Browse the Leslie Buswell Papers

Lt. Colonel Henry Leslie Farmer Buswell was born on December 3, 1887, to Charles and Caroline (Croft) Buswell in Richmond, England, the grandson and great-grandson of English Navy Admirals. He attended Winchester and then Caius College, Cambridge, where he studied chemistry, physiology and zoology. He worked in his uncle’s chemical works for five years before starting his own firm - the Lavola Soap Company. He became interested in acting, and in 1913 was invited to tour with an American company led by Mr. Cyril Maude. While appearing in Boston he met Henry Davis Sleeper, A. Piatt Andrew and John Hays Hammond Jr., all of whom became lifelong friends. 

In the early 1920s he built a house on thirty-three acres of woodland above the Hammond estate in the Fresh Water Cove area of Gloucester, Massachusetts. He named it Stillington for his mother who was the daughter of Admiral Henry Croft of Stillington, Yorkshire, England. The house, designed by Harold B. Willis and decorated by his friend Henry Davis Sleeper, was according to one source a replica of his family’s 16th Century English home. Buswell became a world class collector of “Americana” of all kinds, especially scrimshaw, glass and pewter. He was also a playwright as well as an actor and in 1926 built the addition to his house known as Stillington Hall which contained a professionally equiped stage, and seated a hundred and seventy. Many performances were presented there by his own amateur theatrical group - the Stillington Players - as well as such notables as violinist Ephraim Zimbalist and the American Opera Company.

He married Mary Armstrong Robinson of Pittsburgh, heir to the Armstrong cork fortune in the 1920s, and had one son, Peter Croft Buswell, who was born about 1936. Buswell died on October 13, 1964, and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Read the full finding aid here.