Years of litigation ended with ownership of Belcourt being granted to Harle Tinney, whose husband had since died. Her death led to a high-profile legal battle when Koellisch sued Ruth’s son, Donald Tinney, and Donald’s wife, Harle, for his claimed share of the home. Before the mansion’s then owner Ruth Tinney died in 1995, she had adopted Belcourt handyman Kevin Koellisch. “People are more into the original owners and how the house turned from a divorced bachelor’s hunting lodge into Alva Belmont’s summer party house, as well as the restorative efforts,” Bettencourt says.īut recent history may be more scandalous. It is this early history which most fascinates visitors to Belcourt, says the site’s historian and house manager, David Bettencourt. ( This country has the most castles in Europe.) It was built in the 1890s for banker Oliver Belmont, who later lived there with his new wife, Alva, a New York socialite who’d previously married into the Vanderbilt family. Visitors can take guided tours of Belcourt of Newport, a magnificent 60-room villa modeled on a Louis XIII summer mansion. Dynasties like the Vanderbilts and Astors built palatial holiday homes, many of which are now managed by the Preservation Society of Newport County, a nonprofit group that protects and maintains the homes’ Gilded Age interiors, architecture, and landscapes. In the late 1800s, America’s richest families would flock to the quaint seaside town of Newport, Rhode Island, for the summer. To delve into these stories, tourists can visit temples, castles, tombs, and palaces where the mighty once prioritized assets and influence over familial harmony.

Others were far less civilized, escalating to imprisonment, torture, drowning, even decapitation. Some of these family feuds unfurled in court. From Irish clans to Egyptian rulers, Indian royalty to American elites, the intoxicating allure of power and wealth pitted relatives against each other. Long before the Roy family’s scorched-earth battle for TV supremacy played out in Succession, infighting ripped apart real-life dynasties.

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