Pennsylvania chest that is one of more than 90,000 objects on display at Winterthur. Over the decades, Henry Francis du Pont expanded his family estate from the 30-room house he inherited to a 175-room mansion with many period rooms, some interiors of which he had rescued from old houses before their demolition. He supervised the design of gardens near the house, as well as tree-planting and landscaping throughout the grounds. He also developed a substantial collection of rare books, manuscripts, and scholarly publications, which formed the nucleus of the Winterthur Library, which holds more than 87,000 books and 800,000 manuscripts and images. In 1951, he established the Winterthur Museum and Country Estate and moved into a smaller mansion on the property, where his daughter, Ruth, continued to live after her father's death. The museum holds the premier collection of American decorative arts in the world. Awards and honors Du Pont was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1961. In 1964, du Pont became the inaugural recipient of the Thomas Jefferson Award from the American Society of Interior Designers (then called the National Society of Interior Designers). He received honorary doctorates from Yale University, Williams College, and the University of Delaware, along with a Medal of Honor from the Garden Club of America in 1956. He belonged to the American Antiquarian Society, the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, the American Philosophical Society, and the Walpole Society and served as a trustee of the Whitney Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the New York Botanical Garden, among other cultural organizations. Personal life In 1916, after a seven-year courtship, he married socialite Ruth Wales (1889–1967), a Hyde Park neighbor of du Pont's Groton classmate Franklin Roosevelt, who attended their wedding. Ruth had little interest in farming and disliked Winterthur, dismissing the rural estate as "Frog Hollow" and preferring to spend most of the year at their Park Avenue apartment in Manhattan or their summer residence at Southampton on Long Island. Southampton's Ruth Wales du Pont Sanctuary was named after her. Henry and Ruth had two children, Pauline Louise du Pont (1918–2007) and Ruth Ellen du Pont Lord (1922–2014). Their younger daughter, Ruth, wrote a memoir about her father and his estate, Henry F. du Pont and Winterthur: A Daughter's Portrait (Yale University Press, 1999), which portrayed du Pont as a kindly but aloof parent. The du Ponts were lifelong Republicans and openly