Cynthia Burke Roche Cary
Cynthia Burke Roche was born on April 10, 1884, in London, England, the daughter of James Boothby Burke Roche and Frances Ellen "Fanny" Work Roche. Through her father she belonged to an Anglo-Irish family whose title, the Barony of Fermoy, had been created in 1856 for her grandfather, Edmund Burke Roche.
James Boothby Burke Roche Francis Ellen Work Roche
James Boothby Burke Roche & Francis Ellen Work Roche
James was then a younger son of the first baron and would not himself succeed to the title until many years later. Cynthia's mother came from a very different background. Frances was the daughter of Frank Work, a wealthy New York businessman and financier whose fortune would eventually play an important role in the lives of his children and grandchildren.
Cynthia was the eldest surviving daughter in a family that also included her younger twin brothers, Edmund Maurice and Francis George Burke Roche, born in 1885. Another daughter, Eileen, died in infancy. Cynthia's early childhood coincided with the breakdown of her parents' marriage. James and Frances separated while their children were still very young, and in December 1886, when Cynthia was two years old, she was brought to the United States.
Frances eventually obtained a divorce from James in 1891. The divorce did not entirely end the conflict between Cynthia's parents, particularly concerning their children. That dispute became especially visible in 1899, when fifteen-year-old Cynthia herself became the subject of a legal proceeding. Her father obtained a writ seeking her production in court, alleging that she was being detained from him. The matter attracted newspaper attention before the parties reached a private settlement and the proceeding was dismissed.
By then Newport, Rhode Island, had become an important part of Cynthia's life. In May 1896 her maternal grandfather, Frank Work, purchased Elm Court on Bellevue Avenue for $115,000. The transaction included not only the villa but its contents and greenhouses. Cynthia was twelve when Elm Court entered the Work family's life, and the house would remain connected with her for the next seventy years.
By her late teens Cynthia had become a familiar figure in Newport society. Her formal introduction took place at Elm Court on September 1, 1902, when her mother gave an elaborate ball in her honor. Although Cynthia had already attended numerous social events and was described as a popular young woman in the summer colony, the occasion marked her formal debut and was the only debutante ball of that Newport season.
Elm Court itself could not accommodate an entertainment of the required scale. A temporary ballroom approximately forty by seventy feet, with an additional twenty-foot extension, was erected on the lawn south of the house and decorated in blue and white. Cynthia and her mother received their guests in a reception room transformed with flowers. Dinner was served to approximately eighty guests at small tables before additional guests arrived for the dancing. Two bands supplied the music, and approximately 125 couples participated in the cotillion, which Cynthia led with Elisha Dyer Jr. The favors reflected that season's Newport Horse Show, and among those present during the evening was Grand Duke Boris Vladimirovich of Russia.
Cynthia's activities as a young woman extended well beyond Newport's ballrooms. During the summer of 1903 she competed in lawn tennis at the Newport Casino. In mixed doubles that July, she and Sydney Smith won a match by scores of 6–1 and 6–2. The following month she defeated Ruth Twombly in women's singles, 6–3, 6–4, a result contemporary reporting described as one of the surprises of the day's play. Partnering with Mary Sands in women's doubles, Cynthia was defeated by Fannie Iselin and Florence Twombly, 6–2, 6–4. Her repeated participation in organized competition demonstrates that tennis was more than a casual social pastime for her.
She was also an enthusiastic early motorist. Contemporary accounts placed Cynthia on lengthy automobile excursions through the countryside, and by 1904 she was being included among society women recognized for their abilities as motorists. Horses and riding were also part of the sporting world in which she moved. Her enthusiasm for tennis even extended beyond ordinary daytime play. In 1903 she became involved in an effort to introduce electric lighting to the Newport Casino courts so that play could continue after dark.
Her charitable activities were already beginning. In 1904, at the age of twenty, Cynthia participated in society tableaux at the Newport Casino Theatre that raised money for the Newport Hospital district nursing fund and the Presentation Day Nursery in New York.
On October 27, 1905, Cynthia became an American citizen in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Her naturalization papers recorded her residence as 13 East Twenty-sixth Street in Manhattan, the New York home of her grandfather Frank Work. Her maternal uncle James Henry Work served as her witness.
On June 11, 1906, Cynthia married Arthur Scott Burden in Manhattan and became Cynthia Burden. Arthur, born in New York in 1879, belonged to the prominent Burden family and was a son of James Abercrombie Burden and Mary Proudfit Irvin Burden. Following their marriage, Arthur and Cynthia traveled in Europe before returning to the United States later that summer. By August they were again among the Newport summer colony.
The Burdens established a country life at Jericho on Long Island, where their property became known as Oak Hill. They were already associated with Jericho by 1911, and the estate subsequently became the subject of significant architectural work by John Russell Pope. Contemporary architectural and building publications identify Pope directly with the Burden property. By 1916 he was overseeing a two-story addition to the residence, and his work there also extended to the gardens. An architectural description placed the house on the highest portion of a heavily wooded tract of approximately seventy acres, while stone garden steps designed for Mrs. Arthur Scott Burden were later considered noteworthy enough to be illustrated in an architectural journal.
Below is Oak Hill, Jericho, New York.
Oak Hill Estate, Jericho, NY Oak Hill Estate, Jericho, NY
Arthur and Cynthia had one daughter, Eileen. Surviving records disagree over whether she was born on October 15, 1910, or October 15, 1911, and the discrepancy cannot presently be resolved with certainty. Cynthia herself gave October 15, 1911, as Eileen's birth date on a later passport application.
On March 16, 1911, Cynthia's grandfather Frank Work died in New York at the age of ninety-two. His death brought an enormous and complicated inheritance into the lives of his descendants. An appraisal filed with the New York Surrogate's Court the following year valued his gross estate at $14,228,808.29 and his net estate at $13,566,534.84. His holdings consisted overwhelmingly of securities, particularly railroad investments.
Cynthia's beneficial interest in her grandfather's estate was appraised at $2,682,202. Her young daughter Eileen held a separate interest valued at $878,533, while Cynthia's brothers Maurice and Francis each had interests appraised at more than $2.7 million. These figures did not represent unrestricted cash payments to the beneficiaries. Frank Work's estate involved complicated testamentary arrangements that continued to affect the family for decades.
Those arrangements were further shaped by a family agreement dated February 20, 1914, executed by those beneficially interested in the Work estate. As part of the resulting arrangements, Cynthia became the settlor of seven separate trusts. Their administration would remain legally significant for nearly half a century and would eventually bring Cynthia's name before the New York courts again in her later years.
During the First World War, Cynthia participated in charitable activities connected with the conflict. Under her married name, Mrs. Arthur Scott Burden, she appeared among the patronesses of a gala benefit performance for the Committee for Men Blinded in Battle, an organization devoted to assisting servicemen who had lost their sight.
During these same years, Arthur's health deteriorated severely. He suffered serious injuries following falls from horses and eventually required continuing care. By the spring of 1921 his condition had deteriorated to the point that legal proceedings were begun concerning his ability to manage his affairs. In May a sheriff's jury found him incompetent. Arthur died on June 15, 1921, at a branch of New York Hospital in White Plains. He was forty-one years old. Although later accounts sometimes compressed his history into a single fatal polo accident, the surviving contemporary record documents a longer period of incapacity preceding his death.
Cynthia had meanwhile continued to travel. A passport application completed late in 1920 listed her permanent residence as Jericho, Long Island, and stated that she intended to visit England, France, Italy, Spain and Switzerland to visit friends. She planned to leave New York aboard the Olympic.
The same year brought an important change within her father's family. James Boothby Burke Roche succeeded his elder brother as the third Baron Fermoy on September 1, 1920. His tenure was extraordinarily brief. James died on October 30, only fifty-nine days after succeeding to the title, and Cynthia's brother Maurice became the fourth Baron Fermoy.
After Arthur's death, Cynthia was left a widow with a young daughter. On July 24, 1922, she married New York attorney Guy Fairfax Cary in Newport. The marriage was announced with unusual suddenness. Contemporary reporting noted that Cynthia and Guy had known one another for years but that even their friends had received virtually no warning that a wedding was imminent.
The ceremony took place at one o'clock at Elm Court. The Reverend Stanley C. Hughes, rector of Trinity Church, officiated. Cynthia was thirty-eight and Guy forty-two. Their Rhode Island marriage declaration, signed five days earlier, identified Cynthia as a widow residing in Jericho and Guy as a New York lawyer. Following their marriage, the couple planned to spend their honeymoon at the Canadian fishing lodge of their friend Robert Walton Goelet before returning to Newport later in the season.
From that day forward Cynthia was Cynthia Cary.
Guy Fairfax Cary had been born in New York on November 14, 1879, the son of Clarence Cary and Elizabeth Miller Potter Cary. Educated at Groton and Harvard, he received his undergraduate degree from Harvard in 1902 and his law degree in 1904 before being admitted to the New York bar in 1905. He ultimately became a senior member of Shearman & Sterling & Wright and developed a distinguished career in corporate and estate law. Among his responsibilities were service as an executor of Robert Walton Goelet's estate and as one of the trustees of the estate of William Rockefeller. He also served as counsel to National City Bank and as a director of several major corporations.
Two children were born to Cynthia and Guy. Their son, Guy Fairfax Cary Jr., was born at Jericho on July 11, 1923. Their daughter, Cynthia Fairfax Cary, was born in Manhattan on October 16, 1924. Together with Eileen, Cynthia's daughter from her first marriage, they formed the family around which much of her middle life revolved.
The Carys maintained homes in New York and on Long Island while continuing their long association with Newport. Their interests in houses, architecture and interiors went beyond simply maintaining fashionable residences. Over the course of their marriage Cynthia and Guy assembled a specialized library devoted to architecture, furniture and decorative ornament. It eventually comprised nearly two hundred English and Continental pattern books dating from the fifteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries, ranging from practical builders' manuals to elaborate architectural folios.
Cynthia also accumulated paintings, furniture, jewelry and decorative objects. Among the works documented in the Carys' possession was Sir Alfred Munnings's portrait of Robert "Bobbie" Gould Shaw III on horseback, which was recorded in an inventory of their Long Island house by 1935. Her jewelry collection included an Art Deco platinum, jadeite and diamond jabot pin dating from about 1925. Jewelry remained sufficiently important among her possessions that family heirloom pieces would later receive specific treatment in her will.
By the beginning of the 1940s Elm Court had become increasingly central to Cynthia and Guy's life. In July 1941 a Newport newspaper reported that Cynthia's brother Francis would join his sister and brother-in-law there. On July 8 of that year, Cynthia's mother, Frances Roche, executed a quitclaim deed transferring to Cynthia all of Frances's right, title and interest in the Bellevue Avenue property. The instrument was subsequently recorded in Newport. Whatever the more complicated earlier history of Elm Court's ownership, the deed establishes Cynthia's legal interest in the property years before her mother's death.
By June 1942 the Newport press explicitly described Elm Court as the Bellevue Avenue residence of Mr. and Mrs. Guy Fairfax Cary.
During the Second World War Cynthia again participated in practical wartime activity. In September 1942, at the age of fifty-eight, she was among nineteen Newport women who completed an American Red Cross first-aid course and received certificates.
Cynthia also took a direct interest in Elm Court as property. In 1942 and again in 1943 she challenged Newport's tax valuation of the estate. The second action concerned assessments of $37,000 on the real estate and $23,000 on tangible personal property. Cynthia maintained that the respective values should instead be $27,000 and $10,000, and contemporary reporting referred directly to Elm Court as "her property."
Cynthia's mother died in New York on January 26, 1947. Frances had lived an eventful life between American and European society, and Elm Court had provided a recurring center for the family since Frank Work purchased it in 1896.
Later that year the house became the setting for another important family occasion. On August 23, 1947, Cynthia and Guy's daughter Cynthia Fairfax Cary married Charles Bingham Penrose Van Pelt at Trinity Church in Newport. The bride wore an heirloom lace veil that had belonged to her maternal grandmother Frances. Following the ceremony, a large reception was held at Elm Court. A marquee was erected for dancing to Meyer Davis's orchestra, while another accommodated supper.
The household at Elm Court included employees whose service sometimes extended across decades. James C. McLeish Jr. had first been engaged as gardener there in 1893, before Frank Work acquired the property, and remained associated with its gardens as the estate changed hands. He lived in the gardener's cottage at 27 Bowery Street and continued as gardener for the Cary estate until his death in 1948 at the age of eighty.
Cynthia's collecting also provided a means of memorializing her mother. In 1949 she gave the Metropolitan Museum of Art Sir Henry Raeburn's equestrian portrait of George Harley Drummond in memory of Frances.
The following year brought another profound loss. Guy had suffered a stroke while fishing in Canada in 1949 and remained in failing health afterward. On August 27, 1950, he died of a heart attack at Elm Court at the age of seventy. Funeral services were held at Trinity Church in Newport on August 30. His death ended their marriage of twenty-eight years.
Cynthia continued to make Elm Court her Newport home during her widowhood. Its rooms contained the paintings, furniture, books, jewelry and decorative objects accumulated by the family and during her marriage to Guy. Members of her household staff remained part of her daily life as well. Harold F. Dewey Johnson, who died in 1964, was remembered in his obituary as having worked as Cynthia's chauffeur.
Her family's complicated financial arrangements also remained active. In 1960, when Cynthia was seventy-six, litigation involving trusts she had created under the 1914 family arrangements again came before the New York courts. The proceeding concerned several of the seven trusts and questions arising after the deaths of family beneficiaries. Cynthia was represented personally by Shearman, Sterling & Wright, the law firm with which Guy had been so closely associated during his career.
In 1962, at the age of seventy-eight, Cynthia was photographed extensively by the celebrated photographer Toni Frissell during an assignment concerning Newport society. Frissell made a series of color transparencies of Cynthia as part of work associated with Life magazine and an assignment identified as "The Stately World of Newport." The surviving photographs provide an unusually extensive visual record of Cynthia during the closing years of her life, six decades after the debut that had formally introduced her to Newport society. (Photos courtesy of the Library of Congress)
Mrs. Cary by Toni Frissell Mrs. Cary by Toni Frissell Mrs. Cary by Toni Frissell
Cynthia's involvement with Newport extended beyond Elm Court. Over the years she was associated with charitable and cultural institutions including Newport Hospital, the Seamen's Church Institute, the Redwood Library and the Preservation Society of Newport County. In 1963 the Preservation Society formally recognized her civic and preservation contributions.
Nor had advancing age ended her willingness to become involved in matters affecting her neighborhood. In 1965, when Cynthia was eighty-one, she and Jane Pickens Langley were among those challenging permission for a proposed six-stall automobile wash near Bellevue Avenue and East Bowery Street before Newport's Board of Review.
Her interest in architecture and books likewise endured beyond Guy's death. The collection they had assembled over decades eventually became known as the Cynthia Cary Collection at the Redwood Library. Numbering nearly two hundred volumes, it preserved an unusual group of English and Continental books devoted to architecture, furniture, decoration and ornament.
Cynthia Burke Roche Cary died on Sunday, December 18, 1966, at her home, Elm Court, in Newport. She was eighty-two years old.
Funeral services were held at Trinity Church in Newport on Wednesday, December 21, with the Reverend Canon Lockett F. Ballard, rector, officiating. Cynthia was laid to rest in the St. Columba's-Berkeley Memorial Churchyard in Middletown, Rhode Island, beside Guy. Her gravestone bears the simple inscription, "Cynthia Burke Roche, His Wife, 1884–1966."
Cynthia made provisions in her will for both the institutions she valued and the people around her. She left $10,000 to the Redwood Library for its endowment fund and $1,000 each to St. Columba's Chapel and the Seamen's Church Institute. Several relatives and other individuals received monetary bequests. Her daughters, Eileen B. Robins and Cynthia Van Pelt, were left family heirloom jewelry.
Her will also contained a particularly personal provision for those who worked for her. Each employee still in Cynthia's service at the time of her death was to receive $100 for every year of employment.
Cynthia left her Bellevue Avenue and Bowery Street property, including its furnishings, to her son Guy Fairfax Cary Jr., who also received the residue of her estate.
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