Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 21, Number 93, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 August 1900 — HISTORIC OLD NEWPORT. [ARTICLE]

HISTORIC OLD NEWPORT.

A Fire and a Feast Did Much to Bring Fame to the Rhode Island Resort. } “No watering-place in the United States, not even Saratoga, approaches Newport in the fascination of historic charm,” writes William Perrlne, in the Ladies’ Home Journal. “For more than two centuries and a half, or as far back as the time of Roger Williams, the little Island on which it stands Uas been the scene of great ambitions. There it was that Bishop Berkeley saw in his prophetic and poetic vision how ‘Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way;’ there it was that the Quakers, who had followed George Fox himself to Rhode Island, established a community which at one time promised to rival tjjat of Penn. Before the revolution the foreign and domestic trade of Newport was greater than New York’s. Nowhere else was there a social life more elegant and scholarly. The Redwood Library dates its name and origin to a Quaker merchant of the eighteenth century, a cotemporary of that Col. Geoffrey Malbone who had a house as famous in his day as ‘Marole House’, of the Vauderbilt-Belmont intdurage is to ours. When it was destroyed by fire one summer afternoon, while his slaves were engaged in cookiqg a dinner for a brilliant company of his guests, the Colonel immediately ordered the feast to be served on the lawn, amidst the Illumination from the flames of the burning mansion. It was this fire and this feast that did a gr*at deal to famous.”