Staatsburgh State Historic Site will host “The Real Gilded Age: America’s Elite in the Downton Abbey Era,” a tour set for Sundays, May 22nd and 29th, and Saturday, May 28th.
The Staatsburgh Site includes the elegant country home of Ogden Mills and his wife Ruth Livingston Mills overlooking the Hudson River and the Catskill Mountains in Staatsburgh, Dutchess County, NY.
This tour highlights the real-life characters and themes at Staatsburgh that parallel Downton Abbey and HBO’s The Gilded Age. Led by a costumed interpreter, the 90 minute tour shows how servants and the Mills family conducted a busy weekend of high society entertaining, comparing Staatsburgh to what viewers saw on TV.
Tours will begin at 1 pm. Reservations are required and can be completed online. Admission is $10 for adults, $6 for students and seniors, and free for children 12 and under.
Photo of The Real Gilded Age provided.
Ogden Mills was Secretary of the Treasury under Herbert Hoover and was a world-renowned racehorse-breeder. His solution for the Great Depression was to cut spending and raise taxes. Mills was preceded by another Republican, Andrew Mellon, of whom it was said, “three U.S. presidents served under him.” Another New York Republican, William H. Woodin, a railcar titan, succeeded Mills when FDR took over, and yet another New Yorker, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., succeeded Woodin. (The ending of the banking panic, and the creation of deposit insurance, was achieved on Woodin’s watch in 1933.)