About The Oldest Gazebo Structure In America
The design gave it an air of permanence and architectural seriousness uncommon for its type
A gazebo is a freestanding, roofed garden structure, often open-sided or largely open, built primarily so people can sit, rest, or take shelter while enjoying a view of the surrounding landscape. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the same kind of structure was usually called a "summer house," "pavilion," or "temple".
The oldest gazebo structure of any kind in America is The Redwood Summer House, built in 1766. The Redwood Library Group defines it as the oldest extant garden structure in America. No documented American gazebo structure is older than The Redwood Summer House.
Tucked into the grounds of the Redwood Library and Athenaeum at 50 Bellevue Avenue in Newport, Rhode Island, stands the small octagonal wooden structure that predates the United States itself.
Built in 1766, the Redwood Summer House is widely regarded as the oldest surviving garden or gazebo structure in America — a rare survivor from a golden age of colonial Newport that has outlasted the estate it was built for, two relocations, and two and a half centuries of New England weather.
The Summer House takes its name from Abraham Redwood Jr., the wealthy Newport merchant whose 1747 donation of £500 sterling founded the Redwood Library which is the oldest purpose-built library in America. Redwood was also an avid horticulturist, and his Portsmouth, Rhode Island estate, known as Redwood Farm, featured an elaborate garden that was the talk of Newport society.
A firsthand account survives from a 1767 visit by diarist Samuel Drowne, who described touring "Mr. Redwood's garden" and marveling at the exotic fruit trees and flowers cultivated there, imported from the West Indies. It was within this garden that the Summer House was built the year before, in 1766, as a shaded pavilion where visitors could rest and take in the surrounding plantings.
The Summer House wasn't a simple garden shed. It was designed by Peter Harrison (1716–1775), the same architect responsible for the main Redwood Library building itself, along with other Newport landmarks. Harrison is frequently credited as colonial America's first professionally trained architect, and his design for the Summer House reflects the same Palladian sensibility he brought to his larger commissions.
The historic structure is built on an octagonal plan with elaborate exterior rustication banded stonework detailing more commonly associated with grand civic buildings than garden follies. Where most 18th-century summer houses were simple, largely decorative wooden structures, Harrison's design gave the building an air of permanence and architectural seriousness uncommon for its type.
That distinction likely explains why it still exists at all. Garden pavilions of the colonial and early Republic periods were built in enormous variety. Classical, Gothic, even Chinese-influenced styles were common in that period. The vast majority were modest, generic structures that were dismantled or simply rotted away over time. The Redwood Summer House's higher architectural ambition appears to be a major reason it survived when so many of its contemporaries did not.
For roughly a century and a half, the Summer House remained on the original Redwood Farm property in Portsmouth, well outside Newport proper. It was not until 1916 that the structure was moved to its current location on the grounds of the Redwood Library on Bellevue Avenue — reuniting it, in a sense, with the institution its namesake had founded nearly two centuries earlier.
The move set the stage for another significant addition to the property nearly two decades later. In 1935, following a land bequest from Mary H. Tompkins, the Library commissioned architect John Russell Pope — best known today for designing the Jefferson Memorial and the National Gallery of Art — to lay out a park area on the newly acquired land. Pope's design centered on a long, flagstone-paved allée that leads directly to the Summer House, using Harrison's 169-year-old pavilion as the visual terminus and focal point of the new landscape.
That said, the structure fits the modern definition of a gazebo closely: an open, roofed, multi-sided pavilion built expressly to be admired and to admire the view from. Its octagonal plan is the same footprint found in gazebos built a century and more later, from Massachusetts to Ohio. Whether labeled "summer house" or "gazebo," no surviving American structure of its kind has been found to predate it — making the Redwood Summer House, by either name, the oldest of its kind still standing in the United States.