Signer’s first attention. His avocations were to ride his lanes and woodland, to read Greek and Latin in the original—he was reading Cicero’s “De Senectute” at ninety-three; to preside over a growing flock of grandchildren at Homewood with his son, at Brooklandwood, where Mary Carroll Caton was bringing up the three stunning daughters whom society called the “American Graces”; and to spend much time in the company of his daughter Kitty’s husband, Robert Goodloe Harper. From time to time he was called upon to step into his earlier character as Signer. In 1824 he was invited, with Jefferson and Madison, the only survivors of that great company who fixed their names to the Declaration, to attend the anniversary of the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown. His age forced him to decline, but he compromised by meeting Lafayette at Fort McHenry and lunching with him in a tent which had been Washington’s, and by attending a ball given in Lafayette’s honor at Colonel Howard’s “Belvedere.”
Few men of eighty-seven have shown such activity as was his; most men of his years would have given way to the misfortunes which now trooped out of the shadows. Charles Carroll the Fourth died; General Harper, the beloved son-in-law, followed. In the next year John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the same day, and it was the sad duty of Charles the Third to mourn at their funeral. He was now the last of the Signers. At eighty-nine he signed a copy of the Declaration which is now held in the New York Public Library—and signed it in a handwriting as firm as it had been fifty years before; at ninety he laid the foundation stone of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad; at ninety-three the cornerstone of St. Charles’ College, near Doughoregan Manor. And by this time the patriarch had seen born into his grandson’s family a sixth Charles Carroll.
There are three ghosts at Doughoregan Manor. One is the shade of an ancient housekeeper, whose quiet tread may be heard in the corridors, and whose keys tinkle faintly when the house is still. Another is the spectral coach—its wheels grind on the driveway when death rides to claim a member of the household—the coach which swung up to the door on a still November day in 1832 when the Signer went to join his fathers. It is hardly dignified to call the third a ghost. A warm, lively, pervading spirit it is—that of the Signer himself, smiling down from his portrait on the walls. It beamed on Charles the Sixth through a long and active life until it beckoned to him in 1895. To the son of Charles Carroll VI, John Lee Carroll, it nodded: “Well done, my boy,” when he became Governor of Maryland, and to the seventh Charles it told again all that its cumulative history could convey of the philosophical guidance and binding parental attachment that has made Doughoregan Manor something more than a home. Charles Bancroft Carroll, the Eighth, “carries on” and injects typical enthusiasm into farming twenty-four hundred acres of the grant you will see in the hall on a map the first Charles Carroll drew.
You will feel the spirit strongly as you contemplate the Signer’s place of burial in the chapel where the countryside gathers each Sunday for services. You will sense the alliance between devotion to God and to profoundly national ideals, and recall the sympathetic correspondence between the Signer and his father, as you enter the Cardinal’s room, a gorgeous chamber decorated in red, containing a great mahogany bed where Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop John Carroll, and the Marquis de Lafayette have slept. In a mellow library are the books he read. Trophies over the door of a panelled dining-room, cups won at yachting, a friendly hound from the present master’s hunting pack at your feet—remember that the Signer believed that a clear mind was most likely to be found in a sound body. We may fairly conceive that when the house was to be renovated, as it has been four times in its history, the Signer laid a gentle hand upon the sleeve of the workmen and cautioned them so: “Paint, if you like. Replace, where the old has given all its service. But remember, sirs, this is and must be a home.” And in the fullest connotation of the word, it is a home, with old chairs to fit you, bright cretonnes at the windows, and friendly things about you to rest your eyes upon—the sort of a home that a lad like Charles Carroll the Ninth, who isn’t much interested in ancestors, likes to take refuge in when strangers grow inquisitive.
The Jumel Mansion
© D.McK
THE JUMEL MANSION
Alone in its brittle modern neighborhood, this lovely anachronism stands on the highest point of Manhattan, untroubled, unruffled, and undisturbed except by Sunday idlers to whom its orchards are just another breathing spot. Though it was Heath’s headquarters, then housed Washington, later was captured by Howe, and was one of the smartest suburban estates of Colonial New York, it will never be forgotten as the home of a person of no military or aristocratic consequence, yet of caprice, beauty, ambition, impropriety, common sense and eccentricity—yes, a woman.