September 2023

By Skip Moskey Larz Anderson in 1911. Press photo taken at the time of his first diplomatic assignment under President Taft. By Skip Moskey From early November 1911 until the early fall of 1912, Larz Anderson served as American minister plenipotentiary to the Kingdom of Belgium. He and his wife Isabel, who was the official […]

Larz Anderson was a collector of many things, including several dozen fine old motor cars  – from an 1899 Winton Phaeton that he named ‘Pioneer’ (motto: It Will Go!) to a 1926 Lincoln Seven Limousine, ‘The Emancipator’ (motto: Son Courage Fait sa Force/His Courage is his Might).  Larz was, however, as avid a collector of horse-drawn carriages as he […]

Street scene in downtown Washington, DC, February 1899 On February 13, 1899, Elizabeth Anderson, Larz’s mother, wrote to her son: “This extraordinary weather keeps me prisoner in my room, and we are in fact house-bound today.”  The Great Blizzard of 1899 had begun striking Washington two days earlier with a severe cold wave that extended from Florida to […]

One of the people who moves in and out of my biography of Larz and Isabel Anderson is Chandler Hale (1873-1951), a U.S. diplomat who began his career in 1892 and by some time around 1920, had retired. Little is known about his life after he left the state department. During his retirement, he lived in his parents’ […]

When Larz and Isabel Anderson acquired a summer home in Brookline (MA) in 1899, Larz had a vision for the estate’s gardens and landscapes. It was no accident that their first major project was an Italian garden. Larz had an extensive knowledge of and deep appreciation for classic Italian architecture and decorative arts, and that interest shaped the design and decoration of the […]