Steve VanderVeen: Mary Jayne Gold, of Netflix fame, had big ties to Holland
Marigold Lodge on Marigold Point is a beautiful Lake Macatawa property. It was built by the Golds, who were inventors.
In the 1850s, Cornelius Gold filed a patent for heating homes with steam. His son, Stephen Gold, invented a cast iron radiator. Because the radiator looked like a quilted mattress standing on its side, homeowners called it the “mattress radiator.”
Cornelius' grandson, Egbert Habberton Gold, was born in 1868 in Cornwall, Connecticut. As a young man, Egbert worked with his uncle, Edward Gold, in the family business — first in New York, then in Chicago.
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In 1901, in order to focus on the railroad market, Egbert established the Gold Car Heating and Lighting Company, which he merged with the Vapor Car Heating Company in 1903. Eventually, the Vapor Car Heating Company had a 95% market share.
In his lifetime, Egbert was responsible for over 100 patents.
In 1904, Egbert married Margaret Dickey of South Bend, Indiana. Initially the couple lived at the posh Chicago Beach Hotel in Hyde Park, before buying a residence in Kenwood. They had three children: Samuel, born in 1905; Mary Jayne, born in 1909; and Egbert Jr. — born in 1914. In 1923, the Golds moved to Evanston.
Egbert was an avid boater. Commodore of the Chicago Yacht Club, in 1911, he spent $50,000 ($1.5 million today) to build the Marigold, a yacht named for his wife and daughter.
In 1913, Egbert and Margaret sailed into Lake Macatawa. While anchoring in Pine Creek Bay, Egbert went ashore to explore Point Superior — until 1835, the winter home of the Odawa. Egbert purchased the property and hired Evanston-based architect Tommy Tallmadge to design a prairie-style mansion. Egbert called his new estate Marigold Lodge. Around it, he created beautiful gardens.
During the 1920s, in addition to vacationing in Florida and building an oceanfront mansion in Miami, Egbert further developed Marigold Lodge. But after suffering a short illness, he died there in 1928. After his death, Mary Jayne moved to France. While visiting her, Margaret met and married opera singer Mischa Thorgevsky.
In France, Mary Jayne earned a pilot’s license and bought a plane. In 1938, she engaged in an aerial race around Italy against 67 other pilots. In 1940, after Germany invaded France, she donated her plane to the French government and joined the Emergency Rescue Committee, helping prominent Jews and anti-Nazis escape the Germans.
By 1941, the year she left France, she had facilitated the escape of at least 2,000 refugees, often financing the purchase of their false passports and visas.
Marigold Lodge stayed in the family. But, in 1944, Samuel Gold died in an automobile accident. In 1959, Egbert Jr. died in similar fashion. Margaret died in 1968, and Mary Jayne donated the Marigold Lodge to Hope College.
Unable to maintain the property, Hope sold the property to Herman Miller (now MillerKnoll) in 1978. Today, the home is used as a training center and private hotel for clients.
Mary Jayne died in 1997. Her body is buried in Pilgrim Home Cemetery. Recently, Netflix made a movie about her life called “Transatlantic.”
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Interestingly, there's at least one other Holland residence connected to the Gold family. On one of their trips to China, the Golds witnessed wealthy families living in floating homes, which they used to take advantage of temperate climates.
Inspired, when the Golds returned to Chicago, they commissioned the building of a large cottage on a barge, which they used for hosting parties. Later, they hired a tug to tow the barge cottage to Marigold Lodge, where they tied it against a seawall and used it as a home for their groundskeeper.
During World War II, and likely after the death of Samuel Gold, Holland entrepreneur Phillips Brooks, seeing that no one was living in the barge cottage, inquired if he could purchase it. Eventually, he bought it.
Phillips acquired 1,000 feet of lakefront property between the Macatawa Hotel and Jesiek Brothers Boatyard (present-day Eldean Shipyard), towed the barge cottage there, and placed the cottage on his lakefront property, where it became the summer residence for Phillips and his wife Ruth.
They later added a porch to the “7-Up Houseboat" and, like the Golds, used it to host parties.
Information for this story comes from Wikipedia, the National Park Service, the Evanston RoundTable, and correspondence with Jim Brooks.
— Steve VanderVeen is a resident of Holland. You may reach him at skvveen@gmail.com. His book, "The Holland Area's First Entrepreneurs," is available at Reader’s World.
This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Holland History: Mary Jayne Gold, of Netflix fame, had big ties to Holland
