On the Sea and Bailey’s Beach
For the best yachting vessel money can buy, Gilded Age families took a ride up Narragansett Bay.
ON THE SEA
For the best yachting vessel money can buy, Gilded Age families took a ride up Narragansett Bay.
J.B. Herreshoff and friends aboard the steam yacht Eugenia. Photo courtesy of Herreshoff Marine Museum.
As with any leisure activity, when the elite families of Newport took to the water to enjoy the popular pastime of yachting, they wanted the best. And in Rhode Island, the best meant buying from the Herreshoff Manufacturing Company in Bristol.
“The biggest names of the Gilded Age were Herreshoff customers, and yachting was as significant a means of displaying your wealth and privilege as coaching, or having a magnificent mansion built, or racing horses,” says Evelyn Ansel, curator at the Herreshoff Marine Museum.
The company, founded by two local brothers, was known for its luxury yachts and sleek racing vessels. Between 1895 and 1937, the Vanderbilt family alone purchased forty-nine Herreshoff boats. Other customers included the Astors, Goulds, Morgans, Belmonts, Iselins, Goddards and Tiffanys, some of the biggest names of the day in wealth and business.
Nathanael G. Herreshoff’s personal sailboat Alerion under construction in the Herreshoff Manufacturing Company small boat shop in 1913. Photo courtesy of Herreshoff Marine Museum.
Though the America’s Cup races didn’t take place in Newport until the 1930s, the prestigious New York Yacht Club made regular cruises through Newport, and families and clubs sponsored individual races on Narragansett Bay that were often covered in the New York Times. Ogden Goelet, owner of Ochre Court, and James Gordon Bennett Jr., founder of the Newport Casino, were among the goliaths of the era who sponsored sailing cups bearing their names. Trophies were made by the best silversmiths of the age, including Tiffany and Co. and the Gorham Manufacturing Company of Providence.
Katoura (left) and Resolute (center), an America’s Cup defender, photographed in Bristol in 1914. Photo courtesy of Newport Historical Society.
In addition to sailboats and steam yachts, Herreshoff constructed fishing vessels and other power boats for local families and, later, torpedo boats for the United States Navy. With only one small bridge spanning the Sakonnet River, Aquidneck Island was largely cut off from the mainland except by sea.
“It wasn’t just the elite that had a much closer relationship with boats and the water during the Gilded Age — it was virtually everyone in Rhode Island,” Ansel says. “Ferries were the transport of the day.”
BAILEY’S BEACH
Consuelo and Muriel Vanderbilt at Bailey’s Beach with their escorts, c. 1925.
Young William K. Vanderbilt Jr., Harold Vanderbilt and Harry Lehr at Bailey’s Beach, c.1898.
By the 1890s, newly electrified trolley lines had made Easton’s (First) Beach accessible to the general public, to the dismay of its better-heeled patrons. Not wanting to associate with the masses, Newport’s wealthy claimed a small strip at the far end of Bellevue Avenue as their own and formed the Spouting Rock Beach Association, better known as Bailey’s Beach. Today, the establishment remains a private club that occasionally makes headlines for its exclusive membership. In 2021, then-club president Alexander Auersperg (an Austrian prince who happens to be the son of Sunny von Bülow) felt compelled to respond after multiple media outlets described Bailey’s as an “all-white club.” “I can assure you that there is no one on our board of governors who would ever tolerate such an offensive practice,” he wrote in an email obtained by WPRI.
The trolley to Easton’s Beach, c. 1900. Photo courtesy of the Providence Public Library digital collections.
