On June 6th we will be celebrating our 5th Anniversary as the proud owners of Sweet Briar.
What perfect timing to receive news that we are now officially listed in
The National Register of Historic Places!

We must say, we are honored to be calling ourselves stewards of this land and this place. Barry came to Geneseo to visit his friend Phil and to start up his bookstore in 1972. I came to SUNY the same year. My first recollection of Mrs. Gertrude Chanler was seeing her name listed as a generous supporter of the arts. I was among the young dancers at the college and it touched me to see someone was keeping a caring eye on us.

Fast forward some 30 years and here we are enjoying Sweet Briar’s exquisite beauty ages old, partaking in the fabulous valley sunsets, planting the garden, teaching classes and welcoming all of you into our magical world.

It is all our pleasure. It is our pleasure to be partnering with Will and Louise Wadsworth in Sweet Briar Celebrations for our weddings, events and overnights. It is equally my pleasure to be continuing a more than 30 year friendship and business partnership with Jacki McCausland, in Shakti Yoga. (We met dancing together at the college). And, it is my delight to be offering health and healing services as well, through Radiance Spa.

Enjoy,
Angela and Barry Caplan
6/4/10

~

Sweet Briar Farm History
Written by Oliver Chanler

Sweet Briar Farm is the name Horatio Jones gave to the land he was given by the Seneca Nation in gratitude for his part in helping to negotiate the Big Tree Treaty, and other treaties on their behalf. Jones lived on the farm in the home he built for himself and his family at the bottom of what is now known as the Jones Bridge Road, on the east side of the Genesee River. He gave the name to the property after the sweet briar roses that grow abundantly across the fields even today. Sweet Briar Farm was acquired in the nineteenth century by the Wadsworth family and sold again to Mr. and Mrs. George Austen, in 1896. The Austen’s purchased the property from Major Austin W. Wadsworth and built for themselves a large house and stables at the top of the hill overlooking the Genesee Valley. Over time, the house took the name Sweet Briar among the local public. In 1906, the house and property was bought by Winthrop Astor Chanler, an avid sportsman and fox hunter who had fallen in love with the Genesee Valley.

In her autobiography, Autumn in the Valley, Mrs. Winthrop Chanler says the Austens “were not happy there and after a few years agreed to part and live separately elsewhere.” She describes the house as “larger, comfortable… big enough to hold us and our seven children, their nurses and governesses, with place for guest and plenty of stable.” The Chanler family lived happily in the great house for three generations.

Mrs. Chanlder’s son, Hubert, inherited the house and raised his eight children there, adding to the memories “encrusted” on the walls. Admiral Chanler died in 1974, leaving the house and property to his children. His wife, Gertrude, continued to live there as her children spread across the country and the world pursuing their own lives. In 1979 she built a new house for herself on adjoining property.

John says that his first recollections of Sweet Briar were probably 1944-1945. “Our father was a Naval officer, and came home infrequently from the war. Our mother considered Sweet Briar Farm to be home, but we spent a lot of time in Washington, DC at her mother’s house.”

Sweet Briar Farm was our home mostly in the summer. The stable cottage was the home of Minnie and Bill Servis. He farmed the land and took care of the horses. During the war we had pigs and sheep at the farm buildings down on Jones Bridge Road, next to the river. John remembers feeding the pigs.

In 1946, the family moved to Italy and Sweet Briar was closed for more than two years. However, Bill Servis continued to farm the land. Our father was appointed Navel Attaché at the US Embassy in Rome. We returned in the winter of 1949. That was my first memory of Sweet Briar. I remember my older sister, Elizabeth, showing me around the place. There had been a fresh snowfall the night before, and it all seemed so very magical to me – still does.

That was when Sweet Briar pretty much became our permanent home. The house was very cold in the winter. The apparent original intent of the Austens, who built the house, was for it to be a three season home, closed up in the winter. The furnace was inadequate, so there were fires burning almost constantly in most of the fireplaces, especially in the big fireplace in the main hall. The fireplace in the nursery also was kept going all winter long. When our grandmother Laughlin would come from Washington for a visit, she spent a lot of time in the nursery, saying it was the only warm room in the house. Also, the hot water heater was coal-fired – providing hot water for one or maybe two showers every few hours. Before dinner, we all were expected to bathe, and the first shower was always a rush. Everyone else had to settle for a cold shower – bracing!!

Bathing was necessary before dinner – promptly at 7 o’clock – as we were expected to dress for dinner every night. Our father always wore formal diner clothes, while the rest of us had to wear a suit, or at least a coat and tie, and the girls in dresses or skirts. Meals were very important at Sweet Briar. All of us were expected to be home for lunch, washed and dressed properly – no jeans or T-shirts – promptly at one o’clock.

All of us had our own little jobs or chores to do. Sweeping porches, polishing brass, weeding flower beds, clipping the tall grass around the trees on the lawn, you name it. In the summer we boys helped in the fields as soon as we could lift a bale – putting up hay and straw, helping deliver the grain to the local grain dealer. None of us were ever taught to operate the farm equipment. We only did the grunt work. We were paid one dollar an hour.

When we were small, Oliver Wendell Holmes Culbertson lived across the road from Sweet Briar, on the Wadsworth farm. He had a large boar hog that would escape from time to time and come to lie in the fountain on the lawn. We children had to stay in the house while large men with baseball bats chased him back across the road.

Most of us rode, horses being a primary element in the Chanler family for generation. First we rode on incorrigible little ponies, and then whatever horses were in the stable. Riding included cleaning the tack before and after riding, and cooling down the animals before they were let into the paddock. Often riding seemed more like work than pleasure. A Rochester reporter followed John one morning a few years ago to observe how a member of the Genesee Valley Hunt went about his favorite sport. His conclusion was that hunting was the most labor- intensive sport he had ever seen.

We all loved watching TV when we were kids, but we didn’t have one in the house. Minnie and Bill Servis had one, and we would go up to their house to watch Howdy Doody, The Kate Smith House, and other late afternoon shows. It was there that I saw the first televised nuclear explosion. It was risky watching TV at their house, as we had to get back to the big house to get ready for dinner. Many, many times, the Servis’s telephone would ring and we’d all rush out the door while Minnie lied for us.

We didn’t get a TV in Sweet Briar until about 1953. Our father didn’t approve of the medium, so when the magic box arrived, it was put in the large playroom on the third floor so that he wouldn’t have to see or hear it. Before TV, we were expected to read, and we played parlor games such as checkers, Chinese checkers, and various board games. There was a small gramophone in the School Room – the day room by the front door. In the evenings after dinner, we would all go in there while the parents had coffee. After coffee our father liked to listen to recordings of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. That was also where I was introduced to classical music – Ravel’s Bolero still throbs my memory. After the TV came, it was a race from the dinner table to the top floor to get the best seats to watch whatever was on.

It was a great house to grow up in. There was lots of room to be alone, or to engage with our brothers and sisters. We boys used to wrestle on the rug in the hallway on the second floor, sometimes inflicting a little too much pain, turning the friendly grappling into angry blows. That rug also was our marbles court. We drew circle in the nap and shot marbles for hours. Sweet Briar was a fun place to be, and we were each others’ favorite companions – most of the time. We never went to summer camp, as we were told that we had everything we needed right here, horse, bicycle (that we couldn’t ride on the road), acres of land to run around on – exploring, finding secret places, sneaking over to the gorge at Fall Brook, and going to the lake.

Minnie Servis was Welsh and had been at Sweet Briar for many years. She had come from Wales to work as a domestic for Senator James Wadsworth at Hartford House. Bill had been a driver and horseman for my grandfather, Winthrop Chanler. Bill and Minnie married and raised three children in that little house next to the stable. Minnie helped my mother keep house at Sweet Briar, waiting on table, keeping track of the silver and keeping it polished. She really could run the whole house, and take care of us too.

But there was someone already doing that. Kathleen Fogarty, or Fuddy to us children, was a very important part of our lives. She was a Canadian who had spent her whole life caring for small children. She came to our family shortly before John was born in 1940. She stayed with the family for almost 25 years – until the younger, Alida just wore her out. She cared for all eight of us, traveled wherever the Navy sent us, and was our second mother – binding our wounds, soothing our hurts, listening to our complaints, and helping us learn about acceptable behavior that would keep us out of trouble. She was somewhere around sixty when she came to the family…

Our parents became experts at hiring domestic help, as evidenced by the legions of people who came to work in the house and then moved on to other jobs. There was almost always a cook in the kitchen to prepare the endless amounts of food consumed by our large family. The milkman used to deliver as much as 22 quarts of milk to the house every other day! Also, there was someone to help serve all the food and to clean the downstairs rooms and keep the woodbins and fireplaces stocked with firewood.

One constant in the house was Mae Baize. She worked for our family for more than 35 years. Mae and her family lived in the stucco house up by the road. She did laundry, made the beds, cleaned all the rooms on the second and third floor, mended torn clothing, sewed on buttons, kept track of all the bed linen and towels, etc. Misses Baize could get the most stubborn stains and spots out of a favorite shirt or skirt. There is no miracle spot remove that is better than she was. She had a sense of humor too. I once had a favorite pair of swim trunks that finally were ready for the trash heap. Two holes had worn through tin the seat of the trunks. I found them back in my dresser drawer after throwing them away. Mae had repaired the holes and sewed little tassels over the repair work. I had to wear those at least once… She was a confidant, and a conscience who never proved us – we just KNEW when she disapproved. Together with Miss Fogarty, Minnie Servis, and several other people who loyally cared for our family, she made sure we were loved and watched over.

There was almost always noise in the house – to our father’s consternation. We were constantly being told not to “rough-house on the first floor.” Often we were just told to go outside. On some occasion he told one or another of us to go lie down. That was because there were always dogs in the house. The most famous, or infamous one, was his French poodle, named Cliquot. He bit everyone who came to the house. There were friends of the family who would drive up to the house, blow the horn, and wait for someone to come out and guarantee the Cliquot was locked up. There were other pets too, as one would expect in a house full of children who loved animals. We had cats, canaries, parakeets, rabbits, baby squirrels, gold fish, and on and on. None of them seemed to last as long as the dreaded Cliquot. So, we often had some very solemn funerals for fish, chipmunks, etc in the garden. A trained archeologist might find lot of tiny plastic crosses in those flower beds.

But, like all children, we grew up and went away to school, to college, and then to other homes in other places. Just before our mother built the new house up the road, she was virtually alone in Sweet Briar, the only other occupant was Duoc, the Vietnamese woman who had come to live in the house to help with domestic chores. The house by then was pretty lonely place – no noise, no laughter or screams of joy or terror from children oppressing each other with great glee.

Today, the house is more and more the center of social activities – weddings, receptions, classes & spa visits. It’s wonderful to see the place alive, moving through the new millennium with its own grace and a new spirit. ~Oliver Chanler