Ventfort Hall, the Morgan Mansion

This brick and brownstone mansion is Ventfort Hall, one of the grandest survivors of Lenox's Gilded Age. It was built in eighteen ninety three for Sarah Morgan, the sister of the financier John Pierpont Morgan, and her husband George. Sarah had inherited a fortune of some three million dollars from their father, the banker Junius Spencer Morgan, and she spent lavishly, hiring the Boston firm of Rotch and Tilden to design a Jacobean Revival house of roughly fifty rooms across some twenty eight thousand square feet.

Inside were nine main bedrooms, ten more for servants, seventeen fireplaces, and modern luxuries like an elevator and electric lighting that were rare for the time. Ventfort Hall was one of about seventy five so called cottages that wealthy families from New York and Boston built in Lenox in this era. After the Morgans, the house passed through many hands.

It served as a dormitory for Tanglewood music students, a summer hotel, and a ballet camp before falling into ruin. By nineteen ninety one a developer planned to demolish it. Local preservationists fought back, and in nineteen ninety seven, with help from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, they bought the mansion and began its rescue.

Today it is a museum devoted to the Gilded Age.