Brief by Central Staff
Real Estate – September 1998 – Colorado Central Magazine
Historic Chaffee trophy home can be yours for only $4 million
If you’ve got about $4 million to spend on a house, you can own a piece of Chaffee history, although it’s in Westchester County, New York, rather than Chaffee County, Colorado.
The July 23 edition of the Wall Street Journal reported that an 11-acre estate in North Salem, New York, with a 13,000-square-foot mansion, was for sale for $3,850,000.
It was once the property of Jerome Bunty Chaffee, namesake of Chaffee County. A native of New York, he prospered from his investments in Leadville mines, served as Colorado’s first territorial delegate to Congress, and became one of the first two U.S. senators after statehood in 1876.
In an 1881 society wedding, Chaffee’s daughter, Fannie, married Ulysses S. Grant, Jr., a son of Ulysses S. Grant, the Union’s leading Civil War general and U.S. president from 1869 to 1877.
Sen. Jerome Chaffee gave the estate to the couple for a wedding present in 1881. They had it renovated under the direction of architect Stanford White, and the second-floor hall boasts a stained-glass ceiling by Louis Tiffany.
Known as “The Grant Estate at Inland Vale,” it now has eight bedrooms and eight full baths, and the current owner is David Acorn, a New York consultant, who added a swimming pool and tennis court during his two years of ownership.
Not all the profit from Leadville silver went to the mansions of Capitol Hill in Denver — some of it went into trophy homes in the upscale zones near New York City.