When you are on vacation and you would really love to experience the Rhode Island feel, stop by and visit the famous, House on the Rock -Clingstone, A Rhode Island Treasure, You will be happy you did.
Clingstone is an unusual 103-year-old mansion in Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay which survives through the love and hard work of family and friends.
Henry Wood, the owner, runs the house
like a camp:
All skilled workers welcome!
The Jamestown Boatyard hauls the family's
boats and floating dock and stores them each winter in return for a week's use of the house in the summer.
Mr. Wood, a 79-year-old Boston architect,
bought the house with his ex-wife Joan in 1961
for $3,600. It had been empty for two decades.
It had been built by a distant cousin,
J.S. Lovering Wharton. Mr. Wharton worked with
an artist,William Trost Richards, to create a house
of picture windows with 23 rooms on three stories
radiating off a vast central hall.
The total cost of the construction, which was completed in 1905, was only $36,982.99!
An early sketch of the house...
Mr. Wood is as proud as any parent of
his house and keeps a fat scrapbook
of photographs and newspaper clippings
that document its best moments. Many
of the historic photos he has were
provided by the company that insured
the house for its original owners.
The Newport Bridge is visible from the windows of the Ping-Pong room ... which is
to the left of the fireplace.
The house is maintained by an ingenious method:
The Clingstone "work weekend" is
held every year around Memorial Day.
It brings 70 or so friends and Clingstone
lovers together to tackle jobs like washing
all 65 of the windows. Anne Tait, who is
married to Mr. Wood's son Dan refinished
the kitchen floor on one of her first "work
weekends" at the home.
There are 10 bedrooms at Clingstone ....
all with indecently spectacular views.
The dining room table seats 14.
Refinishing the chairs is a task on
the "to do list" for a future work weekend.
A sign by the ladder that leads to the roof reads:
"No entry after three drinks or 86 years of age"
"It used to say 80 but we had a guy on a
work weekend who was a wonderful contributor
at age 84... so I changed the age on my sign"
said Mr. Wood, ever the realist.
"It would have been a shame to curtail the activities of a willing and viable volunteer.
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