Troy’s Favorite “Castle” – The John Paine Mansion

Join me for a look at the history and architecture of Troy's John Paine Mansion. If you love old houses, amazing craftsmanship and period detail, this story is for you.

(John Paine Mansion. Photo: Kenneth Zirkel for Wikipedia)

Today, when visitors enter the large house at 49 Second Street in Troy, their first words are probably “Woah,” and “Wow!” The house is simply breathtaking. That same reaction was probably had by the homeowner’s first guests, fellow wealthy Trojans who attended the first social events at the mansion in the mid-1890s. Even for Troy’s most successful citizens, no strangers to wealth or opulence themselves, this was truly beyond what anyone else in the city was used to.

At the turn of the 20th century, Troy was at the apex of its rise as one of the wealthiest cities in America. Built upon the work of thousands of factory and forge workers who populated Troy’s neighborhoods, the fortunes accumulated by the industrialists, factory owners, railroad and canal men and their legal and financial experts were only exceeded by much larger cities such as New York, Chicago and Philadelphia.

(2nd Street, Troy, early 20th century. Paine house is in the background.)

Troy’s elite supported the building and operations of many of the city’s finest houses of worship, charitable institutions, parks, concert halls, libraries and other civic and cultural institutions. But when it came to their own places of residence, most of these families were understated. Their homes were certainly fine and well-appointed on the inside, but sedate and quietly elegant from the street. Flashy public displays of great wealth were not their style. At least not until John Paine broke the unwritten rule.

John Welles Paine was from an old Troy family. In 1800, his grandfather established the first Paine home on what is now 2nd Street. Like many settlers in the area, the Paine’s were from New England. His father John was born in Vermont in 1793. His mother, Eliza Ann Warren, was born in 1801, a member of the Warren family, who were themselves very successful in Troy. John was born in Troy in October of 1832. He was educated at Harvard and became a skilled lawyer and financier. He inherited a large fortune through his family’s ownership of the Troy Malleable Iron Works, and grew that money into even more, thanks to his skills and success in finance and real estate.

(Benjamin Ogle Tayloe. Library of Congress)

Paine married Julia Dickinson Tayloe of Washington, DC. Her father, Benjamin Ogle Tayloe was very prominent in northern Virginia and in Washington, and a worthy topic of future study. Tayloe was from a long line of titled and prominent folk. He owned a great deal of property in the city of Washington, and was a slaveholder. He owned several large plantations in Virginia and Alabama, with thousands of acres and almost 500 enslaved men, women and children toiling to give him his fortune. He was known to move them between his Virgina and Alabama plantations as needed.

Tayloe was best known as a bon vivant and influential political activist, and was a member of the Whig party. In 1824 he married Julia Maria Dickinson of Troy. Here is where the Troy connection on Paine’s wife’s side of the family started. Julia had six children, with Julia Dickinson Tayloe being the youngest, born in 1838. As an unofficial diplomat in the young nation, Tayloe was so well placed that the family eventually moved into a new house built just across the street from the White House.

Wife Julia died in 1846, and three years later, Tayloe married Phoebe Warren, one of his wife’s friends. She was another Warren family member from Troy and was said to be a great beauty. At the start of the Civil War, Tayloe was said to be the richest man in America, but he lost his Virginia and Alabama plantations and much of his fortune over the course of the war. He sailed with his wife and son to Europe in 1866, and never looked back. He died in Rome in 1868.

John Paine and his wife Julia were well set up with fortunes on both sides of the family. In 1868 Paine is on record as the new owner of the Sally Gale house on the corner of State and 1st Street, known as one of the oldest houses in Troy. The papers announced that year that he planned to tear that house down and build a “first class private residence” in its place. The family, John, Julia and their three children are mentioned at this address for several years, but by the 1880 census, were living at a home at the 49 2nd St. address.

Sadly, Julia Paine was not with them that year. She died of complications from childbirth in 1872. Paine never remarried, and later commissioned a beautiful life-sized bronze statue called “Affection,” to be placed in the family plot at Oakwood Cemetery. It is said to be a very accurate depiction of Julia.

Paine bought and sold multiple properties in Troy. But he did not limit his real estate dealings to that city. From newspaper accounts, he split his time primarily between Troy and Washington DC, where he was highly active in that city’s development. There he is on record for building houses, flats buildings and apartment buildings. He spent much more time in Washington, especially as his children became adults, so much so that when the statue of Julia was unveiled in Troy in 1892, he was called a “former resident” by the papers.

As a developer, he became familiar with one of Washington’s up and coming architects, a man named Thomas Franklin Schneider, a DC native.  Schneider was the son of German immigrants who came Washington in 1830. Both parents were printers. Like many fine architects of his day, Schneider never had formal architectural training. He learned by doing and worked for the Washington-based firm of Adolf Cluss and Paul Schulze. Both men were also German immigrants and are both considered to be two of the city’s finest architects of their day, designing buildings still treasured as landmarks. Schneider was part of the team of architects with the firm to build the Arts and Industries Building, the second oldest of the Smithsonian museums, which opened in 1881. Today it is a National Historic Landmark.

(Thomas Schneider mansion in Washington DC. Look familiar? Photo: Library of Congress)

Schneider was confident in his own abilities and talent. He left Cluss & Schulze to open his own firm at the age of 24, and by the age of 30 had designed two of his most prominent DC buildings, the Cairo Apartments and the Forest Inn. Paine may well have hired this young architect to design some of his Washington real estate, and he must have seen Schneider’s design for his own home, a mansion in the swanky Dupont Circle neighborhood built in 1891. The house is clad in rough-cut limestone, designed in a very distinctive Romanesque Revival style, and is complete with an observation tower and balcony, lots of arched entryways, windows and loggias, and carved limestone details.

Paine must have loved it and said, “I want one of those in Troy.” He returned home and announced that he would be building an impressive new mansion on the site of his ancestral home at 49 2nd Street, commissioning a mansion that we can clearly see today is very much a smaller version of Schneider’s own home.

It may have been smaller, but it was going to be the most in-your-face expression of wealth conservative Troy had ever seen.

(A winking Green Man greets guests from a capital at the front entrance. Photo: Suzanne Spellen)

The client and his architect were well suited to each other. A few photographs remain of the interior of Schneider’s mansion, which was ignobly torn down in 1958 for a parking lot. Paine knew what he wanted, however. He was well-traveled and had been a guest or tourist in the finest homes in both the United States and Europe, and had been taking notes.

Thomas Schneider had an architect’s dream client, Paine was a wealthy man with no budget constraints. He wanted an exterior design that the architect had already built. Schneider knew what materials were needed, he had already engineered the arches, the columns, rooflines and more on his own home. Both men were then able to spend much more time on the interior details.

The façade is first quality rough cut Indiana limestone, ornamented with carved flora and fauna. Leaves, blossoms and vines are intertwined with Green Men, grotesques and mythical animals. Bands of carved stone and decorative brackets outline the various decorative elements of the façade, the capitals atop columns, and anywhere else they can be applied. Topping off the structure is a copper roof on the house itself, along with a Mediterranean tiled roof on the top floor tower and balcony. The overly tall decorative side chimney, usually seen in European manor houses, completes the picture.

(Period photo of the front hall. Photo: Hart Cluett Museum)

Inside, Paine was very influential in choosing what he wanted in the rooms. They are all very eclectic, a mixture of styles and periods. The front entryway and hall are pure late Victorian, with massive carved wooden columns and ornately carved mahogany casework with a magnificent staircase. The beautiful floors have complex inlaid parquet borders. This is very much a man’s castle, dark and heavy. The only feminine touch in the house is the refined Georgian drawing room, the only room decorated with bright colors; pinks, white and gold. Silk wallpaper and draperies line the room.

(The Moorish-style library. Photo: painecastle.com)

The main floor includes a Moorish room, de rigeur in fashionable houses of the day. The Middle East was seen as mysterious and exotic, and the rooms were decorated to reflect that feeling. Any one who was anyone had a Moorish or Turkish room. This room was identified as the library in descriptions. Although this entire floor is jaw-dropping, moving along, it is the massive dining hall that impresses most.

Heavily carved dark woodwork is everywhere, elaboate gilded plasterwork bursts from the coffered ceiling, and a running three-dimensional relief of owls and floral roundels lines the entire room. Between the relief and the wainstcoting, the walls are panels of Indian onyx. Another massive fireplace is below a second story balcony, where musicians could serenade dinner guests, or where an elicit rendezvous could take place. This feature was inspired by a Byzantine church in Spain that Paine visited, the details brought home to be replicated.

(Dining room wainscoting, onyx walls and heavily carved fireplace columns and frieze. Photo: Suzanne Spellen)

The huge room above the dining room on the second floor was the billiards room, and it too is quite eclectic, with an oversized tiled fireplace and painted canvas panels depicting 17th century musicians, lords and ladies, peasant girls and lovers, all still remarkably intact in 2022. The bedrooms on this floor are not as ornate as downstairs, but there isn’t a room that doesn’t have its own charm and all reflect the taste level and wealth that went into them. Stained glass abounds, and all of the mod cons in plumbing and finishings were originally installed in the bathrooms. All in all, the skill and talent of many unknown artisans, both local and jobbed in, using the finest materials made this house the masterpiece it is.

(Billiard room upstairs on the second floor. Photo: painecastle.com)

As the house was being built, Troy’s press gushed over what they called “the finest house in Troy.” A detailed description of the house was printed in the Troy Daily Times when the house was under construction in 1892. The article stated that the house would be “the most elaborately finished private residence in the state, outside of New York City.” The house was built between 1891 and 1893, although some sources give the year as 1896. It cost Paine $800,000, a sum that would be around $25 million today.

(Paine family memorial in Oakwood Cemetery. Julia’s statue is to the right. Photo: Suzanne Spellen)

John Paine was able to enjoy the splendor of his house until his death in 1912. He joined Julia and other family members at Oakwood, near a large limestone memorial temple that is itself, one of the finest in the cemetery. His children and later family are also interred there. Son John, the middle child, would eventually be the owner of the house. He and his family were generous benefactors of Troy’s Russell Sage College. They willed the house to Sage after their deaths, where it was appropriately used by the school as a music facility.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) is one of the nation's finest technical colleges. The Alpha Tau chapter of the Pi Kappa fraternity house was on the corner of Congress and 2nd Street, which was part of the Sage properties. The college wanted to build a dorm there. They offered the fraternity the Paine mansion in exchange, it was only a few doors down the street. In 1951 the fraternity moved in.

(One of the upper floor bedrooms when it was a fraternity house. Photo: Times Union)

Written into the deed was a stipulation that Alpha Tau could not alter or destroy the original details of the house. They were mandated to do their best to protect and preserve the original details, especially on the parlor floor. The fraternity brothers lived on the second and third floors of the building, with generally about 30 members rooming together. Over the years, as the house naturally deteriorated, they raised money by holding open houses during city events such as the holiday Victorian Stroll, and by renting the floor for film shoots. The house became known as Paine’s Castle, or just “the Castle.”

(The drawing room. Photo: painecastle.com)

In 1993, film scouts discovered Troy and the Paine mansion for Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of the Edith Wharton novel, “the Age of Innocence.” The filmmakers found Troy to be an excellent stand-in for late 19th century Manhattan and the Paine house ideal as the home of Mrs. Manson Mingott. She is one of the pivotal characters in the novel, the matriarch of one of the most prominent families in Wharton’s fictional New York. Scenes were shot in several rooms in the house, including the palatial dining room.

(The Paine drawing room was home to Mrs. Mingott in the Age of Innocence. Photo via filmfredonia)

The Alpha Tau chapter of the Pi Kappa fraternity ceased to exist in 2018, and the college students moved out. The building is still owned by the fraternity’s alumni association. They established the Castle Alpha Tau Foundation, whose mission is to renovate, preserve and protect the Paine mansion.

Initially, they were thinking about renting the mansion to a theater company or to a corporate entity like a law firm. But they eventually decided to use the mansion as an educational and artistic venue, renting it to organizations and private individuals for conferences, performances, parties and more. They also offer frequent tours, allowing visitors to not only tour the parlor floor, but wander around the entire house.

Proceeds from the rentals go to upkeep and restoring the building. Although the parlor floor has been kept in realtively good shape, the upper floors need a lot of work as does the shell of the building. Funds are also needed to upgrade vital utility systems and restore period lighting to most of the rooms. Because the building is so unique and was built with such care and artistry, those working on the restoration have found it to be a challenge, as even the smallest missing details have to be carefully measured and then hand crafted. But it is worth it.

(Dining Room. That’s onyx on the walls, not wallpaper. Photo: painecastle.com)

Just like Scorsese, the artistic directors of HBO’s “The Gilded Age” found Troy’s downtown to be an ideal stand-in for 1880s Manhattan. Locations were used all over downtown and along Washington Park. The Paine mansion was once again chosen for scenes, both inside and out. The show’s success and popularity bring the film crews and actors back this summer, as the show resumes location shooting.

John Paine would have been right at home, especially in the mansion of HBO’s fictious Russell family. He may have come from old money, but he understood the concept that more was more, and built the grandest home that Troy has ever seen, before or since. It’s ironic that being a fraternity house saved and preserved it, or the mansion may have gone the way of so many of the city’s elegant homes – either destroyed or chopped up into apartments, the grand details torn out and thrown in a dumpster.

The Paine Mansion is available for rent for events and for educational tours. There is so much in this amazing home to admire and be in awe of. As the restoration continues, it will only get better and better. Please check out their website (painecastle.com) and go room by room in a virtual tour, enjoy the photo album in a larger format, or arrange for a tour or a private event. Donate! If you love Victorian excess and old houses, this one is most definitely for you. Better yet, come to Troy and see it for yourself!

(Photo: Suzanne Spellen)