the grounds. The inside staff usually numbered forty, but many of them would follow the Stotesburys as they made their yearly pilgrimages to their Florida mansion, El Mirasol, for the winter and to Wingwood House, their mansion in Bar Harbor, Maine for the summer. In addition to E. T., Eva and their servants, Whitemarsh Hall was also designed with Eva's two children in mind (adults by the time it opened), who were given their own rooms in the house. Her son Jimmy frequently resided within, as did (to a lesser extent) her daughter Louise. For about nine years the mansion was the site of lavish balls and receptions. The intensity of the party life dropped a bit after the Great Depression in 1929, and fell even more after 1933 when the Stotesburys were openly criticized for enjoying a life of splendor while most of the country suffered the hardships of the depression. The death of one of E. T. Stotesbury's own daughters in 1935 continued to dampen the Stotesburys' enthusiasm for festivities. Whitemarsh Hall had often been called the "American Versailles", because of the level of attention to detail in the gardens and in the main building. After Stotesbury Eva Stotesbury discovered, after the death of her husband in 1938, that she was relatively broke. Stotesbury had once declared that it cost him over a million dollars a year to maintain the house and the extensive property surrounding it. As a result of the Great Depression, the value of Whitemarsh Hall and its opulent furnishings was significantly lowered. Eva closed the mansion and moved to one of her other mansions, El Mirasol in Palm Beach, Florida. She donated the , steel fence to the War Department to be turned into metal for 18,000 guns. During much of World War II the property was used for warehousing the bulk of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art art treasures as it was feared that the Germans would bombard Manhattan from U-boats or warships. Eva Stotesbury had already put the property on the market after her husband's death, but there were no buyers. The property did not sell until 1943. Transformation, then abandonment Whitemarsh Hall was finally sold for $167,000 to the Pennsalt Chemical Corporation (today part of Total Petrochemicals USA), which transformed the building into a research laboratory. Much of the grounds surrounding the mansion were sold for real estate development, which