page_title: Wentworth–Coolidge Mansion
section_title: The Family Wing
hierarchical_section_title: Wentworth–Coolidge Mansion / Organization of the house / The Family Wing
caption_attribution_description: English: Wentworth-Coolidge Mansion parlor in family wing, showing Longham and Broderip Harpsichord, London, 1779-1785. Eighteenth-century wallpaper. Bolection molding on dado. Late seventeenth-century William and Mary style chairs introduced to house by Cushing family in the late-nineteenth or early-twentieth century. Glimpse through door into china closet.
context_page_description: Wentworth–Coolidge Mansion is a 40-room clapboard house which was built as the home, offices and working farm of colonial Governor Benning Wentworth of New Hampshire. It is located on the water at 375 Little Harbor Road, about two miles southeast of the center of Portsmouth. It is one of the few royal governors' residences to survive almost unchanged. The site is a New Hampshire state park, declared a National Historic Landmark in 1968. Today, the New Hampshire Bureau of Historic Sites manages the site with the assistance of the Wentworth-Coolidge Commission, a group of volunteer civic and business leaders appointed by the Governor.
context_section_description: From the vestibule, a short flight of steps ascends to another wing that extends back from the water. This wing includes a fine parlor (in a section of the house that may have been purpose-built rather than recycled), a common everyday parlor, and between them a secondary vestibule, stair, and room theorized to have been study or office (in a section that was recycled from some earlier purpose). Taken together, this suite of rooms provides the elements of a fine family house. Because the floor level is higher than that of the entertainment wing, but the ceiling height constant, this wing has lower ceilings that are both less imposing and create spaces that were easier to heat.
  The parlor has bold bolection moldings on its wainscot, painted sky blue. The robust molding may represent the slightly out-of-date taste of a middle-aged man, as Wentworth was in his 50s when the mansion was developed. Or it may be a deliberate reference to the similar molding in the MacPheadris–Warner House where he had lived for seventeen years. The woodwork is not entirely dissimilar to the woodwork in Wentworth's father's house, as seen in a room from it preserved in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  The fireplace wall is fully paneled, with bolection molding around the fireplace opening, which is itself lined with marble.
  The parlor walls are ornamented with an original red-on-yellow eighteenth century flocked wallpaper in a very large-scale damask pattern. During restoration of the paper, evidence was found that it may have had an earlier life in another room, and moved here at the time that two more corner "beaufaits" were removed. The latter survived long enough to be listed in an inventory of 1797, when there is an entry for this room of "China & Glass on the corner boards". If the paper had previously been in another room, no clue has shown up to indicate which room. But its scale suggests that it may have been in the great parlor, where it would have added significantly to the imposing character of the space.
  The room also has a harpsichord, for generations a fixture of the house, if moved from room to room. It dates to between 1779-1785, indicating that it must have been introduced by Martha's second husband Michael Wentworth, who is known to have appreciated music. It is listed in the auction of furnishings in 1806 as "grand Harpsichord, of the finest tone, by Longham and Broderip, cost 75 guineas." Though not part of the governor's furnishings, its antiquity accrued about the instrument the legend that it was his.
  Off one side of the parlor is a small lockable room, lined with shelving. This china room is an over-sized version of the lockable parlor cupboards that were and remain fixtures of many high-end Portsmouth houses of this period. The shelves likely held locked caddies of tea, sugar, alcohol, related silver services and china and glass associate with these. Such features had strong gender associations with women. Still rooms appeared in British houses in the sixteenth century, and became common in the seventeenth centuries and later. In those much earlier centuries, distillation of medicines, scents, and cordials was considered an appropriate activity for even wealthy women. This provided the antecedent for women's association with brewing tea, a task transferred from the back of the house to the front of the house to accommodate for the latter costly and exotic beverage and its showy equipage. In Wentworth's day, tea was for all practical purposes a monopoly of Canton and the British East India Company, a situation that continued - and kept it expensive - until large-scale commercial tea cultivation was introduced to other Southeast Asian countries by the Dutch and British in the 1820s. The limited source in the eighteen century kept the price of tea high and gave logic to keeping it under lock and key.
  Additionally, in an era when the concept of dining rooms had not yet been introduced to the region (see below), the place of dining remained fluid, migrating according to occasion from family back parlor to best parlor, and pe
caption: Parlor showing flocked wallpaper, bolection-molded wainscot, harpsichord, and glimpse through to china closet
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