Mirador: The House That Made Nancy Astor

The estate called Mirador sits in a fold of the Blue Ridge foothills in Albemarle County, a Federal-style brick house built in the eighteen forties on a property that takes its name from the Spanish word for a place from which you look out. The view from the house is west toward the Blue Ridge, and on the right day, toward the long ridge of Skyline Drive.

What makes Mirador notable is not the architecture. It is the family that grew up here in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Chiswell Dabney Langhorne, a railroad contractor who had lost his fortune in the Civil War and rebuilt it afterward, raised five daughters at Mirador. Four of them became famous. The most famous was Nancy.

Nancy Langhorne was considered the beauty of the family even by Langhorne standards, which were high. She married Robert Gould Shaw the Second in eighteen ninety-seven, a marriage that did not last, and came back to Mirador after the divorce. In nineteen oh six she married Waldorf Astor, the heir to one of the great Anglo-American fortunes, and moved to England permanently. When Waldorf Astor inherited his father's title in nineteen nineteen and was required to give up his seat in the House of Commons and move to the House of Lords, Nancy stood for election in his Plymouth constituency. She won. She became the first woman to take her seat in the British Parliament.

She held that seat for twenty-six years. She was a polarizing figure: sharp, witty, politically conservative, a committed Christian Scientist, and outspoken in ways that made allies uncomfortable as often as it made enemies. Winston Churchill famously detested her, though the exchange usually quoted between them, in which she reportedly offered him poison and he offered to drink it, has never been conclusively sourced.

Her sister Irene Langhorne Gibson was the model for the Gibson Girl, the idealized American woman depicted in the illustrations of Charles Dana Gibson, who was Irene's husband. The Langhorne sisters of Mirador shaped an era's image of what an American woman was supposed to look like. One of them also shaped the British Parliament.