Name: Gilded Age Tea & Talk Series
Start: 2025-01-19T13:00:00-05:00
End: 2025-04-27T15:00:00-05:00
Location: Staatsburgh State Historic Site

Popular afternoon tea and treats, with a talk on a historic topic, hosted in Staatsburgh's Gilded Age dining room.
About this Event

Staatsburgh's ever-popular Tea & Talk series and afternoon tea returns for 2025!

Enjoy tea and refreshments in the formal dining room while listening to five different talks about aspects of Gilded Age history (see presentation topics and dates below). The programs feature scones, tea sandwiches, sweets and the site’s Staatsburgh Blend tea, a custom blend created for the site by renowned tea purveyors, Harney & Sons.
Please see our "Frequently Asked Questions" section for information on event cancellations, seating requests, and more.

January 19 & March 2 - "Gilded Age Scandals!"
Snow date for January event: January 26
Snow date for March event: March 9
“Gilded Age Scandals” focuses a spotlight on the scandalous behavior and intrigues of the very rich at the turn of the century. Staatsburgh’s owners, Ruth and Ogden Mills, were models of respectability, but the transgressions of some of their peers shocked and titillated Edwardian Society.
Staatsburgh's Educator Don Fraser will discuss celebrity murders, heiresses for sale, and scandals that reached as high as the King of England and the President of the United States. Stories of misbehavior feature a monkey in the formal dining room, arsenic in the clam chowder, and the tale of the famous Society figure who told his distraught bride on their wedding night, “Your money is your only asset in my eyes.”

February 2 - "Black Staatsburg: The Gilded Age Black Community of Staatsburg”
Snow date: February 9
What did the "Gilded Age" mean to the free, Black community of the Staatsburg hamlet, beyond the walls of the Mills estate?
During Black History Month, Staatsburgh's Historic Site Assistant Zachary Veith will explore that question through census records, historic maps, and the larger context of race relations during the Gilded Age. Long marginalized in the historical narrative, the free Black community of Staatsburg fostered a strong community in the face of constant adversity and reveals the triumphs and struggles of generations of African-Americans in the Hudson Valley.

February 15 & 16 - "Gilded Age Love Stories"
Snow dates: February 22 & 23
Enjoy a Valentine’s-themed Tea & Talk! From courtship to love & marriage (with a bit of heartbreak dashed in for good measure), Staatsburgh's Curator Maria Reynolds will share stories about love and relationships in the Gilded Age.
Treat yourself (and your friends and loved ones) to the perfect Valentine's experience!

March 16 - "The Gilded Age in a Glass"
Snow date: March 23
The Gilded Age gave us some of our most famous drinks - the Martini, the Daiquiri, the Old Fashioned, and others. Cocktails -- their ingredients, their stories, their pageantry -- can reveal more than expected about American society at the time. The drinks served at the Astoria Hotel or 5th Avenue dinner parties demonstrate how New York's elite spent their days, whose legacy they commemorated, and the wider prejudices of the era. Imbibing cocktails became simultaneously a signal of inclusion to some groups or an act of defiance for others.
While sipping tea (not cocktails!), hear Staatsburgh Historic Site Assistant Zachary Veith explore technological innovations, social scandals, women’s suffrage, American imperialism, and the familiar haunts of New York's elites behind the popular mixed drinks of yesterday and today.

March 30 - "The Life & Photography of Alice Austen"
One of America’s first female photographers to work outside of the studio, Alice Austen produced over 8,000 photographs of a rapidly-changing New York City. Often transporting up to 50 pounds of photographic equipment on her bicycle, she made significant contributions to photographic history, documenting New York’s immigrant populations, Victorian women’s social activities, and the natural and architectural world of her travels.

Victoria Munro, Executive Director of the Alice Austen House on Staten Island, will provide an introduction to Austen's life and her work with a discussion about the role of her historic home today. Austen's photographs represent street and private life through the lens of a lesbian woman whose life spanned from 1866 to 1952. Austen was a rebel who broke away from the constraints of her Victorian environment and forged an independent life that broke boundaries of acceptable female behavior and social rules.

April 13 - "How to Throw a Dinner Party in the Gilded Age"
For more than merely eating food, the Gilded Age dinner table was the supreme accomplishment of a hostess, according to Emily Post in 1922.
Dr. Beth M. Forrest, Professor of Liberal Arts and Applied Food Studies at the Culinary Institute of America, uses cookbooks, etiquette manuals, and other primary source documents to consider the social expectations of both the host and the guest, from how to choose the menu and set the table, to the proper way to eat your soup.

April 27 - "Redressing American Fashion: Black Designers in the 19th and 20th Centuries"
From late nineteenth-century dressmakers, both enslaved and free, to transitional creatives who helped navigate what an American designer could be, Black people have always been a driving force in American fashion.
Elizabeth Way, Associate Curator of Costume at The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, will explore how Black people have always significantly shaped American fashion through their style, their labor, and as innovative fashion makers. Their stories, however, are often left out of the narrative. Examining the lives and careers of just a few, starts to create a more holistic understanding of American fashion and its wider impacts on culture and society.