“Squirming & crawling about from place to place can do no good,” Abraham Lincoln once lectured a ne’er-do-well stepbrother ambitious to leave the family’s log cabin for greener pastures. Yet 10 years later, as President-elect, Lincoln admitted: “I hold the value of life is to improve one’s condition.”

 

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“Squirming & crawling about from place to place can do no good,” Abraham Lincoln once lectured a ne’er-do-well stepbrother ambitious to leave the family’s log cabin for greener pastures. Yet 10 years later, as President-elect, Lincoln admitted: “I hold the value of life is to improve one’s condition.”

Such conflicts never burdened Lincoln’s direct descendants. His sole surviving son, Robert T. Lincoln, recoiled with horror at the thought of preserving his father’s crude birthplace in Kentucky. When he grew wealthy enough to build a family home of his own, Robert constructed one of the most elegant summer mansions in New England.

Hildene, in Manchester, Vermont, reflected not where the Lincoln family came from but where he believed they deserved to end up. Robert actually took to calling his opulent new retreat his “ancestral home.”

He first visited the region as a Harvard student with his mother in the summer of 1863. Picturesque and cool Manchester offered gorgeous vistas, beautiful gardens, exclusive golf courses, and an elite crowd, all of which the socially ambitious Robert enjoyed.

In 1902 Robert, by then the president of the Pullman Company and a former Secretary of War and ambassador to Great Britain, purchased 412 choice acres on a promontory overlooking an expansive panorama of Battenkill Valley meadowland. There he built his spectacular 24-room Georgian Revival mansion—complete with a porte-cochère in front and formal gardens in back—and made a final, decisive break from his famous family’s hardscrabble past.

For the next 24 years of his long life, Robert and his family spent every summer at Hildene, typically traveling to Manchester from homes in Washington and Chicago in private railroad cars filled with trunks containing his father’s carefully guarded—and still not publicly released—papers. Each year he expanded his Hildene vacations until he was spending up to six months at a time there. He became president of the local country club, developed a cadre of wealthy friends, and conducted company business from a library and office adjacent to his ground-floor bedroom. Stubbornly private, almost reclusive, he made an exception to publicly welcome President William Howard Taft to the house as a gesture of support during the contentious White House campaign of 1912 (Robert hated Teddy Roosevelt, however much TR admired Abraham Lincoln). More typically, Robert hid his family photographs and the file of his mother’s controversial insanity trial inside a Hildene closet, where they remained undisturbed for nearly half a century.

With his wife, Mary, the daughter of an Iowa senator, Robert stocked Hildene with comfortable furniture inherited from his in-laws. But he also filled it