Newport, Rhode Island, began as a modest coastal town of whalers, fishermen, and merchants. By the early 1800s, it had faded into a quiet backwater, its golden era as a port city long gone. Then, in the 1830s and 1840s, wealthy southern planters and northern industrialists began arriving by steamboat, drawn by the cool Atlantic breezes and dramatic cliffs. They built summer cottages, and with them, a transformation began.

The first true palace came in 1852, when William Shepard Wetmore, a merchant who made his fortune in the China trade, commissioned Château-sur-Mer on Bellevue Avenue. Its imposing Italianate style, with a central tower and brownstone trim, announced that Newport could be more than a fishing village. It could be a stage. Wetmore’s mansion hosted the first great society balls in Newport, long before the Vanderbilts arrived.

George Peabody Wetmore, his son and later a U. S. senator, had architect Richard Morris Hunt remodel the interiors in the 1870s, adding the heavy ornamentation that reflected the era’s shifting tastes. Château-sur-Mer opened the door.

Without it, the Vanderbilts might never have chosen Bellevue Avenue for their own palaces. By the 1880s and 1890s, the industrial revolution was minting millionaires at an unprecedented pace, and Newport became their summer capital. The word cottage took on an ironic meaning. Families who stayed only six weeks a year built mansions of forty, fifty, even seventy rooms, dripping with marble and imported European art.

The Breakers, completed in 1893 for Cornelius Vanderbilt II, became the largest and most iconic of them all. Designed by Richard Morris Hunt and inspired by the Italian Renaissance palaces of Genoa, it rose three stories above the Atlantic with seventy rooms and a price tag of seven million dollars, more than two hundred million today. Its great hall soared nearly fifty feet, its dining room glittered with Baccarat crystal, and its terraces overlooked the crashing waves. For ordinary Americans, it was both awe-inspiring and offensive, a palace on the cliffs at a time when many struggled to feed their families.

Marble House, completed in 1892 for Alva Vanderbilt, was a different kind of statement. Hunt modeled it on the Petit Trianon at Versailles, and it shimmered with over five hundred thousand cubic feet of marble. Alva, fiercely ambitious and determined to force the old-guard Astors to acknowledge her family, used it as a weapon in the social wars of Newport. But her story did not end with social conquest.

After her divorce from William K. Vanderbilt, she became a prominent supporter of women’s suffrage. Marble House, once a stage for her personal ambition, became a platform for political activism. She hosted suffrage rallies on its lawn, and later served as the first president of the National Woman’s Party, helping finance efforts that led to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.

Beachwood, the Italian villa where Caroline Astor reigned, was the true social theater of the age. Built in 1851 and remodeled by Hunt in 1881, it was relatively modest compared to the Vanderbilt estates, but its ballroom was where the four hundred, the roughly four hundred individuals deemed acceptable for her guest lists, had their status tested. To be invited was to be stamped with approval. Conversations were performances, and reputations were made or destroyed under Mrs.

Astor’s gaze. When Alva Vanderbilt hosted her infamous costume ball at Marble House in 1883, Beachwood’s exclusivity began to be challenged. But it remained the emblem of social tradition until the early twentieth century, when the influence of the Astors waned. Rosecliffe, completed in 1902 for Theresa Fair Oelrichs, daughter of a Nevada silver baron, was built not to intimidate but to enchant.

Designed by Stanford White and modeled on the Grand Trianon at Versailles, it was smaller than the Breakers, just thirty rooms, but its ballroom was one of the largest in Newport, capable of hosting a thousand guests. Oelrichs became one of Newport’s most famous hostesses, and her parties attracted European aristocrats and artists. In the twentieth century, Hollywood discovered Rosecliffe. Its ballroom and gardens appeared in films such as the 1974 version of The Great Gatsby, True Lies, and 27 Dresses, cementing its identity as a house of dreams.

Not every mansion survived intact. The Bells, built for Theodore M. Davis, a copper magnate and amateur Egyptologist, once held art collected from his travels in the Valley of the Kings. After Davis’s death in 1915, the estate fell into disuse.

During World War II, the Navy commandeered it, and in the postwar years, fire ravaged the property. Unlike the Breakers or Marble House, it never recovered. Its charred walls remain by the sea, now covered with street art and graffiti. It stands as a reminder of the impermanence of fortune.

Others found unexpected second lives. Ochre Court, completed in 1892 for Ogden Goelet, was a French Renaissance chateau of fifty rooms. By 1947, the Goelet family donated it to a newly established Catholic college, Salve Regina. Students now attend classes in rooms once filled with chandeliers and frescoes.

Seaview Terrace, built in Washington, D. C. , by whiskey magnate Edson Bradley, was dismantled stone by stone by his widow and rebuilt in Newport between 1923 and 1925. In the 1960s, it became the fictional Collinwood mansion in the Gothic soap opera Dark Shadows, cementing its reputation as a haunted icon.

Today it still stands, half-forgotten, its grandeur softened by ivy and salt air. The Preservation Society of Newport County, founded in 1945, became the force that saved the mansions from oblivion. The Elms, completed in 1901 for coal magnate Edward Julius Berwind and modeled after a chateau outside Paris, was threatened with demolition after the last Berwind heir died in 1961. The society purchased it for just $116,000 and opened it to the public.

Marble House followed in 1963, and the Breakers soon after, its seventy rooms becoming the society’s most profitable property. Doris Duke, through her Newport Restoration Foundation, purchased and restored dozens of smaller historic houses across the city, ensuring that Newport’s charm extended beyond the grand palaces. The battles were never easy. Roofs leaked, boilers failed, and every restoration uncovered another crisis.

But the gamble paid off. Today, more than a million people visit Newport’s historic houses each year. The Breakers is the most visited historic house in New England. Marble House hosts exhibits about Alva Vanderbilt’s role in the suffrage movement.

Ochre Court serves as the administrative heart of Salve Regina University. Rough Point, preserved as Doris Duke left it when she died in 1993, offers a more intimate glimpse into the life of one of the twentieth century’s most elusive heiresses, a woman whose legacy is entangled with scandal, including the 1966 death of her designer Eduardo Tirella at the estate’s gates. What was once the exclusive domain of a few hundred families is now accessible to millions.

The mansions of Newport, built as private symbols of status, have become public symbols of history, teaching visitors about both the beauty and the contradictions of America’s Gilded Age.