In the Pink

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In the Pink
Beautiful Roseland Cottage adds color to a small Connecticut town.

By Patricia Brooks

Travel to Woodstock, Connecticut, and you can't miss Roseland Cottage. A sprawling salmon-pink house, it's located just across the street from the town's quiet common. With its gables, glazed chimney pots, turrets, verandas, and intricate gingerbread trim, not to mention its eye-popping pinkness, Roseland stands out as a brash exhibitionist among the stately white Federal houses nearby. But Roseland always stood out from the crowd, and in the late nineteenth century its guests included four U.S. presidents and luminaries such as essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Uncle Tom's Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe and her brother, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher.

Roseland's owner, Henry Chandler Bowen, made his fortune in Brooklyn as a silk importer and dry goods merchant, and in 1846 he built Roseland Cottage as a summertime retreat. ("Cottage" is a bit of a misnomer; it has 19 rooms.) In what must have seemed like a display of conspicuous consumption to fellow Woodstockers, Bowen spared no expense. He hired Joseph Collins Wells, a British-born New York architect (who also designed the First Presbyterian Church in Greenwich Village), to design the house and Thomas Brooks, a New York cabinetmaker, to furnish it.


	"Cottage" is a bit of a misnomer; it has 19 rooms.

Bowen was a deeply religious man, and he chose to build in the then-popular Gothic Revival style, symbolizing as it did sacred motifs and the sanctity of family life. (Bowen's own family was large. His first wife, Lucy, died after giving birth to their tenth child, and he had another son by his second wife, Ellen.) The Gothic motif continues inside with delicate carved arches and stained glass windows, wood paneling and even Gothic furniture.

The house has many innovative touches. A double parlor with sliding doors runs from one side of the building to the other, allowing for cross drafts through the bay windows at each parlor end. Carved parlor doors have pointed Gothic arches. Walls in the dining room and both hallways and parlors are covered in Lincrusta Walton, made by a then-new process in which pressed wood pulp was embossed to resemble tooled leather. Most doors have beautiful blue-and-white ceramic knobs.

Bowen loved roses, so he had the cottage painted pink with dark brown trim and forest-green shutters to give it all the colors of the flower. Pink is also evident indoors, in the marble of the south parlor's fireplace, the trim on upstairs door panels and even the pink and gold edge around the monogrammed china in the dining room.

Roseland had its heyday in the late 1800s, a time when Fourth of July celebrations were a major public occasion. Thanks to the political connections of Roseland's owner, tiny Woodstock was able to outdo itself. Not only did the town have torchlight parades, band concerts and fireworks, but four U.S. presidents—Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, Benjamin Harrison and William McKinley—journeyed to Woodstock to make the annual Fourth of July address.

Bowen was a devout member of the Congregational Church and an ardent Abolitionist. In 1848 he co-founded the New York Independent, a Congregationalist journal that became one of the most influential anti-slavery newspapers in the country, with articles by Reverend Beecher, John Greenleaf Whittier, Horace Greeley and William Lloyd Garrison. The paper also supported the newly emerging Republican party, and in 1860 Bowen persuaded Henry Ward Beecher's church in Brooklyn to invite a lawyer who represented Bowen's firm in the west to make a speech there. The lawyer was Abraham Lincoln, and the speech, which was moved to New York's Cooper Union, turned him into a potential candidate for president. (Lincoln later rewarded Bowen, who had no political aspirations, with an appointment as internal revenue tax collector for Brooklyn.)

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Patricia Brooks, a longtime Connecticut resident, writes frequently about the state for national magazines. She is the restaurant reviewer for the New York Times Connecticut section and author of the Connecticut section of the Berlitz Traveler's Guide to New England.

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