Local historian and author, Cornelia Brooke Gilder, will tell us about the lively and glamorous Margaret Emerson Vanderbilt, who rented Ventfort Hall during the First World War. Her lecture will be followed by a Victorian tea. Using photos from private albums, Gilder will illuminate Margaret Vanderbilt’s long and multi-faceted life from a privileged society hostess to a capable Red Cross administrator. Mrs. Vanderbilt’s connection to Ventfort Hall was the result of her desire to establish a country home in Lenox for her two little boys after her husband, Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, perished tragically in the sinking of the ocean liner The Lusitania in May 1915. While living at Ventfort Hall she oversaw the construction of one of Lenox’s last big cottages Holmwood (now known as Foxhollow) on a spectacular site next to her husband’s cousins, the Fields, at High Lawn.