Thomas Lincoln Casey graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1852, first in his class, and was appointed a lieutenant in the Army Corps of Engineers. During the Civil War he was stationed at Fort Monroe on the coast of Maine. In 1878 President Hayes and Congress appointed him to complete the construction of the Washington Monument which, although construction began in 1848, had been abandoned due to design flaws. Casey redesigned the monument, which included strengthening the base, and Casey himself set the capstone in 1884. The monument was dedicated the following February. By 1888 he had risen to Chief of Engineers and Brigadier General. Among his achievements was overseeing the construction of the State, War, and Navy building.
Casey and his family lived in Washington, but he spent his vacations improving the farm while instructing the tenant family, the Goulds, on how the farm should be managed, such as rotating fields, planting crops, maintaining orchards, and fertilizing with seaweed. Casey completed the barn and rebuilt the sheep sheds, changing their frontage. He built a carriage house and woodshed, the roof of the ice-house, a new corn-crib, pig house, a new well-curb, and other outbuildings, and generally repaired all the buildings. He rebuilt many of the principal walls on the farm and “topped,” or rebuilt in a more formal manner, the walls bordering the main road crossing the estate (now the lane, Old Boston Neck Road).
He planted one hundred American elm trees at the cost of $100. The elms succumbed to Dutch elm disease and the weakened trees were destroyed during the Hurricane of 1938. There are photos from the 1930s that show the farmhouse and the surrounding elms in their glory. One elm that probably grew from a seed of one of these trees has managed to survive and can still be seen towards the swamp meadow just beyond the corn crib.
Casey also improved a wild cranberry yard of about two acres in the swamp meadow. There are still cranberries growing there today, and evidence of the method used to flood the bog at the bridge near the southern end. Casey built the stone wall around the family cemetery, and purchased several of the monuments placed there. He had his grandfather, Wanton, and his grandmother, Elizabeth, disinterred from their grave sites in East Greenwich and reburied at Casey Farm.
Thomas Lincoln Casey and his wife, Emma Weir, had four sons. The first, Thomas Jr., became a captain in the Army Corps of Engineers. Their second child, Robert Jerauld, died at age one and is buried in the family cemetery. Their third son, Harry Weir Casey, was born in 1861 at West Point. Their fourth son, Edward Pearce, known as Ned, became an architect of merit in Washington, and worked with his father on the Library of Congress.
Harry spent his summers at the farm, often with his brother Ned, during the 1870s. From 1871-1880, Harry sent letters to his parents in Washington, D.C., which provide an interesting description of life on the farm with the tenant family. He reported escapades shooting his gun and sailing to Block Island. His letters also include complaints about the tenants, the Goulds, including Mr. Gould’s failures to comply with Thomas Lincoln Casey’s instructions, which were frequent and explicit:
- “Mr. Gould hasn’t fixed the broken places in the walls yet.”
- “Mr. Gould hasn’t filled in the pig pens yet, or done anything else except white wash the piazza, and he did that just a little while before we came.”
Harry also complained of Mrs. Gould’s cooking, “regulation” johnnycakes, and lots of comments about dirty dishes and poor laundering. His letters, while not always positive, give valuable information about daily life on the farm. Harry also took many photographs with a glass-plate camera, images that now preserve Casey Farm in the second half of the nineteenth century.
In September 1877 Harry enrolled in the Scientific Department of Yale College where he received a number of awards. Tragically, just prior to his junior year, he drowned off of Narragansett Pier on September 1, 1880.
In 1881 Thomas Lincoln Casey completed his book, A Historical Sketch of the Casey Farm, Boston Neck, Rhode Island, which describes the history of the farm and Boston Neck, as well as describing in detail the efforts to preserve the property intact and his many improvements on the farm. Perhaps the final paragraph sums up his love for the land: “As a piece of property, the place is nearly valueless…The soil generally is exhausted in fertility, much grown up in brush and swampy grasses, the Mansion house dilapidated, and the fields stony. But as the heirloom preservation of which many sacrifices have been made by my ancestors, and as a repository of the ashes of my beloved kindred, the place is beyond price, and I trust will ever be zealously guarded and cherished by me and mine.”
Thomas Lincoln Casey passed away in 1896. At the time of his death, he was overseeing the construction of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. with his son, Edward Pearce Casey. He left the farm to his sons, Thomas L. Casey Jr. and Edward Pearce Casey.