1738: 10-Closet Mansion Built
The wealthy are different from you and me—they had better storage long before the modern closet cult. Although "only relatively well-to-do," Susanna Wright builds a new home in Columbia, Pennsylvania with ten closets. The Wright’s Ferry Mansion is a bitter pill for those of us without any closets whatsoever, but I digress.
One closet adjoins each fireplace; additional closets make "use of other nooks and crannies in a remarkable utilization of space for its time," according to Merritt Ierley in Open House: A Guided Tour of the American Home 1637-Present.
For most of the 19th century American houses were typically built without closets, according to Ierley. Until the early 1800s, "personal wealth had not changed materially" from earlier years and families could easily fit their belongings into chests, highboys, trunks or in attics. The exceptions belonged to well-heeled showoffs like George Read, who had four closets built into the master bedroom of the elaborate, expensive brick mansion he had erected in New Castle, Delaware in 1804.
