Introduction

Whatever the perspectives, values, and historical understanding a guest might bring to Chinqua-Penn Plantation, a visit to Jeff and Betsy Penn's North Carolina home is guaranteed to raise more questions than it can immediately answer. Exploring these luxuriously appointed rooms, perusing through exquisitely crafted things of beauty brought from every part of the globe, and strolling through carefully tended gardens nestled comfortably within a thousand-acre working plantation, today's visitor steps into a world and a way of life that challenges our assumptions even as they seize our imaginations and delight our sensibilities.

What were Betsy and Jeff Penn really like? What motivated them to assemble these odd and fascinating elements into the precious little world they created for themselves on these grounds? What enabled them to fashion, preserve, and share with others (including ourselves) this idyllic--if idiosyncratic--private Eden? Why did they choose this particular combination of qualities, dimensions and sensibilities to express their vision of hearth and home? What can this house, its contents, and its setting tell us about life at Chinqua-Penn in its heyday in the 1920's and 1930's. How did life here relate to political, intellectual, economic, and social developments that were reshaping the world beyond Chinqua-Penn?

The Penns are no longer here to answer these questions. Even if they were, they might not be inclined--or able--to answer them to our satisfaction. So, we must look to Chinqua-Penn itself for the clues that can help us to understand the very personal and individual values and assumptions, the visions and dreams, upon which the Penns built their extraordinary private world. Fortunately, Jeff and Betsy left behind a wealth of evidence that can help to understand them in their full human complexity.

Clues may be found everywhere--in clothes closets, on library shelves, in diaries, letters, and ledger books. Because Jeff was fascinated with the new medium of moving pictures, he insisted upon having a movie photographer present to record events. Surviving film footage provides brief glimpses into life at Chinqua-Penn, as well as scenes from many of the Penn's travels. Historians and anthropologists routinely look to various documents and artifacts of material culture to reconstruct and understand forgotten pieces of the past; observant visitors to Chinqua-Penn are encouraged to do the same.

Peeking into a dressing room closet, one finds enough exotic robes and slippers to costume the entire company of the Metropolitan Opera. Silks and satins, laces and brocades, textiles of every color, texture and cut afford a comprehensive survey of dressing gown styles from around the world. Lined up neatly on the floor below, matching slippers feature pointed toes, curled-up toes, cutoff toes and bejeweled toes, as well as high heels, and no heels at all. Sized to fit Jeff and Betsy Penn and bearing signs of wear by their owners, these personal effects help to underscore the theatrical quality that lent color and drama to everyday life at Chinqua-Penn. One evening the couple might have been perfectly outfitted for a Venetian palace, the next night suitably attired for a Mexican hacienda.

Betsy Penn's extensive collection of playbills from the New York stage offers further evidence of her romantic spirit and taste for theatricality. Dating back to her girlhood, these carefully preserved programmes--and handwritten notes recording her reactions to the plays she saw--can help us to better appreciate her long-standing interest in exploring art through life and life through art.

In the library, the Penns' books offer additional clues to the kind of romantic vision that might easily blur distinctions between art and life. From The Life and exploits of Don Quixote to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, from The Declaration of Giovanni Broccaccio to The Book of the Thousand and One Nights, literary masterpieces of adventure and travel in exotic lands helped to whet the couple's desire to explore the furthest corners of the globe at a time when travel was neither easy nor comfortable.

Jeff's own travel accounts-typescript volumes bound in leather placed among the books in the library- vividly attest to his romantic imagination and eye for the human drama on an epic scale. Sipping coffee at a sidewalk cafe in the 1930's, he contemplated the historical and cultural treasures of Spain's Alcazar while recording with equal interest and enthusiasm the color and pageantry that unfolded before him each day on the streets of Seville. "The Alcazar," he wrote, was "built with chicanery and caution, saturated with romance and rivalry, and hung with hallucinating history....[Today it] proclaims a Palace of Permanency-protecting precious possessions, precious persons, and precious passions." His musing about "the Adam [who created] the Gardens of Alcazar" might be echoed by our own reflections upon Jeff, who designed and planted Chinqua-Penn's lovely gardens. Putting his thoughts to paper with a view to their permanency, was he not, perhaps, imagining parallels between Spain's centuries-old historical site and the one he was building for himself and Betsy back in North Carolina?

At the Taj Mahal, Jeff found another subconscious model. There, he pondered "this great inspiring love [that] lingers lastingly through all Eternity," the inspiration for "this exquisite veil of death....this spotless white marble mausoleum...that would defy death in its noble strength, and yet carry such pleasing proportions, such soothing symmetry, such gossamer, queenly femininity, as to be the eternal fit resting place for this soul-mate, in the Garden of Love!" Such powerful emotions undoubtedly played a role in shaping Jeff's plans for his own final resting place. When one considers that Jeff wanted his ashes scattered from an airplane over Chinqua-Penn and his heart buried beneath a favorite stand of pines not far from the house, one begins to comprehend the grand theatrical scale on which the Penns sought to experience both life and death.

Chinqua-Penn's heyday coincided with the turbulent years leading up to World War II. A shrewd international businessman and astute citizen of the world, Jeff had a very hardheaded, conservative, practical side as well. In his travel accounts, he recognized that history was being shaped even as he and Betsy sought adventure and trophies in the very lands that were shifting the balance of world power and changing the course of twentieth century history. A trip to Japan in 1929 led him to assert that "The Japanese ardently admire and intensely imitate the Germans in their architecture and military training. They do," he wrote, "adore brass buttons and the strut of the soldier." Oblivious to the stereotypes that constrained his own thinking, he nonetheless expressed genuine worriment over larger issues of interracial harmony and world peace. "Can the yellow and black and white man," he asked, "live in harmony and fairness on the face of the earth?"

From "a so-called station" on the muchly misnamed 'Trans-Siberian-Express-Train No.1'" in the spring of 1929, Jeff found Soviet Siberia to be "limp, laggardly, listlessly looking for something....saturated with excuses for the present and pretending to live on the vain promises of some mighty mythical millennium of the far distant future." He blamed Siberia's "millions of miles of misery" on "these meddling men from Moscow," predicting that Russia's leaders would "breed riots and shed blood" in "any and all parts of the world that will allow them in." Presciently, he concluded that "Russia has a long, long ways yet to go before realizing the wonderful dream of the millennium on this earth."

Both on the surface and beneath it, Chinqua-Penn demonstrates the Jeff and Betsy Penn were no ordinary people and the home they built here was no ordinary family home. The closer we look, the more we realize that Chinqua-Penn--and the amazing couple whose visions and realities of their time by personal fortunes of a magnitude that enabled them to survive worldwide depression virtually unscathed, the Penns lived a charmed life. Their circumstances and outlook contrasted sharply with those of their neighbors, especially the black and white families that faced the full force of the realities of the hardship of their times. All of this is part of Chinqua-Penn's story--a story that has yet to be fully recounted. The more we seek to discover and understand that fascinating tale, the more we realize how complex the Penns and their world really were.

Once Betsy and Jeff Penn's private home, Chinqua-Penn today opens its doors to all who would appreciate its beauty and learn from its past. The more questions one asks, the more satisfying and rewarding one's visit will be.