Mansions of the Gilded Age

Mansions of the Gilded Age

This article relates to The Door in Penrose Forest

In The Door in Penrose Forest, the Penrose in question, lending his name to the forest, the city near it, and the ruined mansion at the heart of the intrigue, was Cornelius Penrose, a robber baron from the Gilded Age who used his vast fortune to enrich the area surrounding Penrose (then called Williamsville) before a massive flood devastated the area; not long thereafter, a mysterious fire reduced his palatial estate almost completely to ash. The reader eventually finds out what happened, parceled out in alternating chapters with Nico's story.

The Gilded Age was, of course, a time when mostly-unscrupulous men accumulated then-unimaginable amounts of wealth, which they used to build some things for the people (museums, libraries) but mostly for themselves (for example, their palatial mansions).

There are quite a few Gilded Age mansions in the United States, some of which still stand and some of which met a similar fate as Penrose Estate. The San Francisco mansion of Leland Stanford, an ultra-wealthy railroad magnate and governor of California, for instance, was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake, along with the mansions of the four other founders of the Central Pacific Railroad who lived on the same hill. (These four businessmen who lived on Nob Hill were known as the "Big Four.") Stanford had two other mansions: one in Palo Alto which was torn down in 1965 after serving as a children's hospital, another in Sacramento that now serves as a museum and a reception center for the California government.

One of the more notable Gilded Age mansions still standing is Sagamore Hill, which was built for President Theodore Roosevelt. While he was President, it served as the "Summer White House," and he lived in it from 1885 until his death. You can still visit it today to marvel at the gorgeous Queen Anne architecture and learn all about the 26th president. And not far away from Sagamore Hill sits Oheka Castle, an enormous Gilded Age mansion-turned-hotel built by the financier Otto Herrmann Kahn. This former mansion is perhaps most famous as the location where Taylor Swift filmed the music video for "Blank Space".

Filed under People, Eras & Events

This article relates to The Door in Penrose Forest. It will run in the July 15, 2026 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.