JAMES HOBAN (1758-1831) OF DESART

AND THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA

 

An account by Denis Bergin contributed to the special publication

'Callan 800: 1207-2007: History and Heritage', 

marking the 800th. anniversary of the granting of a charter to the town of Callan

 

 

Part I

 

INTRODUCTION

 

James Hoban, who designed and built the world’s most famous building, The White

House in Washington D.C., was born in 1758 at Desart, Cuffesgrange. The original Hoban

cottage was in place until the 1940s on land currently owned by the Brennan

family.*

    Hoban's father Edward was a tenant farmer and possibly an estate labourer at

Desart Court, home of the Cuffe family, Barons Desart. The Cuffes were prominent in

the social and cultural life of Kilkenny over a period of two hundred years, until the death

in the early 1930s of the last Lady Desart to reside in the area (their involvements included the mayoralty of Kilkenny City, literary pursuits, interest in the theatre, the building

of Aut Even as a private residence and the development of Talbot’s Inch Village, and

the provision of Desart Hall in New Street).

    Little is known of the background to the Hobans’ connection with the Cuffes or

how they came to be in that area of Kilkenny (the family name has its roots in Co.

Mayo). Details are equally scarce about Edward’s wife Martha, whose maiden name

was Bayne. Ongoing research shows that a number of members of the Hoban family

emigrated to the U.S., and two of James’s brothers, Joseph and Philip, settled with him

in Charleston in the 1780s.

 

* NOTE: The exact location of the cottage is held to be at a distance of about 350 yards

immediately west of the location of the Hoban 'marker' erected in 1976 on the western

side of the regional road R691 that runs from Ballymack Cross to Ballingarry and onwards

to Cashel. The cottage was inhabited by Denis Barry and his family before they

moved to the nearby estate gate-lodge on the other side of the road. Bill Barry, a son of

Denis Barry, was born in the former Hoban homestead before the move took place. He

later married and settled in Swords, Co. Dublin, and there are no surviving members of

the Barry family in the area).

    There were two other buildings connected with the Hobans on the Brennan property,

in one of which the Brennan family lived until their present house was built nearby

in the early 1950s. The remains of another Hoban-connected building stood in the

Brennan yard until it was demolished in the mid 1990s. The last member of the Hoban

family to reside there is remembered as moving to a nursing home in Clonmel, where

she died at about the same time as the new Brennan house was built.

 

 

ABOUT THE CUFFES

 

Of the Cuffes themselves, a little more is known. They were a branch of a Somerset

family that had come to Ireland on military service in the second part of the sixteenth

century. Their first acquisition in the Kilkenny area was a claim on the tithes of Thomastown,

Taghan Church, Columkill and the old Augustinian monastic lands at Inistioge.

These were granted to Catherine Cuffe in 1574 as compensation for the loss of her officer

husband in a skirmish at Wexford ten years before.

    These particular Cuffes lost their Kilkenny possessions in 1589 but in the meantime

another branch of the family had been awarded lands in Clare and Cork as a reward

for their work in putting down the Desmond rebellion and allying themselves with

the powerful Coote military dynasty.

    Joseph Cuffe of Ennis profited again from these connections in 1641, when, as a

20-year-old officer in the English army, he was granted the old Norman landholdings of

the Wall family at Castleinch or Inchiholaghan in what would become the parish of Cuffesgrange, near Callan.

    The lands were held at that time by Gerald Comerford, who successfully petitioned

for their return after the Restoration, and in the negotiations and horse-trading

that followed, Joseph Cuffe was rewarded with 2000 acres nearby: 1200 at Tullaghane,

to be known as ‘Cuffe’s Desart’ and the remainder at Lislonan (‘Cuffe’s Grove’).

It was here that the Cuffe succession played out over the next century and a half,

beginning with a local alliance with a family who were already well established in the

area. The Muschamps of Castleinch had a daughter named Martha, whom Joseph

Cuffe married about 1645, producing a son who was named Agmondesham for his maternal

grandfather.

    Agmondesham Cuffe suffered the loss of his properties in the revision of the

Cromwellian settlement acts during the reign of James II, and so became a strong supporter

of the victorious Williamite cause. With the Castleinch lands returned to his family,

he became a member of parliament for Kilkenny from 1695 to 1699.

Agmondesham had married a widowed daughter of Sir John Otway and, once

the family fortunes were restored, they began the important task of expanding their influence

by makinstrong marriage alliances for their children (Martha married another

Castleinch neighbour, Sir John Blunden; Maurice built a house for his new bride at Killaghy).

    But it was the eldest son and heir John who set the pace after he succeeded to

the Castleinch properties on the death of his father in 1727. By then in his early forties,

he had a growing family by his second wife, Dorothea Gorges, whom he had married in

the previous year. He was already well established in the area, having been Mayor of

Kilkenny as early as 1708, when he was twenty-five.

    The Cuffes who lived in the immediate vicinity of the family lands tended to make

their residences in the castles and fortified dwellings that were typical of the colonial settlements of the time, shuffling from one to the other when a succession or a marriage

alliance demanded. It was now time to think on a larger and grander scale.

 

A MANSION ARISES

 

A new Cuffe mansion, known as Desart Court, therefore soon arose on the Castleinch

lands, to designs by an accomplished but unidentified architect. Some scholars attribute

the design to Sir Edward Lovatt Pearce, who had a family connection with the Gorges,

having succeeded Dorothea's father as Member of Parliament for Co. Meath (he would

soon design the building in College Green that served as the Irish House of Parliament

until the Act of Union seventy years later).

    Pearce was a well-connected architectural prodigy who had come to Ireland from

London and became state surveyor in 1730, when he was thirty-one. Knighted in 1731,

he worked feverishly for two years up to his death in the year that Desart Court was begun.

Pearce had little connection with the provinces in either his public or private work,

although he designed a palace for the Archbishop of Cashel which still survives as a hotel

in that Tipperary town.

    Another architect associated with Desart Court is Richard Kassel, Cassel or Cassels,

a German engineer who spent his early years designing fortifications and canals

on the European mainland before arriving in England about 1725 at the age of thirtyfive.

An advocate of the use of cut stone in engineering and architecture, he wrote a

treatise on artifical navigation and put his ideas into practice by designing a stone lock

on the Newry Canal in 1728. For the next twenty-five years, until his death in 1751, his

Irish career flourished, and, as Sir Richard Castle, he was responsible for a half-dozen

landmark buildings in the city of Dublin (including Leinster House, Newman House and

Iveagh House), as well as a dozen of Ireland's most notable country houses (including

Carton in Kildare and Powerscourt in Wicklow).

    He also worked on Russborough House in Wicklow, and here he co-operated

with another architect who may well be the true designer of Desart Court. In 1733 Clare-born

Francis Bindon was forty-three, and emerging from a successful career as a portrait

painter to be an equally successful architect, having studied with Sir Edward Lovatt

Pearce. He had just become a member of the Dublin Society, and was gathering a select

group of admirers and clients that would eventually include some prominent members

of the Kilkenny nobility and gentry. By the end of the 1730s he had designed and

supervised Castle Morres at Aghaviller for Hervey Morres, first Viscount Castlemorres;

Bessborough at Piltown for Brabazon Ponsonby, first Earl of Bessborough; and Woodstock

at Inistioge for Sir William Fownes, who was about to become Lord Bessborough’s

son-in-law (an account of Bindon’s approach to house design and construction in

that period can be found in Tom Whyte’s book ‘The Story of Woodstock’, published in

2007).

    Perhaps the answer is that Pearce set out the main outline of the plan, and Bindon

took it over and made it his own as he embarked on a serious career in architecture.

Whichever the situation, the outcome was beyond doubt: an elegant three-storey

over basement mansion in the early neo-Classical style arose in the Kilkenny landscape.

    The children of the tenants who viewed it every day could not help being impressed

and influenced by its scale, the detail of its construction and complexity of its

decoration. The fine Kilkenny limestone with which it was faced (probably from the

Colles quarries in North Kilkenny) gave it a dignity that would be replicated in another

building and another style over four thousand miles away and two generations later.

 

THE CUFFE ENVIRONMENT IN THE MID 1700s

 

The completion of his fine mansion and the acquisition of the title Baron Desart in 1733

inspired John Cuffe to expand his landholdings, and in 1735 he bought an adjacent

2000 acres from the Duke of Ormonde, bringing his holdings to the edge of the town of

Callan.

   The building of the house and the price of the land left the family coffers at a

dangerously low level. To this was added a new complication: the first Baron Desart

died in 1749 at the age of sixty-six, leaving a young family.

    The late first baron's heir and eldest surviving son of three, also named John,

was olnly nineteen, and still at Trinity College in Dublin when his father died. He already

had already acquired a reputation for quirkiness (he wore the Irish form of dress and

headgear, a practice that earned him the nickname ‘Seán a’Chaipín’).

The rest of the family, not yet in their teens, was made up of three boys, Otway,

Hamilton and William, destined for the law, the church and the army respectively, and

three girls, Lucy Susanna, Nicola Sophia and Martha.

    John now took over the running of the Desart Court estate, marrying Sophia

Thornhill, the widowed daughter of Bettridge Badham of Cork in 1752, when he was just

twenty-two and settling down to start a family. Three daughters arrived in quick succession,

the last one in the same year as James Hoban was born at the cottage a few fields

away.

    The new baron’s mother, who had continued to live at Desart Court, now made

arrangements to re-locate to the Cuffe town-house in Henry Street in Dublin, from

where her remaining children went forth to seek advancement. Only William, military officer

and later M.P., remained unmarried all his life; Otway went to study and practise

law in England; Hamilton became a rector in Co. Meath, Sophia and Martha married

into the Herbert family, and Susanna married her first cousin and Castleinch neighbour

John Blunden.

    The fact that the ‘children of the house’ were all girls probably meant that their

acquaintance with the future architect was limited, and in any case their world was shattered

in 1767 when their thirty-seven-year-old father died “of a violent fever caught by

sitting for his Picture, and what is more remarkable two Dogs and a Horse that were

drawn in the picture caught the disorder – the Dogs died – the Horse was never any

good after and the painter lost his sight – supposed from some poisonous paint.”

    ‘Seán a’ Chaipín’ was waked in the traditional style, with the standard lament being

led by two accomplished local practitioners, Mrs. Shearman and Mrs. Carroll. His

funeral procession stretched out along the country laneways for over three miles.

    The death of his master and landlord must have had some impact on Edward

Hoban’s plans and those of his young son. But there was one other factor in the social

equation, and one that may have been the most important influence of all in the early

life of James Hoban.

    ‘Sean A Chaipin’s’ exploits as a bachelor and local blade had produced a natural

son named Joseph, who lived happily with the family after his father’s marriage. He had

a gentle disposition that manifested itself in a love of the arts, but did not enjoy good

health, and it was agreed that he would move to the Herbert household in nearby Clonmel,

where he became a firm favorite of Martha Cuffe Herbert, her husband, the Reverend

Nicholas, and their young daughter Dorothy.

    In her published diaries Dorothy describes Joseph thus: "He was a mighty Good

Creature, and much pleased with his new abode. I was then a very young child but a

great pet of his and as he had a a great taste for Music, drawings and the Belles Lettres,

he strove to engraft a like taste on my Young Mind – he lent me all his books, gave

me some chosen volumes and began to teach me to draw." Sadly, Joseph Cuffe died

soon after he had fallen into a "deep decay" according to his cousin, but he was

mourned by the family as if he had been a legitimate member of it.

 

JAMES HOBAN'S TRAINING AND EARLY CAREER

 

Otway Cuffe, who succeeded as 3rd. Baron Desart, was still a bachelor at the time of

his older brother’s death and had lived most of his adult life as a barrister in London,

though he now took up some of the expected responsibilities of his Irish inheritance. He

appears as Mayor of Kilkenny as early as 1771, holding that position again eight years

later.

    The bachelor Earl did not have the same hands-on approach of his brother, but

his cosmopolitan experience must have suggested to him that there was something different

about the young son of Edward Hoban as he underwent early training as a

carpenter/wheelwright in the estate workshops, working there until he was in his late

teens.

    As a result of Otway Cuffe’s encouragement, James Hoban then attended the

Dublin Society’s Drawing School, then located on Lower Grafton Street in a new building

that looked across at the residence of the Provost of Trinity College, completed in

1759 (the familiar College Green facade had been built seven years earlier).

    A few blocks away, the house designed for the Earl of Kildare (later the first Duke

of Leinster) by Richard Castle had been completed less that thirty years before, and

was still an unusual feature of the city landscape, located in what was regarded as an

unfashionable area and surrounded largely by green spaces. The Drawing School students

were accustomed to taking country strolls by the impressive mansion, which

would become a permanent home for the Dublin Society a generation later.

    The 2nd. Duke himself took a personal interest in the progress of the Drawing

School’s students, presenting a medal for craftmanship at the end-of-year ceremonies –

James Hoban won it in 1780. At the presentation, the Duke might well have extolled the

victories of the mother country in the Revolutionary War, since his brother, Lord Edward

Fitzgerald, was an officer in the British ranks (he later became a prominent Irish revolutionary

and died from injuries contracted in resisting arrest).

    After finishing his formal training, James Hoban most likely went on to understudy

the school's principal, Cork-born Thomas Ivory, in his private practice as drawing

assistant and later as apprentice architect.

    Buildings associated with Hoban as draughtsman, apprentice, designer or supervisor

include the Royal Exchange, designed by the prominent English architect

Thomas Cooley, which Hoban used as an example when discussing the costs of the

U.S. presidential mansion (the former exchange is now Dublin City Hall, recently restored

to its original glory). The Glendower, Newcomen & Co. bank building, designed

by Ivory, and now also in the possession of Dublin Corporation, is sometimes credited to

Hoban. He may also have acted as an assistant draughtsman for Gandon's Custom

House project (from 1781 onwards) and was probably in independent practice on his

own account for a short time from 1782 onwards.

    Although there is no record of his commissions, they must have been sufficient to justify his reputation, later quoted by George Washington, as having been involved in important projects (Washington was well briefed by his Irish friends and correspondents, including Sir Edward Newenham).

    Ivory and Cooley died within a year of one another in 1784-5. At about the same

time, the bachelor Baron Desart, now forty-eight and newly advanced in 1781 to the title

of Earl, married the twenty-year-old Anne Browne of the prominent Mayo family, who

had used both Richard Castle and Thomas Ivory in developing their property at Wesport

House.

    With some of his most important connections lost, and English architects still being

favored for the larger architectural projects, lack of prospects may have influenced

Hoban's decision to emigrate to the United States.