The Glebe House, built about 1740, is celebrating its 96th year in operation in 2021 as an historic house museum and garden. It was the home of Rev. John Rutgers Marshall, his wife Sarah, nine children and three slaves from 1771 to 1786 and is furnished with period furniture including a wonderful collection of furniture made in Woodbury during the 18th century. By the 1920s the house had passed through several owners and fallen into great disrepair. The Glebe House was restored in 1923 under the direction of Henry Watson Kent, a pioneer of early American decorative arts and founder of the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. One of the early historic house museums in the country, The Glebe House opened its doors to the public in 1925.

In 1926, the famed English horticultural designer and writer Gertrude Jekyll was commissioned by board member Annie Burr Jennings (Colonial Dame, heiress to the Standard Oil fortune, living in Fairfield, Connecticut, Connecticut Trustee at Mount Vernon) to create an “old fashioned” garden to enhance the newly created museum. Although a small garden, when compared with the some 400 more elaborate designs she completed in England and on the continent, the Gertrude Jekyll Garden includes a classic English style mixed border and foundation plantings, and a planted stone terrace. For reasons unknown today, the garden Miss Jekyll planned was never fully installed in the 1920s and its very existence was forgotten. After the rediscovery of the plans in the late 1970s the project began in earnest in the late 1980s and is now being completed according to the original plans.

This online lecture sponsored by Morven Museum & Garden and underwritten by KellerWilliams Realty, takes place online on March 16 at 6:30, and the speaker is LoriAnn Witte, Director of Glebe House. $18 Friends of Morven, $25 general public. Register HERE