A Brief History of Taylor Swifts Rhode Island Feud

Table Of Content

• Taylor Swift superfan reveals everything he saw in the pop star’s $50M NYC home after being invited inside
• Inside Taylor Swift's $17 million seaside mansion where she hosts A-list parties
• History
• Unpacking Taylor Swift’s New Song About Her Rhode Island Mansion
• Taylor Swift's 'Tortured Poets Department' drops Friday. Here's where to celebrate in RI.

And so, because Swift has an affinity for drawing famous young people into her orbit, this tiny New England state has become something of an "it" destination. But then again, just last year, Swift told Ellen DeGeneres that her favorite place to go on holiday was still Rhode Island. Try to imagine a chillier welcome than an entire state attempting to create new tax legislation that was not just aimed at taking your money but was also named after you. According to Rhode Island Monthly, the couple bought the coastal property soon after the wedding, and they became known for their (as Swift points out herself) “tasteful if a little loud” soirees. In her day, Harkness was as much of a media darling as Swift is now, and often the target of unfavorable headlines and press coverage.

Taylor Swift superfan reveals everything he saw in the pop star’s $50M NYC home after being invited inside

Her rise to the top began on a Christmas tree farm in Cumru Township, Pennsylvania, before the Swift family moved 15 minutes away to a five-bedroom home in Wyomissing, just outside of Reading. It was in a Georgian Colonial–style home that she first began to exhibit an interest in music and started to play guitar. At 14, Swift convinced her parents to move to Nashville to pursue her music career—which is where she made her first official real estate purchase, in 2009, a condo that she still owns today. Since then, it's become one of Swift's favorite vacation spots, most notably for her star-studded July 4th parties (the last of which happened in 2016).

Inside Taylor Swift's $17 million seaside mansion where she hosts A-list parties

Swift purchased the Watch Hill, Rhode Island, house for $17.75 million (in cash, no less) back in 2013, and has since held numerous—very Instagrammed—Fourth of July parties there. In the lyrics of Taylor Swift's song, "The Last Great American Dynasty," she tells listeners that her Rhode Island mansion sat empty on the coast for 50 years before she purchased it. She also mentions a woman named Rebekah, and it didn't take fans long to discover that the woman in question was Rebekah West Harkness, an heiress from St. Louis who once owned the property, as reported by The Washington Post.

History

With its old-money summer colony — a cohort of privacy-loving, multigenerational families tucked into century-old shingled houses — and its diminutive main drag, the picturesque Bay Street, this town is a curious choice for a megawatt celebrity like Ms. Swift, 26. (Why not the billionaire-infested potato fields of the Hamptons?) And High Watch is a peculiar spot for such a celebrity to hole up, given its fishbowl site and proximity to the public beach, with an access path that runs along its property line. Despite Swift’s jet-set life, she stuck to her roots when purchasing her second Nashville home, a sprawling Greek Revival known as Northumberland Estate.

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He’s tested new material at the Firehouse Theatre, has attended Audrian’s Concours + Motor Week, and has been known to get lunch downtown. It’s well known around these parts that comedian Conan O’Brien is a New Englander, with a Boston, Irish Catholic background and a Harvard degree to boot. Slightly less known is that his family has a vacation home in Watch Hill, which the "Conan" host bought in 1997. From the mansions of Newport to more casual homes in Watch Hill and Warwick, here are seven homes that are owned by some well-known celebrities.

The first a Cape Cod-style cottage for $4 million, the other a smaller single-story home she used as a guesthouse for $2.65 million. The house was built by Guilford Dudley Jr., a former US ambassador to Denmark. The quiet neighborhood isn’t a typical choice for A-listers, which is probably one of the reasons she chose it. It’s rumored that her song “The Last Great American Dynasty” was inspired by this property. The property has seven bedrooms and six bathrooms and includes a three-bedroom apartment next door for Swift’s security team.

Taylor Swift’s house in Rhode Island

(So far out there that fans have scaled the seawall and fence to get onto her property, tried to break in, and even tried to swim there.) The old-money families in Watch Hill have passed those homes down through generations. Even Conan O’Brien, who lives just around the corner, gets a pass from whispered scrutiny, maybe because he bought the house from his parents in 1997. He’s fussed over so little that even someone like me, who lives close enough to go to Watch Hill at least twice a month year-round, didn’t know he lived there until recently. Fans got a rare glimpse into Swift's home life in 2016 when she made headlines for an elaborate Fourth of July party, which featured several of her A-list celebrity friends in attendance, including Blake Lively, Ryan Reynolds, and GiGi Hadid. In a now-deleted Instagram post (via Business Insider), Swift shared photos of the partygoers on the beach, at the pool, and in front of the giant inflatable water slide that read, Taymerica, causing many to draw further parallels between Swift and the house's predecessor. Harkness was married to William Hale Harkness, whose family founded the Standard Oil Company.

She also added some vintage red rugs and velvet couches to give it a warmer feeling. There was even one on the top of the toilet; I have never seen anything like that before. Most people have some potpourri or some flowers, but she had a Grammy Award on her loo,” he said. A Taylor Swift superfan spilled the details on everything he saw when he was invited inside the pop star’s $50 million New York City home. Everything you need to know about the famous New York hotel and its relation to Taylor Swift. But not long after her win, she awoke one night to find her mother poised over her with a butcher’s knife, intent on killing her, though Sarah fainted before she was able to go through with it.

High Watch

But she did hang on to one LA property — the 1934 Georgian Revival estate she purchased for a whopping $25 million. As a proper Newport mansion would, Ocean Lawn, built in 1889, has 515 feet of ocean frontage, 13 bedrooms and 10 full bathrooms and one half bathroom, and his-and-hers libraries. It's owned by professional drag racer Alexis DeJoria, daughter of John Paul DeJoria, the co-founder of the Paul Mitchell hair care products line and the Patron Spirits Company.

Luxury features include double-height ceilings, antique Parisian brickwork, and a variety of glamorous chandeliers. Arguably one of her most beautiful abodes, it’s old charm complete with modern renovations makes for beyond luxurious (not to mention costly) digs. Swift’s Rhode Island home was previously owned by Rebekah Harkness, a St. Louis-born heiress known for throwing lavish parties with cultural icons like Salvador Dalí, according to a 2020 article by Vulture. The former homeowner appears to have inspired a song on Swift’s “folklore” album called “the last great american dynasty.” Harkness died in 1982.

"The Last Great American Dynasty" references Taylor's massive Rhode Island mansion (where she used to hold her annual Fourth of July parties) and tells the story of the house's previous owner, Rebekah West Harkness. Taylor Swift and the State of Rhode Island have their own contentious history. First, as soon as she bought the house in 2013, came grumblings from locals about traffic created by the flood of fans who just wanted to see the house.

Bow became one of the biggest movie stars of the 1920s, reaching a stratospheric level of stardom that exceeded her dreams without actually fulfilling them. A true Brooklyn girl, she never got “cultured,” and never put on fake airs, like other Hollywood transplants from Brooklyn did. She was kind not just to people who could help her, but to crew members and performers who were coming up behind her. She was, for a time, engaged to Hollywood director supreme Victor Fleming; then she fell hard for shy, strapping, ethereally handsome Gary Cooper—because, well, who wouldn’t? There were scandals—mostly not of her own making, but resulting from the greed of others—that cost her several small fortunes to clean up. She made 46 silent films and 11 talking pictures before essentially leaving the business, in 1931, after suffering a breakdown.

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The “A Thousand Miles” singer has been posting snapshots of her family's circa 1803 Federal Colonial home on Instagram since 2021. In 2014, there was a kerfuffle involving Westerly putting his house up for auction due to him owing $8,000 in back taxes, but it was quickly resolved when the taxes were paid. A playground for the rich and the famous during the Gilded Age, the shorelines are dotted with mansions.

With the 2020 release of her eighth studio album, Folklore, fans got the opportunity to see a different side of Swift, as she moved away from writing music from her own perspective and, instead, chose to share other people's stories. "I found myself not only writing my own stories, but also writing about or from the perspective of people I've never met, people I've known, or those I wish I hadn't," she explained in a tweet announcing the arrival of her album. What she failed to mention at the time though, is how much she related to the woman who famously owned the house before her.

She spends a lot of time touring and in Nashville, but she does have a farm in Rhode Island and has talked about it publicly as recently as February 2023. She bought the farm during the pandemic and told the Illinois Entertainer that they have goats, donkeys and some other farm animals. Front and center are the ocean views, of course, but also the garden, which was carefully cultivated by the home’s previous owner, late Campbell Soup heiress Dorrance H. Hamilton, who was known for her love of gardens and helped start the Newport Flower Show.

The Watch Hill mansion and its history were also the inspiration behind a song on her 2020 album, folklore. Although the private pop star, 34, hasn’t shared many images of the vacation property herself, several of her A-list pals have given glimpses inside the home while uploading images from the lavish bash — known as Taymerica — to their social media over the years. While we'd argue that it's of no use to try and understand the inner workings or "whys" in Swift's songwriting and lyric choices, the Chelsea Hotel has long been a sanctuary for "tortured" artists. On this album, Swift dives into the emotionally fraught people and places in her life over the past two years.