Please continue down the corridor and enter the Blue Room, which we interpret as the only first-floor bedroom.
You should now be standing in the Blue Room, one of three guest rooms in the mansion and the only bedroom on the first floor. The furniture in this room was made by the Tobey Furniture Company of Chicago, a company known for its high-quality, handmade furniture in several styles – from reproduction 15th-century French designs, to Art Nouveau, to Arts & Crafts. Tobey described its pieces as simple, elegant, and natural, emphasizing the beauty of the wood. They advertised that they employed skilled Norwegian craftsmen who completed all the delicate handwork.
An interesting feature in this room is the inclusion of one of the mansion’s three needle showers, but no water closet. Any guest staying in this room would have been obliged to use the small half-bath located in the hallway just beyond the Blue Room’s vestibule.
This room is identified simply as “Chamber” on floor plans found in real estate advertisements from the early 1920s, but oral history suggests this was the room in which Tom’s niece, Amy Plant Van Tassel, preferred to stay when she visited Lucknow. The room is often referred to as “Amy’s Room” as a result.
Amy holds a special place in Lucknow lore. After retiring in 1910, Tom Plant was on the hunt for an expanse of wild land that he could develop into a hunting and fishing preserve. According to Tom, it was Amy’s tales of the beauty of the Ossipees that inspired him to buy this land. Sight unseen, Tom wired his brother, William, who kept a summer home on Tuftonboro Neck, and asked him to begin purchasing land in the Ossipees.
William Plant and a few other agents acting on Tom’s behalf did just that. Within three months, they had amassed hundreds of acres, including a 300-acre tract of land in the Ossipee Mountains once owned by Benjamin Franklin Shaw, who had built on that land a hotel called Weelahka Hall, and a viewing platform on the peak of Lee Mountain called the Crow’s Nest. Over the next few years, Tom Plant and his agents secured 6,300 acres of land that would become his Lucknow Estate.
“In 1911 I arrived from abroad and sought out my new property. As I looked out from the Crow’s Nest, it seemed to me that I had never, in all my travels at home or abroad, seen as beautiful, as complete a scenic picture. The variety, the perfection, the pure beauty of it all impressed me as I had never been impressed, and the thought of using the land simply as a game preserve soon gave place to the conviction that this was to be my home…”
And by the fall of 1914, Tom was living comfortably in his Lucknow Mansion, at the peak of Lee Mountain on the very site where the Crow’s Nest once stood.
