Alden Villa

On July 3rd, 1878, 25 year old Stanford White set sail for Europe on the French steamer, Periere to visit his life-long friend and colleague, the great American sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens.   White had spent the previous eight years working as the head draftsman in the New York office of Henry Hobson Richardson who he had been introduced to by a friend of his fathers, Frederick Law Olmsted, master planner of the University of California campus in Berkeley, and designer of Central Park in New York. White had originally planned to board the ship alone, but as Leland Roth tells it in his book "McKim, Mead and White, Architects, "at the last minute, White's and Saint-Gaudens's good friend Charles McKim was coming to Paris too." White's 1878 trip to Paris was to change the landscape of American Architecture for ever.  Upon  his return, he joined McKim and William Rutherford Mead to form one of the influential and prolific architectural firms in history. Though White had been given a great deal of artistic freedom in Richardson's office due to Richardson's ailing health (he died at the young age of 47), Richardson was still "the mogul" as White called him. With his name on the door, White was allowed to fully extend his wings, and shortly after returning from Europe, began work on a project for Ann Caroline Coleman Alden, a wedding gift for her son, Percy and his wife Mary Ida Warren to be built in the iron rich hills of Cornwall, Pennsylvania.