Coe Hall - The Planting Fields
01-16-2020
Through the beech copse and sunken garden of a grand estate an elegant lady lingers. The cold air of autumn is upon her, the gardens in quiet surrender to the inevitability of the season. It is a world apart, tied tenuously to the present, as one’s memories and emotions of a past life…
On the North Shore of Long Island, not far from Manhattan, there remain but a few grand country estates. They are testaments to a former existence, when this stretch of land, known as the Gold Coast, once held arguably the greatest concentration of wealth and influence in the country, and where the rich and famous of America’s Gilded Age built an aristocracy of their own. Here, the country estates numbered in the thousands, from castle-like behemoths to the more stately country home. Grand balls and extravagant summer parties, playboys and debutantes, servants and chauffeur’s were a part of life. And while all that is nearly gone, the great estates largely torn down, their fate having been sealed by the extensive suburbanization of the 1950’s, some have survived. Coe Hall is one of those. An authentic specimen of that by-gone era, the estate stands, seemingly frozen in time and unaffected by all that surrounds it.
Built around 1919 in the small village of Upper Brookville near Oyster Bay, Coe Hall was the country estate of William Robertson Coe. Coe, an English-born insurance executive, whose company famously insured the “unsinkable” RMS Titanic, had married Mai Rogers, who was the daughter of Henry Huttleston Rogers, a major partner in Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company. Although Mr. Coe’s own wealth was considerable, it was most likely largely with Rogers’ fortune that Coe Hall was constructed.
Designed by the notable New York architectural firm of Walker & Gillette, the sixty-five room Tudor Revival mansion was a homage to Mr. Coe’s country of birth. Somewhat eclectic in nature, with its mixed façade of Indiana limestone and plastered half-timbering, the house reflects the English tradition of unabashed additions and a progression of styles. Even the immense, wrought iron entry gates were imported from England, having been built in Sussex in the 1700s. Thus, Coe Hall presents the image of a house passed through the generations, as with any proper English manor.
While the mansion is indeed the ideal country home, the gardens and grounds of Coe Hall are really the heart of the estate. Originally called the “Planting Fields” by the Matinecock Indians, who farmed the fertile landing above Oyster Bay, the site presented the ideal location for the Coe’s, who, both avid horticulturalists, would spare no expense in creating gardens to rival those of Europe.
They first employed the famous, Harvard-educated landscape architect, Guy Lowell and his partner A.R. Sargent to help carry out their grand vision. From the main house, a sunken Italian garden, complete with a blue pool fountain and nearby tea house, leads into a seemingly endless rose arbor. Gentle pea gravel paths meander in one direction and then another, down a catmint walk here and crabapple alley there and even through a tunnel of weeping blue atlas cedars, making the immensity of the place—over four hundred acres—difficult to grasp all at once.
As in all aspects of the estate’s construction, the Coe’s oversaw the entire landscaping process. For instance, Mr. Coe purchased over two thousand rhododendrons from England during a World War I surplus and continued to grow and hybridize different varieties over the years. He also acquired a large collection of rare Asian camellias from Guernsey, for which he created an especial greenhouse, one of several on the estate.
Of course, Mrs. Coe was no exception to this sort of horticultural extravagance. When her father passed away, she decided to transplant two large European copper beeches from his estate in Fairhaven, Massachusetts. The two massive trees, with root balls nearly thirty feet in diameter, were barged during the winter across Long Island Sound to Oyster Bay. Roads were widened, power lines dismantled and teams of horses and steam-powered rollers were used to haul the precious trees to Coe Hall. It is just an example of the sort of passion and exuberance that only a vast wealth such as hers could sustain.
And, yet, despite their extravagance, the Coe’s were careful to maintain the natural landscape of the area. With the additional help of the Olmsted Brothers, whose father, Frederick Law Olmsted, designed Central Park, they incorporated large meadows with open expanses, trails, and groves of beech, magnolia, and other specimen trees. In doing so, the grounds of Coe Hall are seamlessly woven into the primeval woods, and therefore one crosses unawares, as it were, into this charming world unto itself.
Undoubtedly, Coe Hall, the Planting Fields, is one of Long Island’s treasures. Sheltered from an ever surging tide of development and the egalitarian wave of modernity, she remains steadfast in her ways, a secret of sorts, largely hidden from those not looking.
Article by Joseph Fabbri
PH by Salvatore Fabbri