I wrote an essay in my non-fiction class about all the time I spent at Sonnenberg Gardens. Grandmom used to make clothes for the estate, which meant that sometimes I would wear Victorian Clothing while walking around. I spent countless hours walking up and down these paths.
2019, Spring – Jamie
For a thirty-six-year-old introvert-slash-homebody like me, getting out of the house is not at the top of my daily “to-do” list. I would rather stay at home and read a book; stay at home and write a book; stay at home and watch a movie based on a book that I just read; and sometimes wish I could finish one of my books and it could become a movie so that I could, in turn, watch another movie based on a (good) book.
I find that some people can be draining to be around—no offense. If you’re an introvert as well, then you can understand what I mean. For me, it’s about the energy that people either exude or absorb and (you can believe me or not) I can very often feel that exchange. Those who have studied the phenomenon use the term “empaths.” Think Deana Troi of the USS Enterprise. Only without the Federation issued purple jumpsuit. What’s more is that I can often sense the energies of people that aren’t there (anymore). No, not ghosts. Imprints.
It might therefore be understandable why I avoid some areas of my hometown of Canandaigua, New York. There are places that feel like eyes are watching. Staring. I felt something in the tall grass at my last house. I avoid the stretch of County Road 46, between Saltonstall St. and County Road 10 because one Fall I felt the presence of people, standing shoulder to shoulder, on both sides of the road, looking at those standing opposite. In Baker Park during the summer I can feel something tucked away in an alcove of trees, darkened even on nights of the full moon (the darkness of the alcove may be accented by the blue-white tones that frost the grass and leaves like a winter chill).
One place has always been different for me. It has always felt like the strong North end of a magnet, the positive of a battery, warm and welcoming like that surprising day at the end of October when you can wear shorts one last time. Parts of it are now locked. They are off-limits. Hidden, as though they don’t exist. It bothers me when doors are treated as walls. I think that everyone should be allowed to freely walk the halls, back corners, and expansive gardens of Mary Clark and Frederick Ferris Thompson’s old Summer home at Sonnenberg Gardens in Canandaigua. There’s history, wonder, unexpected architecture, and life, so much life.
1887, Fall – Mary Clark Thompson
My husband, Frederick, and I have recently overseen the completion of our three-story Queen Ann style mansion at 151 Charlotte St. in Canandaigua, New York. Mr. Francis Allen, the brilliant Boston architect, designed and managed the two-year project. We are making a point to hold very dear the ornamental and progressive ambitions of the Victorian era. Notably, there is a skylight on the ceiling of the second floor of the stair, and a window above the fireplace in the sitting room. We are eager to catch the surprised faces of our guests when they arrive.
This farmland as we bought it in 1863, as newlyweds, consisted of little more than 300 acres of fields and trees. My family is glad to have me near for the summer every year. The mansion rests at the top of a gently sloping hill in the very place that our old farm house stood. One can see for miles from the patio chairs, over the tops of trees that redden and yellow like a patchwork quilt. Above all else, it is beautiful here. I look forward to the day when we can open our doors to family, to neighbors, and to community, alike. It is these things that will bring life to the land. The previous owners called it Sonnenberg, German for “Sunny Place,” and it is becoming, more and more, an accurate title. How fitting it would be to plant an array of flowers in some of these fields. There is more than enough room to create numerous gardens here.
I walked with Frederick through all three floors of the new house, standing in each of the forty rooms. He nodded his graying head with satisfaction, a smile beneath his bearded face. I wondered, while he stood there in his suit and with that smile, that he could no doubt win an election of his choosing, as surely as my father, Myron Holley, took office as New York State Governor in 1855.
Frederick can afford such endeavors as these. John and Samuel (his father and brother) together owned a number of banks including the 1st National Bank of New York, well secure since its establishment in 1812 as the City Bank of New York. When they left in 1873 to form the Chase National Bank (named in honor of U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase), Frederick remained the sole owner. He is a kind man, passionate about education and the arts. Last year we donated a clock tower to the Williams College of Massachusetts, erected at the Lasell Gymnasium, along with the 40-acre Tallmadge Farm property. He is earning for himself the title of “Philanthropist.” I do hope that all he does for these communities remains forever.
2002, Spring – Jamie
“Sonnenberg won’t be opening this year,” my grandmother, Phyillis, says. Her tone is even because she’s already had time to deal with the emotions of it. “Something happened, and it might not ever open again.” I can’t believe my ears, and she reads the confusion on my face. “John J. Murphy, the man who has been managing the grounds for about a decade, is going to court for embezzling around a half million dollars.” After walking the gardens with my grandmother for years, it’s impossible not to be angry. Sonnenberg was part of me, and I was a part of it. After one year of college, home suddenly feels different.
“But – it’s all volunteer based, isn’t it? What money did he take?”
“Everybody pays admission, don’t they?” Right. I volunteer from time to time, but I still pay when I go to the other events. “Sonnenberg needs that money because it’s in debt for utilities and for taxes. But. We’ll probably never see all of that money back.”
The gardens have always been there. And the mansion. I can see it all as easily as I can close my eyes. Red and yellow, white and blue, wallpaper and rooms, and green just everywhere. I’ve learned so much about the history and how wonderful the people were who built it all. I just never expected it to be… well history.
1903 – Spring, Mary
It’s been four years now since Frederick passed. Our wish to be benefactors of the community has not waned in me. I have recently funded Woodlawn Cemetery on North Pearl Street, as well as a public bath house on Canandaigua Lake. In honor of Frederick, I have started the F. F. Thompson hospital in his name next door to the Wood Library, where Frederick was the first president on the board of trustees. I have also hired workers to redesign the first garden at Sonnenberg under the direction of Mr. Ernest Bowditch. The Italian Garden rests at the bottom of the small hill off the back patio of the mansion. This garden is divided into four quarters with inlaid-stone pathways. It contains thousands of flowers of red, white, and yellow, curling into Fleur-de-Lis patterns among the green grass.
I have allowed the public to come and see for themselves. I enjoy watching them walk along the paths – even down to the fields and older, smaller gardens. Gentlemen, ladies, children skipping from stone to stone, all of it is refreshing and gives me strength. The rock wall that has surrounded the property for years now is, in many places, short enough to be easily seen over. I am delighted that pedestrians will see the garden as the flowers bloom and give off their spring-time smells.
I would love for people to come to these gardens every year. And I would love to add to it often so that there will always be new things to see.
2000, Spring – Jamie
I almost decided not to come this year, being an eleventh-grade high schooler who wears a Victorian get-up isn’t something one generally wants to be made public. It would have made Grandma sad if I had backed out, but she would have understood. This is one of the annual events at Sonnenberg to raise money so that it can stay open. (I’ve heard things aren’t going so well, and volunteers are putting in a lot of extra work to keep the place running.) In the winter, they have the Festival of Lights, where horse-drawn carriages take visitors through the grounds to see lights strung up over gardens and trellises. Today is an event for people to come and play Victorian games and see the gardens in bloom, aptly named “Victorian Days.”
There are a lot of people dressed up this year – my only chance at blending in and not being recognized if anybody from school shows up. My Grandma is wearing a maroon skirt and a blouse with a flower motif, which is fitting. She has, of course, made me a new outfit that I can fit into – basically the same thing as before apart from the measurements. They’re the kind that boys wore for outside playing. Long socks (which go up past my knees), knicker-bockers (like long shorts or short pants that are puffy), and a long-sleeved white shirt (which is also puffy – and itchy).
We walk down the brick path and into the Blue and White garden, the statue of Diana unexpectedly stands in the shade. The fountain has been turned on, the pool has been cleaned, and I feel just a little bit closer to its origin than I ever have before. This water makes it more real; I can feel the energy flowing here, trickling, running along the path and around my feet. I can sense others that were here long ago. Kids in play clothes, ladies in dresses, men in suits – their clothes now replicated and slung over the mannequins on the other side of the mansion’s velvet ropes. In these gardens, they are free from posed, limbless figures and instead walk the gardens around me. They are free to move, to walk, to promenade, to jump from brick to brick, to smile, to tip their hats or nod their heads in my direction.
I step back out to the main path and my eyes wander across the Italian Garden. The spectacle requires some 15,000 new annuals to be planted each spring: peonies, hibiscus, roses, balloon flowers, tulips, water lilies, cornflowers, bloodroot, daffodils, lenten rose, and each has its own bloom-cycle which means that the garden is constantly changing in color and shape.
Down the path to the right, west, beyond the ivy-covered trellis, and down the Pergola–Italian for “pleasant, shady walk.” There’s a new wire fence with a sign that indicates why. The plaque tells me that the statue was moved because the pillars of the Temple of Diana were too badly damaged and they had to take it down with a crane before anybody could get hurt. The enormous, ornate stone dome rests on steel girders, and most of the pillars remain intact – one of them didn’t survive the process. I think about how the place is falling apart in places. Age is consuming it.
A breeze brushes past me, of someone not there – who didn’t follow me out of the Blue and White Garden. It dances in a tree long enough to draw my attention to the green, and in a bed of flowers so that I see the pink of something blossoming. It’s not falling apart. It’s fighting to stay alive.
1907 Spring – Mary
We have now completed five gardens in all. John Handrahan has taken over planning and organization. He has worked on the Sub-Rosa Garden as expertly as Mr. Ernest Bowditch has done with the others. Each addition is every bit as magnificent as the last: The Italian, Rose, Old-Fashioned, and Japanese Gardens. Outside the Sub-Rosa is a new statue of Diana, goddess of the hunt, entitled “Diane de Gabies,” or “Diana Robing.” This is a signed sculpture by Bazzanti, a replica of the same statue at the Louvre. It is my hope that a walk through the grounds may be inspiring, if not educational.
Work is being done to expand the Greenhouse Conservatory Complex, designed by Lord & Burnham. It should reach over 10,000 square feet, according to the plans. The opportunities for horticulture and the study thereof are immense with the creation of these buildings. These expansions also include a Mushroom Cellar as well as a Peach and Nectarine House. I wonder if many citizens of Canandaigua have ever eaten a truly fresh nectarine.
1995, Spring – Jamie
April is probably my favorite month of the year. It’s when my birthday is (I turned 13 this year). It’s also when spring makes everything bloom and the trees turn green again. It’s also when Sonnenberg opens–Grandma takes my brother and me every year. She was an assistant for our art teacher in elementary school, but now she’s a volunteer seamstress for the mansion. Since it’s a Victorian mansion, she makes Victorian clothes, and she’s really good at sewing. Full skirts, blouses, bonnets, shawls, long gloves, and even corsets for the women mannequins, dress shirts, vests, cravat ties, and high waisted trousers for the men ones.
This year is special because Grandma gave my brother and me gifts for going to Sonnenberg with her all the time. She made us our own Victorian clothes so we can walk around like it’s really the 1800’s! They’re play clothes from a long time ago. Knicker- bockers (which is really fun to say), long socks (that keep sliding down), and a puffy shirt (with lots of buttons). At first I thought the clothes were really plain and a little itchy. But I can wear something under them. And it means getting to walk around Sonnenberg mostly whenever I want to.
It really is a lot of fun to walk around the gardens dressed like this. My brother is dressed up a lot like me (unfortunately, Adam still looks like he’s my brother, just in different colors) and Grandma wears a long skirt that has a bump on her butt, quite fashionable back then. She even carries a parasol and wears a pretty black hat. Usually we start at the Blue and White Garden. This particular garden reminds me of The Secret Garden, because there is small gateway that opens to a large area. It has a square path with a fountain and a small pool at the end. People smile at us a lot as we pass, and Grandma likes to tell people about whatever garden we’re in at the time. Adam gets distracted all the time and starts hopping around the stone paths between gardens or walks in circles around a stone vase if we’re near one, but I can’t help but listen to everything she says. Sometimes I can even remember things she doesn’t, so I help her.
We pass the Temple of Diana outside the Sub-Rose Garden. “Don’t go too close to that, Jamie. It isn’t safe.” There are six tall pillars, big enough that I couldn’t get my arms around them. Even if I was allowed to go closer. They hold up an enormous stone dome over a statue of Diana. “I do hope they fix it somehow. Mary was very proud of this.”
“Who is the statue? Is it Venus?” I don’t know many statue names, except Venus, David, and the big one called The Thinker. This one is tall and white. She has sandals, and it looks like she’s buttoning a robe together over her shoulder.
“This one is Diana. She was a goddess of the hunt, built in,” she double checks the paper under a plastic guard, “1905. The real one is in the Louvre, a famous art museum in France.”
I like to walk up the steps in the rock garden, where there’s a real castle made of stone. At least, Grandma says it’s a castle, but nobody lived there and it’s not big enough for more than camping out it (which would be the best thing ever!). There’s moss growing on the stones, which makes me want to work here so I can help keep things clean. Water drips down the walls like tiny waterfalls and ivy hangs and droops down from places that there are tunnels and it smells more like spring than regular spring does. There’s a Rose Garden which has more roses than I have ever seen in every red, white, and pink there is, just like Mary had it; an Italian Garden with red, yellow, and white flowers arranged in curling patterns that are almost like a maze; and there’s even a Japanese garden with a tea house, a red bridge, and a koi pond – they’re like gigantic goldfish that can have orange, brown, gold, and white colors. Grandma says that Mary did a lot of traveling with Mr. Thompson to learn about these kinds of gardens.
I feel special when I get to sit on the porch chairs and lounge, a small breeze playing with the leaves in the trees that keep the areas between gardens cool. It takes a lot of effort not to pass the red velvet ropes inside the rooms in the mansion because I feel like I belong there. I want to use the giant four-poster bed in a downstairs bedroom, the claw-foot bathtub I can see through a side door, the billiard table which is set up as though part way through a game and it seems that the players might walk past us at any moment.
1921, Summer – Mary
My gardens are complete, nine in all. Many are Victorian inspired, as is fitting. We have also achieved a notably eclectic variety, of which has been very popular since 1890. It is truly unlike anything else in the region. To the north or to the east one finds country land, corn fields, cow farms, long and twisting country roads. To the south, there is the lake. The gardens are a respite from the farming, from the commerce, from buzz of bathers down at the lake. With no ill-regard to Fioravanti’s flower shop in Rochester, I have never smelled anything so wonderful.
I always love walking through the Sub-Rosa Garden and seeing lovers whisper secrets into the mouths of the lions at either end of the massive curved stone bench and react when, as if by magic, they hear can one another. While walking through Deer Park children point and clap while the animals – deer, squirrel, and sometimes a fox – run and play or eat, watching with the same curiosity. The Roman Bath has attracted bathers during the summer months, and the open ceiling has even brought visitors on the occasional starlit night. And to think – all of this was farmland sixty years ago. Frederick and I were so young and full of ambition. Just look at what that has given us, and all that we have been able to give.
2019, Fall – Jamie
I wanted to return to the gardens this summer. I really did. I even looked up the schedule and realized I had missed the open season by two weeks. My Victorian clothes have been tucked away somewhere for eighteen years now. There is no doubt in my mind that if I asked Grandma to make me a new outfit so that I could return to the gardens, she would do it in a heartbeat. It’s possible that the knickerbockers and knee-high socks I once wore are still at Sonnenberg; maybe even on one of the stoic mannequins on the other side of the red velvet rope. Maybe my first set of clothes is upstairs in the children’s room among the rocking horse, marbles, and train set.
One year, I was shown the “nooks and crannies” tour and I saw amazing things, though we couldn’t go on any of outdoor structures. I saw a place on the third floor where there was no roof, much like in the Roman Bath I saw that same afternoon, which allowed the light to pass onto a sunroof in the second-floor stairwell. They explained how the chimney flue in the sitting room branched off in either direction to allow a window to sit above the fireplace. I shudder to think how many people don’t even notice these interesting alterations to the architecture that must have been incredibly apparent a hundred years ago.
Mary died in July of 1923 at Sonnenberg Mansion, she was 87 years old. Having no children of her own, the property was given to her nephew, Emory Clark. Eight years later it was sold to the federal government who put a VA hospital on the land. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to get into the mansion and walk around all those rooms that are currently locked, simply because it was on the property and nobody technically claimed or owned it at the time. Patients and workers tried to keep up some of the gardens over the next 40 years, but the plots struggled or died, graffiti appeared everywhere, and occasionally panes of the Greenhouse Conservatory Complex were assaulted with stones.
In 1966, a local citizen’s grassroots movement convinced the government to give the mansion and 50 acres to the public, who formed a non-profit organization in 1972. Restoration began a year later which literally had to unbury the gardens from the weeds and free the mansion of its boarded up windows and doors. After John Murphy nearly ruined all chances with his embezzling in 2001, the Mansion and Gardens were bought by the state in 2006, cleared of $1.4 million worth of debt, and even provided a balance of $1.8 million as a National Heritage Trust in order to satisfy renovations. 35,000 people visit every year during the spring and summer months, for picnics, concerts, weddings, and touring, put together by 320 volunteers and six year-round staff members just to keep the estate financially safe. I really did want to visit this year and be a part of it all. It’s name, “Sonnenberg,” or “Sunny Place,” is becoming–more and more–an accurate title. And it takes less of a fight now for it to stay alive.
Frederick and Mary came to Canandaigua, built their summer home, opened it to the public, supported the community, and breathed life into the entire region. The estate has almost been lost more than once, and yet it finds a way to pull through. It isn’t just the spring air that revives the garden every year, it’s the warmth of the people that come, and those who return every summer. I like to think that it’s because Mary never left. Not really. I don’t mean to say that she’s a ghost. But I do know that she has left an imprint.
