Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 5.djvu/387

 THE ROLFE-RUMFORD HOUSE. 351

Walkers and the Thompsons seemed to have degenerated in the new master of the Rolfe house. He had a scholarly education, hut was without enterprise or ambition. In 1808 we find him on the staff of His Excellency, Governor Langdon, with the title of colonel. He served also in municipal and church affairs, but was not prominent. In his latter days he grew dissolute, and allowed the old mansion to fall into decay. He died July 18, 18 19, and his half sister became his heiress.

Almost as strange and full of vicissitudes as the life of her father was the career of Sarah Thompson, Countess of Rumford. The forsaken infant of a persecuted father, fleeing from unmerited reproach and insult to the enemy for protection ; the orphan, by the decease of the only parent left to protect her ; forsaking the home of her childhood to pass ai: isolated life with her paternal grandmother in an adjacent state ; a young girl, in the hey-day of life, encoun- tering the perils of the Atlantic, at the call of an exiled and, to her, a long-lost parent, a resident of the capital of T.avaria, when Munich was about to be bombarded by the Austrian army, and which was alone prevented by the stern energy of her father, at that time commander-in-chief of the Bavarian forces ; the caressed daughter of one honored among the learned savans of Europe, and received with flattering attentions among the most select circles of London and Paris; doubly an orphan, in a foreign land, and by that event inheriting the title and estates of her father; returning to England and settling upon the paternal estate of Brompton, near London ; receiving at will the attentions of the most eminent persons among the literati of the British metropolis ; again a resident of Paris, where she was subjected to all the embarassments naturally the result of the revolution of '30 ; and finally, coming to America, the original seat of her ancestors, to die in her old age. Was here not change and variety with an emphasis ! She saw life as few saw it. She was a queen of society, and exercised much social influence. She was never married. Tired of courts and their flatteries, after her return to America, in 1845. she spent the remain- der of her life in a quiet circle of society, aloof from the stir of city life, with an adopted daughter for her companion. She had considerable property, saved from her lather's estates, with a pension of nearly a thousand dollars a year from the Bavarian court, for the services rendered by her father. This she bestowed chiefly in charity.

The countess died in December, 1852, at the age of seventy-eight. By her last will she devised $15,000 to the Concord Asylum for the Insane. The estate and another $15,000 she left for the endowment of an asylum for little girls, natives of Concord, to be known as the Rolfe and Rumford Asylum. The money bequeathed has ever since been at interest, and amounts at present to nearly $80,000, and the income is annually sufficient to maintain the home. The old mansion house is now used by the institution, but a fine edifice will soon be erected from plans procured in Europe by Hon. Joseph B. Walker, of the board of trustees. The home was opened January 15, 1880, under the care of Mrs. Nathaniel Shaw as matron. The first, a girl of nine years of age, was admitted in March. Since then, ten others have been received. The will provides that all who are admitted to the Asylum must be motherless girls, but the difficulty of finding enough to take advantage of its protection has neces- sitated the letting down of the bars somewhat in its admission.

The Rolfe-Rumford house occupies a very pleasant site but a kw rods from the Merrimack river, on a sliglit eminence that overlooks that queenly stream. Its rear is toward the river, the front facing Hall street and the west. It is no flimsy, inconsistent structure, but a substantial and admirable specimen of colonial architecture. The whole building has a comfortable, home-like look, and the eye rests content on the beautiful wooded and park-like grounds

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