Hillwood

Marjorie Merriweather Post, the daughter of cereal maker Charles William Post and heir to the Post Cereal Company, made Hillwood in Brookville her Long Island country home from 1921 to 1951. She shared it with her second husband, the financier Edward F. Hutton, a co-founder of the brokerage E.F. Hutton & Co. The Village of Brookville describes the estate as a 70-room mansion on 178 acres. The house is a Tudor Revival design with elaborate carved woodwork. Its architect could not be confirmed from a reliable source for this entry. A Smithsonian garden photograph in the Lewis & Valentine Company records identifies Marian Coffin as the landscape architect of the grounds.

The Huttons divorced in 1936, and Hillwood remained Post's home until 1951. In 1940, according to a 2004 Long Island University newsletter, members of Luxembourg's royal family took refuge at the estate after the Nazi invasion of their country. Grand Duke Henri of Luxembourg visited the campus in 2004 to see the place where his father had stayed.

In 1951 Long Island University bought the estate, which it describes as 177 acres, for $200,000. The university wanted room to serve the families then moving to the suburbs, and its trustees named the new college for Post's father. Post occasionally returned for college functions, football games and student socials until the end of the 1960s, according to the Village of Brookville. The campus grew around the house and later took in neighboring estates; the university says it now covers 334 acres with 47 buildings and three historic mansions.

The mansion's bedrooms and living quarters were converted into administrative offices, meeting rooms and performance spaces. In 2004 the Winnick Family Foundation and alumnus Gary Winnick gave $8 million to renew the exterior and building systems, and university carpenters restored carved moldings and refurbished more than 300 windows. The house is now called Winnick House. Its Great Hall, a 90-seat room, is used several times a month for student recitals.

Two cautions apply to anyone researching the house. First, Hillwood Estate, Museum and Gardens in Washington, D.C., is a different property and is not this house. Second, Hutton House on the same campus, home of the university's Hutton House Lectures, is a different building. It was built in 1927 for H.W. Lowe to a design by John Russell Pope and was later owned by William E. Hutton II, who called it Mariemont. After his divorce, E.F. Hutton bought the house just east of Mariemont, which is now the campus Fine Arts Center.

Winnick House is a working university building, and no public tour program for it was found. The campus is home to the Tilles Center for the Performing Arts, a concert theater that is open to the public, and to the Hutton House Lectures.