Although it is not recorded that any of the Tayloes shone very conspicuously in their country’s annals by reason of any great service rendered in positions of public trust, yet because of their great wealth and social prominence, their lives touched at various points many of the great names which emblazon the pages of history. At the time he took possession of his Octagon home, in 1801, Colonel Tayloe’s income was seventy-five thousand dollars a year—three times as much as the President’s salary at that period—and the unbounded hospitality dispensed from his two households at Mt. Airy and the Octagon, embodied the most splendid features of the regal Old South.
He was married at the early age of twenty-one, to Miss Ann Ogle, daughter of Governor Benjamin Ogle, of Maryland. Descended from the Corbins, Gwynnes, Platers and Fauntleroys, connected by the marriage of his sisters with the Lees, Pages, Washingtons, Carters, Beverleys and Lomaxes of Virginia, and by his own marriage with the Bladens, Taskers, and Ogles, of Maryland, Colonel Tayloe’s social prestige was limitless.
One does not live long in Washington ere he learns to uncover and speak softly before a lineage which reaches to the “Eastern shore,” either of Virginia or of Maryland; and when a line is discovered which connects both these aristocratic strongholds—well, words are but poor things, and a solemn hush is the most approving corollary.
ECLIPSE
Colonel Tayloe was educated at Eton and Cambridge, England. He was noted for the urbanity of his manners, for the splendor of his equipages and for his lavish hospitality. In 1802, conjointly with Governor Ridgeley, of Maryland, Colonel Tayloe laid out the Washington City Race Course on the Holmead Farm, about two miles north of the President’s house, near the present Mount Pleasant. For a number of years, the Colonel was at the head of the turf in his native state at a time when the turf was much affected by the aristocratic sportsmen of the old régime. He kept in his stables at Mt. Airy a large number of blood horses. He owned the celebrated Leviathan, Gallatin, Sir Charles, Sir Archy and others; and from his imported thoroughbreds were descended the most famous coursers in the early annals of the American turf. From the Tayloe stables came Eclipse and Henry—“the North and the South”—who ran the celebrated sectional race on the Long Island course in 1823, in which Henry was beaten, and the success of Eclipse was attributed to the manipulation of a jockey named Purdy. The victory was received with uproarious shouts, Eclipse was led to the stand amid the strains of “The Conquering Hero,” and there followed a jubilee in New York. Whereupon, John Randolph, of Roanoke, who was present, remarked: “I am glad no one on the course thought of nominating Purdy for the Presidency, for it would have been carried by acclamation!”
In 1818 Colonel Tayloe built the old Willard Hotel, on Pennsylvania Avenue and Fourteenth Street, which was enlarged and improved by his son, Mr. Benjamin Ogle Tayloe, in 1844, when it became and has since continued the most fashionable hotel of the Federal City.
Colonel Tayloe was in his day the largest contributor to St. John’s Episcopal church, which was the first building erected on Lafayette Square after the War of 1812, and is popularly known as “the President’s church,” from the fact that more Presidents have attended it than any other in the city, probably because of its proximity to the White House. Colonel Tayloe presented to this church the massive silver service which formerly belonged to the old church of Lunenburg, in Richmond County, Virginia.
