In celebration of its 200th birthday, Linden Place Mansion, an 1810 Federal-style mansion located in downtown Bristol at 500 Hope Street, will offer free tours during the museum’s opening day on May 1st, from 10a.m. until 3 p.m.   In an effort to make the DeWolf-Colt Mansion more accessible to the greater Rhode Island community who voted for the 1986 bond in support of preserving the estate, Linden Place will offer free admission to the 1810 Federal-style mansion. 

Visitors to Linden Place will enjoy a special appearance by the mansion’s resident “History Kids,” a group of students who perform re-enactments in period costume. “History Kids” will be seen about the property and parlor rooms playing board games from centuries past.  

Linden Place Mansion, built in 1810 by the seafaring General George DeWolf,  magnificently reflects the prosperity of the DeWolf merchant princes and the exquisite Adamesque Federal taste inspired by the architecture of ancient Greece and Rome. Visitors will see one of the best examples of Federal architecture in New England, from the magnificent Palladian windows to the fluted Corinthian columns, which gracefully flank the front entrance to the mansion. Also of architectural significance are the later added gothic conservatory and four-story spiral staircase.   

Tour highlights include tales of DeWolf family exploits, from their privateering and slave trading to their financial ruin and triumphant return to prosperity during Victorian times.  Docents introduce visitors to family members Pomeroy Colt, founder of United States Rubber, now Uniroyal, his mother Theodora DeWolf Colt, who as Madam Colt ran Bristol Society from Linden Place as if she were Queen Victoria and the great actress Ethel Barrymore who married in to this most prominent of American families.  At the tour’s end, visitors are welcome to stroll the sculpture-filled gardens where they will find Greek bronzes and an 18th Century gazebo.