In 1958 the estate was scheduled for demolition. My grandfather drove past it every day on his way to Wilmington. In 1962 he stopped driving past.
The First GenerationHenry Foster, 1962.
My grandfather Henry Foster was a metallurgist for the DuPont company. He had grown up in the Brandywine Valley and he drove past the Ashforth estate every weekday for twenty-six years on his commute from Kennett Square to Wilmington. He watched it decline: the family gone by 1947, the property held by an absent corporate owner from then forward, the roof failing on the conservatory side by the mid-1950s, the boxwood gone feral, the south lawn cut for hay by a local farmer who paid the corporate owner forty dollars a season for the privilege.
In November 1958 he read in the Chester County Times that the estate had been sold to a developer who intended to subdivide the property into a residential cul-de-sac. The manor would come down in the spring of 1960. The boxwood would be bulldozed. The conservatory, my grandfather said later, "they were going to break the glass on purpose."
The development did not happen. The developer ran out of capital in 1961. The bank that had financed him repossessed the property and put it up for courthouse auction in October 1962. My grandfather attended the auction in a brown wool suit, with a cashier's check for forty-six hundred dollars in his breast pocket. He did not expect to win. He won.
He could not afford to restore it. He could afford to keep the roof on and the bank away. He did that for nineteen years. My grandmother Edith, who had not been told about the auction in advance, was not pleased. They never lived on the property. They lived in their bungalow in Kennett Square. My grandfather drove out to the estate on Saturday mornings with a thermos of coffee and walked the grounds for an hour. He once said the only thing he had ever bought without asking my grandmother was the manor; he was glad he had bought it; he never bought anything else without asking.
He died in 1979. My grandmother followed in 1980. They left the estate to my parents in undivided thirds; the third undivided third was held in trust for me and my brother. I was seven. My brother was eleven.
The Second GenerationCatherine and David Foster, 1981.
My parents began the restoration in the spring of 1981. They sold their house in Wilmington and moved with my brother and me into the carriage house — at that time a four-room cottage with a half-collapsed roof and a coal furnace that worked in three rooms out of four. We lived there for the next seventeen years.
The restoration went in stages because the money went in stages. The first three years were the roof — every panel of the manor's slate, re-laid by hand. My father did much of this himself; the rest he hired Amish craftsmen from Lancaster County to finish. By 1984 the manor was watertight for the first time in three decades. They turned next to the walls — replastered, repointed, repainted in the original cream and umber.
The boxwood parterre was my mother's project, beginning in 1988. The original Olmsted-firm plantings were largely gone; she replanted from cuttings she had taken in 1981 when the hedge was still mostly alive. The roses were lost; she replaced them with David Austin shrubs in colors she believed approximated the originals. She read Olmsted's letters in the Library of Congress archive over three trips to Washington. She kept a notebook of every plant she put in the ground; that notebook lives in the library now.
My father re-poured the bluestone parterre allées himself in 1991, by hand, in three-foot sections, over an entire summer. He was sixty-one. He could not lift a bag of stone alone by the end of it. My brother helped on weekends. I held the level.
By 1998 the manor, the parterre, the south lawn, the library, and the carriage house were all habitable and recognizable as themselves. My parents had spent every dollar they had. My mother said once that they had bought their retirement by giving it up. I think she meant that as a compliment to my father.
The Third GenerationEliza Foster-Whitaker, 2002.
I took over operations in 2002. I had been an environmental lawyer in Philadelphia for nine years. My parents were tired, the property was beautiful and expensive to keep, my brother was building furniture in Maine and had no intention of returning. I drove out for Christmas in 2001 and my mother said over coffee that they were thinking about selling. I drove back to Philadelphia that night. I quit my job in February. I told my parents in March. I moved back into the carriage house in April. My mother cried; my father did not.
I had no plan beyond not selling. The wedding venue idea took six months to crystallize. I had been to a friend's wedding at a Pennsylvania estate the prior June and had spent the entire reception thinking about what the owners must charge to keep the place open. I worked the math backward from what my parents needed to live on, what the estate cost to maintain, what we wanted to set aside for further restoration. The number was twenty-two weddings a year. Not twenty-four. Not thirty. Twenty-two.
I met Ben in October 2002 at a contractor's barbecue in West Chester. He was the contractor. He was forty-six. He had been married briefly in his twenties; I had never been married. We were married on the south lawn the following May. Two hundred and twelve people attended. The boxwood was in flower. The tent went up the day before and came down two days after. It was the seventeenth wedding ever hosted at the estate.
Ben runs the grounds. He took over from my father in 2008. He still mows the south lawn himself in season because he has never trusted a contractor to do it correctly. He has restored the carriage-house roof slate by slate over the last eight years. He is a quiet partner; he prefers not to be on the tour but he is the reason the property looks the way it does. He is a better gardener than my mother was. My mother would have agreed.
We did not turn this into a wedding venue because we thought it was good business. We turned it into a wedding venue because it was the only way to keep it. A house this old needs people in it.
The Next GenerationThe question of who comes next.
Ben and I have two grown children. Our daughter Margaret is a furniture-maker in Camden, Maine. She visits in August. She has never expressed interest in running the estate. Our son Henry, named for my grandfather, is a cellist with the Boston Symphony. He visits at Christmas. He has never expressed interest either. We have not pressured them and we do not intend to.
I am fifty-two. Ben is fifty-four. We have at least another fifteen good years here. If neither of our children wants the estate by the time we are done, the plan is to transfer it to a 501(c)(3) trust — a small foundation, modeled on the National Trust for Historic Preservation — whose purpose will be to keep the property intact, keep it operating as a small wedding venue under continuing private stewardship, and keep it from ever being subdivided again. The trust documents are already drafted. They sit in the library in a file my grandfather would have laughed at.