On the west side of Duke of Kent Street, lush vegetation largely covers the sprawling ruin of a once-fine mansion known as Longford House. In the early 1700s the lot on which it stands was widow Ann Levinz’s garden, adjoining her house built to the west. In 1709 the land was granted to Dr Roger Thomas who built the main core of Longford by 1713. Thomas gave the house to his wife Sarah and son William before he died in 1715. Sarah died three years later, and Walter Mitchell was appointed guardian of the young William. Mitchell, a hugely successful merchant, taught the boy well, for in 1737 William Thomas moved to Barbados to set himself up as a trader.

By the 1760s another successful merchant had purchased the house. William Foot was the son of a poor lieutenant in HM Independent Company which had been stationed in Bermuda. Foot amassed a considerable fortune before his death in 1807 and also served as an assemblyman. He bequeathed his mansion valued at £1,200 to his wife Jehoadan and daughter Jehoadan Lagourgue, the widow of French planter and merchant Denis Victor Lagourgue. The Lagourgues had lived in Saint Domingue until the slave rebellion in 1793 forced them to flee for their lives. Victor died a broken man by 1803 but Jehoadan lived on in her late father’s house for another three decades, raising her four children in a genteel house filled with mahogany furniture, sets of china and a pianoforte.

After Jehoadan Lagourgue’s death in 1835, the house was sold to another prominent merchant, John Davenport, and became the home of his son Robert. Samuel Crofts Rankin later purchased it and placed it in trust after his death in 1904. By the time it was finally auctioned in 1951, Longford House was described as a ‘building in ruins, no value’. The cause of the house’s demise was not stated, but it more than likely fell victim to the terrible hurricane which struck Bermuda in October 1926.

The house has a deep cellar and three chimneys and some walls survive, despite the benign neglect of nearly a century. The remains of a detached kitchen stand to the west, and on the south are traces of an alley which once ran from Church Lane to Blockade Alley.