Talk:The Pine Barrens

Clarifications regarding the de Ruspoli estate

According to Prince Ruspoli's Cottage - Woodland Township Historical Society

Years ago an Italian prince, Prince Mario Ruspoli, and his family came to stay at the White Horse Inn on occasion. Later the prince and his wife moved to Chatsworth and built a villa on the lake. Here he invited many wealthy friends from all over the world to attend parties. Chatsworth began to boom, and the Chatsworth Country Club was established and became very popular.

Prince Costantino (not "Constantino") was the son of Mario Ruspoli, 2nd Prince of Poggio Suasa, mentioned above, and grew up staying at the cottage. Prince Mario was married to Pauline Marie Palma de Talleyrand-Perigord in 1891, daughter of the fourth Duchi de Dino and Elizabeth Beers-Curtis, and granddaughter of New York realty tycoon, Joseph D. Beers who had amassed 25,000 acres in the Pinelands.

The above document continues:

American heiress Pauline was left seven thousand acres in the Pinelands and so loved the area that she and her husband built a villa on this site. Prince Ruspoli was responsible for the brief development of Chatsworth as a resort known as the Chatsworth Club in the twentieth century.

The first son of Mario and Pauline, Constantino de Ruspoli, was born in New York in 1891 yet lived at the villa at a young age. When Prince Constantino returned for a visit to Chatsworth in 1927, the villa had been vandalized by hunters and peat moss gatherers, its silk wall hangings ruined. The villa was later destroyed by fire. An aged Prince Mario disposed of his Chatsworth land holdings in 1940, shortly after World War II had begun in Europe. His son, Prince Constantino, was killed in the war in 1942.

Compounding the confusion of which Ruspoli was which, Prince Mario's wife Pauline's mother, Elizabeth Beers-Curtis, was the sister of his father Emanuele Ruspoli, 1st Prince of Poggio Suasa's third wife, Josephine Mary Beers-Curtis, whom he had married in 1885. She became the Dowager Princess Poggio-Susan Ruspoli after Prince Emanuele's passing in 1899. Both sisters had inherited land in the Pine Barren.

The land which Prince Mario had expanded into the ultra-exclusive "Chatsworth Club" had long been out of the de Ruspoli family hands when Costantino visited the vandalized "villa" ruin in 1927, having been sold at auction in 1908. It's unclear what "land holdings" had remained with Prince Mario until 1940, and whether they had included the former family villa in 1927:

The magnificent estate went to foreclosure proceedings February 5, 1908 in Mt. Holly, New Jersey and sold to a syndicate composed of Jonathan Godfrey, Leavitt J. Hunt and Thomas C. Rumbault for $20,000. At the time it was one of the largest tracts of land offered for public auction in Burlington County. The new owners stated that the tract would be developed along different lines and not continue as a resort. Mr. Godfrey had considerable interest in lands in Woodland Township and it was predicted that at least part of this purchase would be developed into cranberry land. The former club was later destroyed by fire.

Wikiuser100 (talk) 16:15, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

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