The following is an online extra from our May 2024 issue.
Image via Wikimedia Commons
Chesterfield County is named for Philip Stanhope, the fourth Earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773), a Whig politician, diplomat, orator and composer of aphorisms and advice. He made such statements as, “Absolute power can only be supported by error, ignorance and prejudice.”
Stanhope is known for “Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman,” which he never intended to go public. It was the correspondence of 30 years — more than 400 letters — with his namesake son born out of wedlock. The earl sought to encourage and instruct the younger Stanhope to mediate his socially awkward status and improve his character. (Courtly London looked down on him for what they viewed as his questionable parentage.)
The younger Philip and Eugenia Peters lived as husband and wife beginning around 1767, already the parents of two sons together. Philip exerted great effort in keeping the relationship secret from his father, which entailed separate living arrangements. He obtained various diplomatic posts, but the government paid him to leave his seat in Parliament.
His death in 1768 at age 36 left Eugenia a single mother, although the earl took on educational duties for grandsons Charles and Philip. He doted on them. At his 1773 death, he provided financial support for the boys, but nothing for Eugenia.
Although the family objected, she undertook the collection and publication of Earl Chesterfield’s musings. The “Letters” became a bestseller, due in large part to the associated scandal. The volumes remained in print for a century. Eugenia also wrote “The Deportment of a Married Life: Laid Down in a Series of Letters.”
Despite all the advice and financial support, the lives of the sons and their descendants did not go well. They are the subject of Cheryl Nicol’s 2019 history, “The Stanhope Legacy: The Story of Lord Chesterfield’s Grandsons and the Miserable Fate of Their Heirs.”
Meanwhile, the earl’s London estate and that of a Richmond merchant prince in Chesterfield County shared similar aesthetics and ultimate fates.
Chesterfield House, built between 1747 and 1752 in Mayfair, London, was decorated in a variety of styles. “This willingness to draw on different fashions and meld them into a satisfactory whole is what made Chesterfield House so distinctive among the great private palaces of London,” reflected Robert O’Byrne in the April 2022 issue of Apollo magazine. “Unfortunately, that was not enough to save the building.” Chesterfield House was demolished in 1935 to make way for modern apartments.
In Richmond, the Chesterfield Apartments opened in 1902 at Franklin and Shafer streets, built and named by J. Scott Parrish and his business partner, William Todd. Parrish’s vast farm estate, Miniborya (1899), supplied the dairy products and fresh flowers for the apartment building’s tearoom, basement “rathskellar” and lobbies. Located on the west side of Falling Creek, adjacent to the present Meadowbrook Golf Course in Chesterfield County, Miniborya featured Queen Anne, Colonial Revival and Shingle design styles. Landscape architect Charles Gillette created the gardens.
The estate left family hands in the 1960s and, like Chesterfield House, fell to suburban expansion with the development of the 42-acre, 500-unit Meadowbrook Apartments.
