Newport Is Where America's Old Astor Money Lost a Very Public Fight to the Vanderbilts

Newport's reputation as America's grandest old summer colony was built, somewhat paradoxically, by new money. Through the Gilded Age, roughly 1870 to 1910, industrial fortunes with names like Vanderbilt joined an existing East Coast elite that had summered on this stretch of Rhode Island coastline since the early nineteenth century, when it was still a relatively unshowy retreat from the seasonal heat of New York and Boston. What followed was a decades-long competition in stone: 'old money' families, the Astors chief among them, found themselves outbuilt by industrialists eager to prove their arrival, and Newport's shoreline filled with summer 'cottages' that were palaces in scale and name only.

The Breakers, built by a Vanderbilt in 1895

The most famous of Newport's mansions, The Breakers, was completed in 1895 for Cornelius Vanderbilt II, heir to the family's railroad and shipping fortune, and ran to 48 bedrooms and 27 bathrooms. At a time when fewer than five percent of American homes had electricity, every room at The Breakers had electric lighting, alongside hydraulic-powered elevators and plumbing capable of running both fresh and heated seawater, technical extravagance built as much to be seen as to be used.

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Marble House, and the fight against wooden Newport

Marble House, built between 1888 and 1892 for Alva and William Kissam Vanderbilt, is generally credited with tipping Newport from a resort of relaxed wooden shingle houses into one of opulent stone palaces, a shift its owners were quite deliberately chasing. The Elms followed in 1901, commissioned by coal magnate Edward Julius Berwind and modelled on the Château d'Asnières near Paris, a French classical design that stood apart from the largely Renaissance-inspired mansions built in the same decade.

Kept standing by a preservation society, not a single family

Unlike enclaves where old money simply kept its houses private, several of Newport's grandest mansions are today owned and maintained by the Preservation Society of Newport County, a nonprofit that opens them to public tours rather than keeping them as exclusively private residences. It is an unusual outcome for a rivalry that was, in its own era, entirely about exclusivity, and it means Newport's Gilded Age architecture is now more accessible to an ordinary visitor than almost any other American old-money enclave of comparable scale.

Traveller tips

• The Breakers, Marble House and The Elms are all open for public tours through the Preservation Society of Newport County; combination tickets cover multiple mansions.
• The Cliff Walk, a public path running behind several of the mansions along Newport's coastline, offers exterior views of the estates without a ticket.
• Newport is roughly a 90-minute drive from Boston and around three hours from New York City.
• Summer weekends draw heavy tourist traffic; a weekday or shoulder-season visit makes for shorter queues at the main mansions.