#high watch

anyways this view is amazing

https://thewatchhillconservancy.org/wp4/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/WatchHill_TT.pdf

“In the years before World War II, footmen had stood behind every chair at dinner parties at Holiday House. During Rebekah Harkness’s tenure there, the various chefs in the different apartments into which the house was divided were themselves catered to by a master chef”

One of the most notable cottages of Watch Hill, Holiday House, later called High Watch, was built in 1929‒30 for Mrs. George Grant

Snowden (Pearl Pinkerton McClelland Snowden) of Philadelphia, whose husband had died in 1918.  It stands as a landmark for sailors on the great bluff from which Watch Hill takes its name. 

Mrs.Snowden had acquired the historic and dramatic site from the estate of Eugene Atwood in 1929.The Snowdens, beginning with George Grant Snowden’s father,

James McKean Snowden, who was born in 1831 and lived in Pittsburgh, had made their fortune in oil and gas exploration. George Grant Snowden and his brother, James H. Snowden, explored for oil first in Pennsylvania and then in Texas and New Mexico. An unanticipated result of their explorations in New Mexico was the discovery of what at the time was the largest potash deposit in the world. The next generation, George Grant Snowden, Jr., and his brother, James M. Snowden, continued the family business from an office in New York. 

James M. Snowden, Jr., remembers skyrockets and roman candles being set off from the terrace over the ocean on the Fourth of July in the 1940s.  These fireworks were launched from glass milk bottles that were current then. He recalls that one guest, Joe Thomas, senior partner of Lehman Brothers, lit the skyrockets with a large cigar.

Mr. Snowden also remembers hearing from his father about an attempted kidnapping, some years earlier, involving a plane which kidnappers had landed on the golf course. Owing to confusion as to which was the house of their intended victim, the attempt failed.

Even though the Snowdens were not the target, for the next several weeks at Holiday House, a night watchman was stationed with a submachine gun at the end of the hallway where most of the bedrooms were.

In 1948, Holiday House became the property of William Hale Harkness. Harkness was heir to his family’s Standard Oil Company fortune, his great-uncle, Stephen Vanderburgh Harkness, and his grandfather, Daniel M. Harkness, having been initial investors with John D. Rockefeller. He himself had been an initial investor, in 1922, in a fledgling publishing venture launched by two Yale friends, Briton Hadden and Henry R. Luce. That venture was Time, The Weekly News magazine. 

Harkness came to Watch Hill through his second wife, Rebekah West Pierce Harkness, whom he had married the year before.  Rebekah Harkness, known as “Betty,” was from St. Louis and had summered all her life at Watch Hill, where her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Allen T. West, owned Stoneleigh on Wapan Road.

William Harkness brought with him his eighty-foot yacht, Ardea, which was the committee boat of the annual Yale-Harvard Crew Race at New London, the oldest intercollegiate sporting event in the country. The finish judges’ boat at those races was another famous boat, also associated with Watch Hill, Aphrodite, formerly John Hay Whitney’s cruiser, which in the 1990s was acquired by Watch Hill summer resident Charles M. Royce and was regularly docked at the Plimpton Dock.

Biographer Craig Unger describes Holiday House as “the single most imposing structure in Watch Hill”:

Situated on the bluff after which the town was named, the white clapboard house dominates the area. It is so large and rambling — with more than forty rooms, four chimneys, and half a dozen terraced sundecks — that it is hard to believe it is a single-family summer dwelling. Near the top deck is a room with windows on three sides from which one can see for miles up and down the Rhode Island coast.

After Mr. Harkness died suddenly in 1954, Mrs. Harkness, an amateur musician who had studied under Nadia Boulanger, the celebrated French teacher of composition, and at the Mannes College of Music and had written a number of popular songs, entered upon a career in dance. Reportedly at the suggestion of Yehudi Menuhin, she also took up yoga to improve her musical technique, importing a yoga teacher, B. K. S. Iyengar, to Holiday House in the summer of 1956 to teach her and her three children, Allen and Terry Pierce, and Edith Harkness, ages, 16, 12, and 7.  Neighbors’ children were invited to join in the lessons. 

Mrs. Harkness announced her intention to go to India the following year, for advanced lessons with Yogi Iyengar. In the early 1960s, Mrs. Harkness became a patron of the Joffrey Ballet, bringing the entire company to Watch Hill for two summers,1962–63. 

They practiced at the old Fire House, which she had purchased and converted into the Holiday Art Center, and on the terrace of Holiday House. In 1964, she founded her own company, the Harkness Ballet, principally with dancers from the Joffrey. She invited the new company to Watch Hill for the summer of 1965. The new company also accompanied her to Washington in September of that year, when they performed for President and Mrs. Johnson at the White House on a new portable East Room stage which she presented to the house on that occasion. 

In 1966, she had an outdoor practice floor, covered by a blue plastic Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome, constructed on the lawn to the east of the house. The dome outraged neighbors, who sued on the basis of zoning violations. They prevailed, and the dome was dismantled. 

Not long thereafter, Mrs. Harkness left Watch Hill, establishing herself at a new country location nearer to New York, Sneden’s Landing on the Hudson, a half-hour north of the city. She put Holiday House on the market. A local partnership, the Watch Hill Associates, was formed to protect the property, and Mrs. Harkness conveyed it to them in 1973. 

Fearing that no single purchaser would be found to acquire the entire property, the partnership subdivided it into three lots, the center one, Lot 2, containing the house. The deed to Lot 2 required the buyer to reduce the size of the house at each end and to establish appropriate sideline distances for any structures that might be built on Lots 1 and 3. 

The Westerly Sun ran a photograph of the house with the caption, “Probably to be Demolished.”

 All three lots were sold in 1974, the Gurdon B. Wattles family being the purchasers of Lot 2. 

They renamed the cottage High Watch and over the next four years acquired the other two lots.  They reduced the cottage in size, and no further structures were built on the Watch Hill.

1 Thessalonians 5:4 But you, brethren, are not in darkness, that the day would overtake you like a thief;

1 Thessalonians 5:5 for you are all sons of light and sons of day. We are not of night nor of darkness;

1 Thessalonians 5:6 so then let us not sleep as others do, but let us be alert and sober.

1 Thessalonians 5:7 For those who sleep do their sleeping at night, and those who get drunk get drunk at night.

1 Thessalonians 5:8 But since we are of the day, let us be sober, having put on the breastplate of faith and love, and as a helmet, the hope of salvation.

1 Thessalonians 5:9 For God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ,

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