Sonnenberg Gardens and Mansion State Historic Park

Mary Clark Thompson's father was Governor of New York. Her husband was a prominent New York City banker. Together they built a 40-room Queen Anne mansion on 50 acres outside Canandaigua in 1887, then spent the years between 1902 and 1919 surrounding it with nine formal gardens. That is the kind of scale that requires a word like estate and means it. The property passed to the federal government in 1931, sat in bureaucratic limbo for decades, and was finally transferred to a local non-profit by an act of Congress in 1972. It opened to the public the following year. New York State took ownership in 2005; the non-profit still runs it.