Donn Piatt: Gadfly of the Gilded Age

8 The Man in His Castle

144 donn piatt F 8 G the Man in His Castle When Donn Piatt resigned his commission in the Union army in 1864, he and Louise planned a new house in the country at Mac-o-cheek. She died before it could be built. After the war ended and he married Ella, they built at Mac-o-cheek a modest-sized Swiss chalet on part of the two hundred or so acres that they now owned directly. Donn’s brother Abram had already begun, in 1864, after his return from the army the previous year, to build at Mac-o-cheek a fine stone mansion for himself. Abram finished the house in 1871, named it Mac-A-Cheek, and moved into it together with the lady he had as a widower lately married, Eleanor Watts. Donn and Ella decided that they too should have a grand house. In the 1870s they expanded their chalet into a stone chateau with twenty-eight rooms—only slightly smaller than Rutherford Hayes’s brick mansion in Fremont, which Hayes was still enlarging. The Piatts’ new construction did not destroy but redecorated the older part to match the new. Although the chateau was described as being in “the Flemish style,” it seems more likely that (as an Ohio history claimed)1 the inspiration was some castle on the Rhine, a river much traveled by American visitors , including Donn and Ella. Donn and Ella’s new country seat, which would become known as Mac-OChee , was in good part built by Donn’s nephew William McCoy Piatt—whose name is still on the facade in stone—but the original architect was the Austrianborn John L. Smithmeyer, who together with his partner in Washington, D.C., Paul J. Pelz, was becoming perhaps the most prestigious architect in America. Piatt’s friend Ainsworth Rand Spofford, who had been the librarian of Congress since 1864, had long dreamed of a great new building to house the Library, and in 1873 Smithmeyer’s and Pelz’s neoclassical design, later modified to include neo-Baroque features, won the architectural competition for the new building.2 Smithmeyer and Pelz also designed the central, tall stone building of Georgetown University in Washington, now known as Healy Hall, which was begun in 1877. 144 Bridges text.indb 144 7/31/12 10:29 AM the man in his castle 145 Donn and Ella’s Ohio chateau was completed in 1879. It cost, the papers said, $85,000 to build—the equivalent of two and a half million dollars or more in the early twenty-first century. The Piatt chateau is much smaller than either the Library of Congress or the Georgetown University building, but its two towers, one with an elevation of eighty feet, and massive limestone walls make it a smaller cousin of the latter (which still dominates the Georgetown skyline and is said to have cost over $300,000 to build). The interior of the Piatts’ house features high ceilings with frescoes by the French artist Oliver Frey,3 as well as fine carvings and parqueted oak and walnut floors. It was altogether a costly place, but the Piatts were wealthy now. It is difficult to analyze Donn Piatt’s finances. In addition to what he made from lobbying, it appears that The Capital eventually became a very profitable enterprise. Even if there was no longer an incumbent President Grant to attack and Piatt had achieved a different relationship with President Hayes, in the late 1870s people across the country still wanted to know what Donn Piatt had to say, and people in Washington and elsewhere were buying his paper. In August 1878 the editor apologized for not having met the demand for copies for three straight weekends; the Christmas 1878 issue ran to twelve pages. A journalist who interviewed Piatt some years later wrote, “It is said that he realized $50,000 in two years from it.”4 (The value of the dollar then was perhaps twenty-five times what it is today.) He also derived a certain amount of income from the farming operations at Mac-o-cheek. On the other hand, he had apparently taken losses in the stock market and in real estate. He wrote in 1875 that “since the Chicago fire [of 1871], followed so closely by the failure of Jay Cooke & Co., we have found it necessary to economize in a way that really at times makes us ashamed of ourself.”5 All in all, Piatt’s...