Elkton Green’s West Wing features a faux-Romanesque capital set directly beside one that might be called “Adirondack Carnival Ecclesiastical Ecstatic.” Our “righthand person,” the inimitable Mary Ellen Broadfield, said, “This home is like some lady from a very good family who’s had entirely too much coffee and feels forced to try on every hat in a third-rate shop, all at once.” There are sane people who consider the house overornamented. But for us, the mansion’s gingerbread detailing represents Elegance pushed—testing—clear to the edge of Comedy. (Which is just where some of us most long to live!)

Elkton Green’s 14-foot ceilings boast heavy, indeed luscious moldings; there are faux-marbled baseboards and grained doors and a dining-room mural (oil on leather, 10 × 21 feet). Its subject seems to have been suggested by Judge J. V. Coker’s extensive collection of American Indian artifacts. Coker’s brilliant early acquisitions—however dubiously gained from those rough-hewn grave-robbing bounty hunters known even then as “New York art dealers”—formed the cornerstone gift to what is now the Smithsonian’s impressive horde.

The mural shows a band of fruit-carrying Indians, generically bare if genitally unspecified. They greet one paunchy Quaker-looking gent smiling from beneath a probably hurtful black tricorn hat. (There is an eerie similarity to Edward Hicks’s later Peaceable Kingdom series.) The fat white guy is said to resemble the great-great-grandfather of Elkton Green’s builder, one Judge Josiah Vestry Coker (1670–1749). He remained on fine terms with his Native American neighbors even through the Tuscarora War of 1711. He negotiated the release of certain English lady settlers taken as hostages. They were freed through his personal diplomacy and an anonymous donation of “many sovereigne of the King’s coinage, meetly dispatched by His Own horses.” The mural is of museum quality and unique in the state.

Some people have complained that I tell too much about the history of each house. That is not possible.

For the record, the man who built Elkton Green inherited a goodly fortune via this very Judge and arts collector. But plump Caleb Coker soon handsomely supplanted his patrimony through naval stores, pitch and rope and turpentine, sold along the state’s then-bustling steamship coast. Coker’s own King Cotton holdings—taken collectively—equaled half the land mass of Rhode Island. It was he, Caleb Hunstable Coker (1812–1891), who conceived of Elkton Green as the site for his beautiful daughter’s wedding. This, prior to his actually having a daughter. (Such is the energy and optimism of our America!) The mansion’s stained-glass skylight-lit staircase was designed to make stunning the choreography of one girl’s white-veiled descent.

Concord, Coker’s only child, was born just three years after the home’s completion. Her mother died in childbirth. Fortunate for herself and her father (and his architects!), Concord proved to be the beauty a 51-step staircase preordained.