The Caretaker of The Elms in Newport, Rhode Island

It was supposed to be for only a couple of weeks. That’s what Harold Math­ews repeated to himself late one August evening in 1983 as he settled into his new bedroom. The setup was bare bones: small cot, tattered-looking reading light, in a tight little room that was desperate for a fresh coat of paint. The sparseness of his new sleeping quarters felt especially at odds with the house around him: a 48-room French chateau known as The Elms on Bellevue Avenue in Newport, Rhode Island. Spreading out some 60,000 square feet, the mansion featured rare Italian marble, lavish 18th-century artworks, and a grand ballroom that comfortably held 400 people.

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.

But one unexpected event can often lead to others. Mathews never did start his business. And he never did leave The Elms. After a couple of weeks on the job, the Society named him full-time caretaker. More than 30 years later, he’s still at it. It’s a career that has introduced him to celebrities, allowed him to learn the intricacies of getting a 60,000-square-foot house ready for a 600-person black-tie event, and for two decades permitted him to call the place his home. For more than half his life, Mathews has cared for and cared about the old mansion, and he just might know it better than anyone. Historians can offer up precise details about the origins of the breccia marble in the main foyer, but it’s Mathews who can tell you how it should be cleaned. He can breezily wax on about how the place reacts on a scorching July day and what a bitter January weekend means for the heat bill. He tells about hunkering down in the house during a blizzard and how a big wind can make the ductwork howl like a ghost. “I’ve grown to love the place,” he says. “It’s an honor to be here, take care of it, and make sure it doesn’t get ruined.” But all of that lay ahead of him as he settled into his first night at The Elms. That August evening had started at around 5:30, when the last of the visitors left and Mathews made his first round to lock up the home’s 100 windows and take inventory of all the cleaning he’d have to do the next morning. In a house that had once employed 42 servants, Mathews was now its main set of eyes and ears. When he finished his round, he headed outside, hopped a big stone wall along the southwest side of the property, and walked the few blocks to his mom’s house for dinner. Over big plates of pasta they joked about the estate, about how the workers talked of seeing the ghosts of the old owners, about how dark the mansion became at night. “When I left, I told my mom, ‘We’ll see how it goes,’” Mathews says. Back inside the mansion, Mathews walked the house one last time, then bounded downstairs, through the old kitchen and into the pantry, home to his makeshift bedroom, where he tucked himself into bed. “I was never nervous or intimidated by the house,” he says. “But I do remember thinking, ‘Maybe I should stay in the fish business.’” Finally, sometime around 10:00, Mathews closed his eyes and managed to get some sleep, even in all that darkness. “The next morning, I got up, made my coffee, and started my day.” It’s been much the same ever since.

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For most of us, a lightbulb change is a pretty menial task. For Harold Mathews, it can consume a good portion of the morning. It’s pushing close to 8:00 on an overcast mid-August day, and The Elms’ caretaker is already partially caffeinated and up on a ladder changing out one of the bulbs in a big light that hangs from a high ceiling in the main foyer. Lightbulb usage doesn’t indicate grandeur, but it can give you a pretty good idea of the size of an estate—and between the wall sconces, chandeliers, and other smaller lights, The Elms has more than a thousand of them. And every single day at least a handful of those bulbs need to be changed out. “I’m going to be doing this for a while,” Mathews says, teetering atop a 10-foot aluminum ladder. He’s 50, but you’d hardly know it. He’s got a full head of black hair that he sweeps back, and a face that packs only as many wrinkles as a 25-year-old’s. He moves with purpose, his body bent slightly forward, with a walk that puts him up on the balls of his feet as he dashes from room to room, floor to floor. He’s constantly scrubbing his work of inefficiencies and takes pride in being able to shut down the second floor (lights turned off, windows shut) in just five minutes. On this morning he’s wearing blue jeans and an orange-collared short-sleeve shirt, which he’ll eventually change out of because it’s become too sweaty. It’s all part of a morning routine that Mathews and his four-team staff embark on almost immediately upon arriving at the property at 7:00: opening windows, turning on fans, dry-mopping floors, cleaning bathrooms, dusting mantels and furniture, even wiping down individual crystals that hang from the big chandeliers. All together, it’s a three-hour track meet to make sure the home is ready for its 10 o’clock opening, when the first of the day’s 1,100 visitors begin streaming into the grand entrance hall. Of course, guests have long been a feature of The Elms. Its history goes back to the 1890s, when Edward Julius Berwind, a coal magnate out of New York and Philadelphia, and his wife, Sarah, commissioned the construction of a summer chateau modeled after an old French mansion. Finished in 1901 for $1.4 million, The Elms was spared little in the way of decadence. Whole rooms were designed around enormous pieces of art; the dining room alone boasts the largest collection of 18th-century Venetian paintings in America. In the sun-drenched ballroom, a single elaborate crystal chandelier helps anchor the space, as does a gold-leaf grand piano. There’s a library, conservatory, and seven bedrooms, many of which open up to a wide, landscaped lawn filled out with fountains and flowerbeds. In the mansion’s basement, a small underground rail was constructed to truck in loads of coal from a station across the street. Even modern touches, including electricity and refrigeration, were added, making The Elms one of the first Newport homes to have such amenities. Money was no object for the Berwinds after the house was finished, either. It wasn’t unusual for the couple’s summer entertainment bill to top $300,000.

But by the early 1900s, this Gilded Age lavishness was closer to its end than its beginning. The Berwind family managed to hold on to The Elms until 1961, when it auctioned off most of the home’s art and furniture, then sold the mansion to an eager developer, who planned to tear it down and squeeze in a couple of houses or maybe a shopping center. Only a last-minute move by a few forward-thinking preservationists saved it. They bought the estate for $100,000, then donated it to the still relatively new Newport Preservation Society. Just three weeks after taking over The Elms, the Society opened the mansion to the public for tours. At the time of Mathews’ arrival in 1983, The Elms was still in the throes of being returned to its turn-of-the-century glory. Sections of the building needed major work, decorative elements such as the silk wallpaper in Edward Berwind’s bedroom had yet to be repaired, and much of the original furniture and art pieces were slowly being bought back. Burglar and fire alarms hadn’t even been put in place. That responsibility fell on Mathews, who received a slight upgrade on his bedroom, moving to the other side of the home’s lower level, not far from the basement and the big oil furnaces. “I remember taking dates down there,” he says. “I’d have a flashlight and I’d go, ‘Did you hear that?’ Then I’d shake the flashlight and they’d get nervous. Oh, boy, I used to have fun.” He pauses, then laughs. “I don’t think I got many second dates doing that.” Today, the state of the home is a much different story. Almost all of the original art again hangs in the house. Much of the furniture has returned, too. It took five years, but the entire home has also been rewired, allowing the Society to finally install hardwired fire and burglar alarms. And Mathews, who eventually moved to the third-floor servants’ quarters, no longer resides at The Elms. When the Society launched a new “servant life tour,” he was relocated to a caretaker’s cottage, just down the street. To watch Mathews work is to watch a man consumed with how The Elms is presented. He’s particular about where in the house the staff can drink their coffee in the morning, how those tricky upstairs bedroom windows are shut at the end of a summer day, and how the delicate chandelier crystals get wiped down. Even now, 12 years later, Mathews still shudders at the sight of a long scratch on the ballroom floor that a crew of careless movers made as they repositioned the piano. “Can you see that?” he asks, pointing to a faint mark on the floor. “I still go eh every time I look at that.” His boss, Curt Genga, the Society’s director of properties, isn’t surprised. “You wind him up and point him in the right direction and he goes,” Genga says. “I’m constantly bringing new ideas to him. One time I told him that 3M had just come out with this new diamond pad and polish. We brought a guy in to show him how it worked [on the marble floors], and then I couldn’t stop him. I almost had to take it away from him.” But there’s a complicated tension that surrounds Mathews’ work, a careful balancing act between taking care of the house and taking care of its visitors. That’s because what the house needs isn’t always what tourists desire. They want to pick up stuff they’re not supposed to touch. They want to wander into areas that are marked off-limits. One of the hardest changes for Mathews came about a little over a decade ago, when the Society shifted away from guided tours and let guests roam the home at their leisure with an audio device. “Now all of a sudden, they’re touching things,” Mathews says. “I remember seeing one guy in one of the bedrooms open up every drawer. They made that change in 2001, and I’m still not completely comfortable with it.”

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At a mansion that for years employed local help, it seems appropriate that Mathews is now its caretaker. He grew up just a few blocks from the estate, one of eight kids in a bustling Italian American family. Although the mansions had faded from their past glory, their imprint on the community was impossible to ignore. Their history still helped define Newport’s identity, and their slow rebirth signaled Newport’s rebirth, from a harder-edged Navy town to a budding tourist stop. For Mathews there were personal connections to The Elms as well. One of his clearest childhood memories is of taking a tour of the mansion with his mom when he was 8 years old. He marveled at the expansive backyard with its big statues, trees, and fountains. Inside, he ran his hands along the foyer’s breccia marble, mined in Italy. In addition, his grandmother’s best friend was a woman named Betty White, who for years had worked as head laundress at The Elms. “She was always on her knees scrubbing floors and clothes,” Mathews says. “She later had bad knees and called them her ‘Elms knees.’” But Mathews carries his own stories about The Elms as well. This is where, as a young, single father, he brought up his daughter. On the mansion’s third floor, they set up their bedrooms. In the evening, after the last of the visitors had left, father and daughter would run around the big lawn, cooling off from the hot summer day in one of the fountains. At night, Tara would tag along with her dad, helping him shut off all the lights. “Those were some of the best years of my life,” he says. “I have a whole photo album of her growing up here.” That part of his life is repeating. Mathews is a single dad again, the father of two young boys, who live with him part-time. Like his daughter’s, their childhood is being shaped by The Elms. They play on the lawn, they swim in the fountains, they help their dad close up the mansion. The older boy, Julian, who’s 6—and a bit of a workhorse, his father says—constantly tells Mathews that he’d like to succeed him. It wouldn’t be unprecedented. A number of the Society properties are cared for by people whose fathers or mothers held the same positions before them. But Mathews isn’t convinced that Julian should follow in his footsteps. “He loves to draw and build things,” he says. “It’s the age-old thing. You want your kids to have the best, to have more opportunities. I’d like to see him go to college, maybe be an architect. But he wants to be just like his dad.”

It’s nearing 6:00 p.m. now, and the last of the day’s visitors have just finished the tour. Outside, a small group of them linger on the back lawn. A few sit on the steps, taking in the early August evening, while a set of grandparents nearby take turns having their picture taken with their grandkids. Mathews stands in the ballroom and looks out the big windows at the scene. He’s smiling. This time of day, when he begins to have the whole house to himself again, is his favorite. “I don’t mind if they stay a little longer,” he says. “It’s pretty great in winter, too. Even with the snow and ice, you get these beautiful sunsets. The skies are just gorgeous. If you take the time, you can really appre­ciate it.”