My spouse and I visited Grey
Towers National Historic Site (sometimes called the Gifford Pinchot House) on a
Saturday afternoon in July 2019. We visited once previously years ago. Grey
Towers is open daily Thursdays through Mondays (closed Tuesdays and
Wednesdays).
Grey Towers is the ancestral
home of Gifford and Cornelia Pinchot; he was twice the governor of Pennsylvania
as well as the first director of the US Forest Service. Since the Pinchot
family was French, the hillside house overlooking the Delaware River resembles
a French chateau. It holds National Historic Landmark and National Historic
Site honors and its purpose is dedicated to forest conservation. The house was
constructed by Gifford’s father James, a successful wallpaper manufacturer.
The L-shaped blue-stone
mansion has rounded turrets at three corners and contains 43 rooms and 23
fireplaces. If visitors pay to take a one-hour guided tour (offered from May
through October), guests can visit the first/ground floor, including the entrance
hall, dining room, library/living room/office, and sitting room (previously the
separate dining and breakfast rooms). (Guests cannot visit the second and third
stories, which house the bedrooms and storage spaces. Over 90% of the furniture
is original, including over 11,000 artifacts. The property is expansive (over
300 acres) with many outbuildings; guests can visit several cottages (including
the Bait Box [a playhouse for the Pinchot’s son], the Letter Box [an archive
for family and political papers]), an open-air theatre, and the Finger Bowl (an
outdoor water-feature dining area covered with a wisteria arbor) without taking
a tour. Visitors can only see the remains of the area that once held the
swimming pool, enclosed on three sides by a stone pergola and wood trellises.
We enjoyed our tour of Grey
Towers, and we hope that one day we can see some of the upper rooms as well.
