The dining room and the drawing room on either side of the salon will soon have their elaborate plasterwork completed. The French hunting wallpaper that once startled visitors to the library in the west hyphen has been found at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, bought and ordered installed. Riversdale began in 1801 as a country house for wealthy Belgian political refugees Henri Joseph and Marie Louise Peeters Stier and their family. Henri Stier, who owned castles and palaces in Europe, wanted an equivalent American country place. So he bought the 730-acre plantation and built his fine house.
Today there are only eight acres left.
In 1803 the elder Stiers packed up their extensive art collections, inherited in part from their ancestor, the painter Peter Paul Rubens. And the family departed for their native Belgium, leaving their youngest child. Rosalie, then 25 and married to planter George Calvert, a descendant of the English lords of Baltimore, was given the task to finish the house. The Stiers invested their trust in a good place. The daughter became a financier, one of the wealthiest women in the United States.