Soledad Mansion and Gardens formerly known Kates Mansion has a well documented and diverse history. It has seen periods of the highest level of care including two massive renovations, and five periods of extended abandonment.  The property is part of an original Penn’s grant dating back to the mid 1700s.  The original deeded owner was John Jacobs.  Jacobs, a Quaker, was a highly respected and influential personality and a member of the General Assembly of Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia Constitution Convention.  Because of his political position and financial support of the revolution he was shunned and dismissed by the Quakers.  He built a handsome and substantial farm house that is still used as a private residence in the early 1750's.  He died in1780 but the property remained in the Jacobs family until it was sold to Hewson Cox in 1853.   Three hundred meters west of the Jacobs homestead Cox built a new mansion  based on the plans found in the book published by Andrew Jackson Downing's, American Country Villas, published in 1848.  Downing wrote of the plan: " A sensible, solid, unpretending country house, with an air of substantial style; but indicating intelligent domestic life in the country....The broad and massive veranda- the full second and third stories, overshadowed by the overhanging eaves- the steep roof, to shed the snow and afford a well ventilated attic, and the tasteful or convenient appendages of conservatory for plants on one side and kitchen offices on the other- these are all expressive of the comparatively modest but cultivated tastes and life of substantial country residents in the older parts of the Northern states."   Downing was an architect and horticulturalist.  He wrote his book after a two year study in Europe.  It is a treatise of what the cultured country home should be, who would typically live in them, and what their characteristics would be.  Different then today, great pains were taken to design a home and its gardens to match the owner. The climate, and the gardens should be an integral part of the building itself.  The mansion marks a departure from others erected in the area to this date in that it is not a vernacular farmhouse but a country villa.   Cox died in 1859.  The mansion was seized and advertised for tax sale.  Despite the effort to sell there was no buyer and remained in the Cox family and lived in the mansion until it fell into tax default in 1892.  It remained abandoned until it was purchased by Clarence Sears Kates in 1904.   Kates was a lawyer, agricultural pioneer, and philanthropist (founding member of the Church Farm School). He was married to a distant cousin  who was descended from Isaac Worrell who was on the staff of General George Washington at Valley Forge.    After a two year restoration directed by Milton Medary, plans are on file in the collection of the Philadelphia Athenaeum, Kates lived  here until his death in 1922 (he developed a tooth infection and died on the way to West Chester Hospital due to closure of his air passage).  The property again went vacant for eight years.  The property once again sold at tax sale to a country gentleman named Snowden who in 1936 installed electricity and converted the carriage house to a garage.  In the early 1950's it passed to the Church Farm School who used it as a dormitory for twenty years.  Once again the mansion was boarded and vacant for 18 years when the present owners bought it and began the incredible renovation that lasted two years and involved as many as one hundred workers and craftsman.  After the renovation was completed, the greater project commenced and will remain an on going project for the foreseeable future.  For that reason the Garden at Soledad is and will be a stunning, expansive, and probably the most important, privately held, formal garden on the east coast.