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On Thanksgiving Day 1976, their bellies full of turkey, future President Ronald Reagan and conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr. captained opposing touch football teams at the Buckley home in Sharon, Conn.
“It was, of course, a draw,” Buckley’s nephew Cameron O. Smith said of the outcome of the game.
The gathering was one of many that drew notable figures like former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, author Sylvia Plath and aviator Charles Lindbergh to the Great Elm estate that has been with the family for about a century, Smith said.
The Buckleys sold parts of the roughly 50-acre estate in the 1980s to help maintain the property, converting the roughly 14,000-square-foot Georgian house into condominiums. The family retained a section of the home and now are listing their six-bedroom, roughly 7,000-square-foot residence for $3.999 million.
The circa-1812 house, about 100 miles northeast of New York City, was built by Ansel Sterling, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, according to Sam Tanenhaus, author of “Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America.”
In the early 1900s, William F. Buckley Sr. was a wealthy Mexico-based oil driller who grew up in Texas. The elder Buckley left Mexico in 1921 after opposing its post-Mexican Revolution president, Álvaro Obregón, according to Tanenhaus.
So, he founded a new Venezuelan oil company backed by investors in New York, and around 1924 purchased the house in Sharon for his family, whom he often visited on weekends, according to Tanenhaus. It cost $25,000, according to the Sharon Historical Society & Museum. After buying the house, he tripled its size and added a central courtyard, said Smith.
In 1929, following a change in Mexican leadership, he returned to Mexico and brought back artifacts and architectural salvage, said Tanenhaus. He shipped seven train boxcars of handcrafted tile, light fixtures and furnishings back to the U.S. and incorporated them into the house, said Smith.
The elder Buckley enclosed the courtyard in 1937 to create a three-story, roughly 1,250-square-foot atrium, said Smith. The atrium has a wrought-iron banister in a style intended to blend the atrium’s Mexican architecture with design influences from New Orleans, where his wife, Aloise Buckley, was from, said Smith.
He and his wife had 10 children who survived into adulthood, including National Review founder, William F. Buckley Jr.; former U.S. Sen. James Buckley; and National Review managing editor Priscilla Buckley. The children made prestigious friends, including Sylvia Plath, who visited the house in 1951.
Upon passing the “white colonial columns of the Buckley home,” Plath wrote in a letter to her mother, she was “greeted by a thousand living rooms, period pieces, rare objects of art everywhere,” specifically noting a painting by Sandro Botticelli over the fireplace in one of the drawing rooms.
The Buckley patriarch died in 1958. In 1960, Buckley Jr. hosted the Young Americans for Freedom, a gathering of about 100 young conservatives who wrote the Sharon Statement in the living room. A bronze plaque engraved with the statement is mounted on a well on the property, said Smith.
By the 1980s, Aloise, then in her 80s, was spending most of her time at the family’s homes in Camden, S.C., New York City and at care facilities until she died in 1985. Great Elm’s maintenance cost $300,000 to $400,000 a year, so to keep the property from falling into disrepair, they divided up the property and formed a condominium association around 1982.
The plan, however, caused a local controversy. “It got quite bitter,” Smith said. “There were articles in the local journal about how the Buckley family, who spoiled the natural resources on seven continents, have now come home to do the same in Sharon.”
From the 1980s to the 2000s, Priscilla Buckley, who was unmarried, lived there with Smith’s divorced mother, Jane Buckley Smith. The sisters each purchased one unit of the Buckley house’s newly divided five condos around 1982 to 1984, said Smith, who didn’t know what his mother and aunt paid for the properties.
Smith and his wife, actress Liza Vann, bought both condos for a total of about $1.4 million after Jane’s death in 2007 and Priscilla’s death in 2012, he said. They spent about $1 million renovating and combining them. The couple, who also have residences in New York City and North Carolina, are downsizing because the house is underused, said Smith, a consultant in the oil-and-gas industry.
The owners of the rest of the house, spanning an additional 6,000 square feet across three condos, are also open to selling their units, said listing agent Ann Stettner of Neil Charles Real Estate.
“When my aunts and uncles were alive, this was the congregating place, every wedding, every Thanksgiving,” said Smith. Now, everyone in Smith’s generation has their own families with gatherings at their own homes, he said. “The real rationale for Great Elm as the Buckley family gathering place is dissipating.”
In Litchfield County, where the house is located, homes sold for a median $500,000 in June, down 5.7% from the same time last year, according to Realtor.com.