A Mansion Called “Folly”

Ruins of Folly Great House - Port Antonio, Jamaica 

A few miles east of Port Antonio, a quaint little town on the beautiful northeast coast of the island of Jamaica, is to be found what has come to be called "The Folly Great House". In reality it is the ruins of a two story 60 room mansion that was built around 1905 by wealthy American Alfred Mitchel for his wife, who belonged to the Tiffany family, jewelers from New York City. They both lived in this ostentatious manor until Alfred's death in 1912. Abandoned a few yeas later, by 1938 the roof had collapsed, and the place is now a spectacle symbolizing the corruption of noble intentions by a mixing of incompatible ingredients.

The reasons given for the demise of this once illustrious abode of this wealthy family have taken on mythic proportions. One often repeated reason has to do with alleged shortcuts that were taken during its construction. The story is told that salt water from the sea just below the mansion was used in the mixing of the concrete, leading to corrosion of the steel components of the building. 

Some accounts dispute this assertion, going as far as to say that all construction materials were imported from abroad, including the water for mixing the concrete.  Be that as it may, what was once the pride and joy of these lovers is now a symbol of what results when the best of loving intentions is corroded by what I have called "the salted cement of incompatible ideals". In a poem titled "Uninhabitable", I wrote the following about Folly:

“Now here it stands
On a pastured rise...
A sad place... 
Wasted by the many generations of its emptiness...
Hope discolored... Columns that weep
Under the burden of helpless beams...
Day by day it falls apart
Materially... And in every heart that has ever known love
And sought to build a monument
With the steeled character of passion determined
And the salted cement of incompatible ideals...
Here it stands... A monument to passion... A concreted folly
Uninhabitable"