The Caretaker of The Elms in Newport, Rhode Island

Inspiration for The Elms, including the conservatory, came from a large 18th-century French estate just outside Paris.
Credit: Joel Laino But on that cool late-summer night, those extravagances mattered little to the 20-year-old Mathews. All he could think about was how dark the place got when he shut off his reading light. “Pitch, pitch black,” he says. “And I hate sleeping in the dark.” Mathews, who’d previously owned a small fish market in Massachusetts, was there as a favor. He was in between jobs, and The Elms, a turn-of-the-century estate built by a coal magnate that came under ownership of the Newport Preservation Society in 1962, was in between caretakers. A friend had landed him a spot on the caretaking staff earlier in the summer. The season passed, the rest of the staff returned to college, and then, without much warning, Mathews’ boss left, too. The Society needed a fill-in until they could find a permanent replacement, and Mathews, the single father of a young girl and someone who’d called Newport home for much of his life, accepted the offer. He’d work for a few weeks, he reasoned, make a good paycheck, and then open that small fish market in Newport that he’d long talked about.