Susan's Blogue

The Lions of Landfall

by Susan Taylor Block

It’s no wonder “lions” once lounged at Landfall, an expansive community near Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina. Owner Pembroke Jones’s voice was described as a roar when riding in his carriage down Jones Road, after the grand parties.For most of its 20th-century life, Landfall was known as Pembroke Park, a 2,000-acre hunting preserve that was owned by Pembroke Jones. Henry Walters was Jones’s best friend and he took artistic charge of Pembroke Park before Jones could do so much as order up the kit house he threatened to build there as his lodge.

Lions represent royalty and have been depicted in almost every facet of art. Henry Walters acquired many distinctive “lions” while amassing his enormous, diverse personal collection that he bequeathed to the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore. William Walters, Henry’s father, acquired a lion statue by French sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye, and placed it near the Walters’ Mount Vernon Avenue estate in Baltimore.

Walters hired John Stewart Barney to design an exquisite Italianate villa on the property that bordered Wrightsville Sound. Barney was a New York architect, novelist, and author who kept company with Mr. and Mrs. Jones, and Walters in New York City and Newport. Versatile and studious, his design portfolio ranged from big city churches and libraries, to the development plan for the restoration of Williamsburg.

The Joneses called their 39-room home at Airlie Gardens, near Pembroke Park, “the Shack”; their mansion in Newport, “the Cottage”; and the new hunting lodge, “the Bungalow.” When the Bungalow was complete, about 1905, Walters filled it with furnishings from Palazzo Accoramboni, a palace in Rome, and invited many of his friends from Europe to visit the new spread. Lions were incorporated into Bungalow’s original design.

In 1912, Pembroke and Sarah Jones’s daughter, Sadie, born in an upstairs room at Wilmington’s Governor Dudley Mansion, married architect John Russell Pope at Mount Lebanon Chapel, in Airlie. Pope, who designed the Temple of Love at Pembroke Park, also designed the classical Lion’s Gate that divided the two Jones properties, Airlie and Pembroke Park, on the southern and northern ends of Jones Road. Most of the Lion’s Gate structure still exists, and it sits at the rear of the Lion’s Gate condominium community, off Eastwood Road.

Sadly, two large elegant marble lions that once stood at the gate were destroyed. The lions were imported from Italy and each weighed two tons. The lions crouched atop the gates, with their claws on a large serpent. Sometime after 1940, thieves misjudged the weight of the animals and the lions slipped while being hoisted. They fell onto the road and shattered into many pieces.

(See        http://susantaylorblock.com/2010/04/01/airlie-gardens-the-annex-landfall/     )

Two mere 400-pound freestanding lions from the Bungalow disappeared from the lodge, sometime in the 1940s. School students placed them on the lawn of a Board of Education employee as a Halloween trick. Later, they were moved to City Hall, where they sat until someone complained they were not of proportionate height for the building. Their next home was the Kiddie Zoo, across South Third Street from the Greenfield Lake overflow. Eventually, vandals hit again, pulverizing one of the concrete animals. It is not known what happened to the other.

 

   ******************************************************************************************************************************************* “The outside of the building (Bungalow) is what fascinated me – the lions and the gold fish that were big as flounders.” – Longtime Wrightsville     Sound resident Lossie Gardell, in an interview conducted in 2000. 

READING LIST:

William and Henry Walters, The Reticent Collectors, by William R. Johnston.

Land of the Golden River: Old Times on the Seacoast, by Lewis Philip Hall.

Airlie: The Garden of Wilmington, available at the Airlie Gift Shop.  (All proceeds go the Airlie Foundation)