by Elisha Lee, for The Curious Yankee

I’m a great fan of The Gilded Age, not just the television series with its glitter and intrigue, but also the mansions of the period. These structures are more than mere architecture; they’re livable art – manifestations of human desire, unbridled ambition, and, often, unacknowledged wounds. Each tells multiple stories – of the people who designed them, the fortunes that made them possible, and the emotional wreckage left in their wake.

In January 2024, while researching Medfield State Hospital, I discovered that its architect, William Pitt Wentworth, had designed only two known private residences: the James W. Hunter house in Norfolk, Virginia, and the John G. Johnson house in Proctor, Vermont. Drawn to the latter, I made a pilgrimage to what is now known as “Wilson Castle”, a private house museum and wedding venue with an apparently steady sideline in paranormal activity tours. My skills do not include extra-sensory perception, and I won’t presume to comment on that aspect of the property, but, in walking its halls, I certainly felt the weight of ambition and of the unspoken struggles that often accompany immense wealth.

The house sits on a hillside overlooking Otter Creek and acres of cornfields, still magnificent despite crumbling masonry. The sweeping vista is much as it was in its heyday, telephone lines, a solar array, and a radio tower being the only apparent concessions to the present. The Wilson Castle website tells us only:

“the castle’s construction began in 1885, as instructed by Doctor & Lady Johnson. Doctor Johnson was aVermonter who went to England to study medicine. While there he met and married a wealthy lady of the aristocracy. After 7 and a half years of planning and construction the castle was completed at the sum of $1,300,000. The Johnson’s remained in the castle for only a brief time.”1

Surely, I thought, there has to be a good deal more to the story than that…as indeed there is.

The story actually begins some 65 miles to the southeast, in the little town of Walpole, New Hampshire, where John J. G. Johnson was born on August 9, 1841. John’s father, Stephen Sumner Johnson, was a farmer of average means, and I can find no evidence that his son received more than a grade school education. On August 7, 1862, 21-year-old John married a Walpole girl, Mary A. Waite, and, several weeks later, enlisted in the 14^th New Hampshire Volunteer Infantry. He had played an active role in the recruiting of Company B, which consisted of men from Walpole, and was duly elected its captain. His enlistment papers list his civilian occupation as blacksmith.

The 14^th New Hampshire spent the first 24 months of its 36-month term stationed in and around Washington, D.C., and saw virtually no action during that time. Johnson was discharged on November 3, 1863, having served only 14 months of his enlistment. While no cause is given, it seems unlikely that the Union Army was discharging its most capable officers halfway through their term of service.

Johnson went west after leaving the army. His name appears on a list of letters being held in Bloomington, Illinois, in March of 1864. On January 25, 1869, he married Augusta Adelaide Hinds in Bloomington. Later that year, the first Mrs. Johnson, living in Rockingham, Vermont, sued her husband for divorce, citing “intolerable severity” and “adultery with one Fanny Newton and with other women to the petitioner unknown.” 2 Oddly, the charges do not include bigamy, and she may have been unaware of his second marriage.

Mary Waite Johnson’s petition for divorce was granted on June 19, 1870. Four months later, Augusta gave birth to a daughter, Content Aline Johnson, who would later become a noted artist.

By 1880, Johnson was practicing as a physician and living with Augusta and Content in the Bloomington household of his brother-in-law, Dwight Hardwood, a hardware merchant. At some point shortly thereafter, the Johnsons relocated to Manhattan, taking up residence at the Windsor Hotel on 5th Avenue.

The reason for the move isn’t entirely clear, but the Windsor was a meeting ground for New York’s captains of industry – Jay Gould’s mansion was across 47th Street from the hotel, William H. Vanderbilt lived on 40th Street, and the hotel was home to such visiting luminaries as Andrew Carnegie.

The relocation raises the question of what Johnson was “practicing”. He wasn’t an actual doctor – indeed, he seems to have had no medical qualifications whatsoever. The only reference to his practice known to me is a reference in The Hypnotic Magazine published in 1897 that identified him as a practitioner of “the massage treatment”. Johnson was probably engaged in electro-magnetic therapy. The technique was believed at the time to benefit “female hysteria”, a somewhat vaguely defined condition characterized by insomnia, depression, irritability, and emotional outbursts.

It was probably in that capacity that he met and began treating a young woman named Sarah Amelia Robins. Sarah, not quite 30 years old at the time, was the daughter of a successful Manhattan builder, David Robins, who had died 11 years earlier. The nature of Sarah’s “nervous complaint” is unknown, but it may have been a consequence of her mother’s death on September 28, 1882, which left her a very wealthy orphan.

John undoubtedly saw in Sarah an entrée to the wealth and social aspirations that had brought him to Manhattan. What Sarah saw in John remains a mystery. We do know that on July 11, 1883, John applied for a passport. The document incorrectly states his date of birth as August 9, 1843, and his place of birth as Rutland, Vermont. Later that year, he left Augusta and sailed for England. What prompted the voyage? It certainly wasn’t “to study medicine”. In all likelihood, Johnson went to England in order to marry Sarah, having slightly misrepresented his age and place of birth so as to obscure, at least to the extent possible, the existence of his first and second marriages. The only problem he faced was Augusta’s less-than-enthusiastic view of the plan. To resolve that situation, Sarah engaged one of New York’s more flamboyant legal personalities – Charles Harvey Reed, best known for having defended Charles Guiteau, the assassin of President Garfield. Reed persuaded Augusta to give her husband his walking papers in exchange for $50,000 (roughly $1.6 million today); however, he had to sue Sarah to collect his fee of $10,000.

John and Sarah appear to have been married in Woolwich, Kent, in 1884 and lived at the Star and Garter Hotel in Richmond-upon-Thames, losing an infant son, Leslie, to spinal meningitis while there. Two years later, they returned aboard the RMS Etruria, one of the premier Cunard liners of its day, arriving in New York on May 17, 1886. Accompanying them was Sarah’s maiden aunt, Annie Finch. A year later, on May 1, 1887, a son, Elliot Christopher Weber Johnson, was born in New York City.

On April 6, 1887, John G. Johnson, then of New York City, purchased the 160-acre farm of J. Grafton and Julia Briggs on the West Proctor Road in what was then Rutland for $10,000 – the money, as always, undoubtedly Sarah’s. This would be the nucleus of the Johnson family’s Proctor holdings, and the timing is significant in that it establishes 1887 as the earliest possible point at which the construction of the house could have begun. Why Proctor, when Sarah’s wealth might have allowed them a country estate virtually anywhere? John’s older brother, William Henry Johnson, was already there and in the marble business – a path that John appears to have followed. By the end of 1887, both men were directors of the Valido Marble Company, then the third-largest marble company in Vermont.

While much is made of “Wilson Castle” and its English origins, the architect was decidedly American and, by birth, a Vermonter. Born in Bellows Falls in 1839, William Pitt Wentworth was likely acquainted with the Johnson clan of Walpole, just across the Connecticut River, which would explain their choice of an architect whose practice was heavily oriented towards ecclesiastical and institutional buildings. The red brick is said to have been imported from England, but the floor of the large terrace overlooking the barn complex and Otter Creek is made of regionally quarried Vermont marble. The house boasts a total of 84 stained-glass windows, some reportedly purchased by Wentworth in Europe and others apparently commissioned by the Johnsons. The furnishings, while both eclectic and intriguing, appear to have been collected mainly by a later owner, Colonel Herbert Lee Wilson, and shed little actual light on the Johnson family.

Johnson clearly envisioned a landed estate of the sort he had seen in England, as the complex includes what appears to be a stable northeast of the house and a barn complex on the east side of West Creek Road. The construction process was the subject of considerable local interest and amusement – the estate was locally known as “Johnson’s Folly”. A contemporary (1887) account in the Burlington Free Press noted:

The farm was stocked with the best breeds, mainly of Holstein cattle and Percheron horses, imported by himself, and they were accompanied by foreign attendants who devoted their whole time to their care. The stock, farm, house, and outbuildings are estimated to have cost half a million dollars, and he is constantly making a large outlay for improvement of the grounds and surroundings.3

A letter written by Johnson’s granddaughter, Louise Chapman, in 1957 mentions imported deer, peacocks, and even an eagle.

The Johnsons are said to have lived in the house for only a short while. Given the time it must have taken to create the estate, it would have been a work in progress for much of their tenure. Evidence suggests that they were there for about 12 years in all. It’s not clear when Sarah brought her husband’s wild spending spree to a halt, but, on December 15, 1899, she, being then of Boston, appointed S. Webster Jones of Brandon her attorney with instructions to “take possession of all her real estate in Vermont and lease them for the best rent that can be procured.” Jones initially leased the entire property to the Vermont Marble Company on a short-term basis and, on June 18, 1900, sold it to Belle Brown Cummings of Philadelphia for stated consideration of $1.00. The furnishings and livestock are said to have been sold at auction, although I have found no record of this happening. At the time, John was living in New York, where he remained until at least 1904, when he filed for a military pension, which provides the only clue to his later whereabouts. He died on January 6, 1916, in Oakland, California, and is buried in that city’s Chapel of the Chimes Columbarium and Mausoleum. Sarah never divorced her husband and spent the remainder of her life primarily in the Boston area, dying in Wellesley, Massachusetts, in 1940. Both she and her son, Elliot, are buried in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York.

It is called a castle, but it never was. Wealth built it, and filled it with the finest that the Old and New Worlds had to offer, but even the Robins’ fortune couldn’t satisfy “Doctor” Johnson’s unbridled ambitions. Wilson Castle survives today, perched above the cornfields along Otter Creek. Battered but still elegant, “Johnson’s Folly” reminds us that wealth, however vast, cannot necessarily claim the life it imagines.

1. https://www.wilsoncastle.com/history
2. The Vermont Phoenix, December 3, 1869
3. Burlington Free Press, August 22, 1887