Christopher Wolfe acquired Coral Island off the head of Grindstone Island, and renamed it "Whisky Island," building a cottage there about 1875.

Whisky Island, old postcard view

Wolfe was an architect, said to be one of the wealthiest men on the river--a multi-millionaire back when a million dollars was real money. Architects at the time didn't amass such wealth (still don't, as this architect-author attests). Wolfe a "well known clubman of Tuxedo Park, New York" was probably a gentleman architect, a dilettante. It was his mother who resided at the exclusive Tuxedo Park enclave. The Wolfe money came from New York City real estate development. Wolfe was fifty-five years old at the time of his death, survived by his wife, Emma Hall Leavitt, a son and two daughters. It seems reasonable to suppose that the Wolfes already were "old money" when they founded the enclave at the head of Grindstone Island. Emma Hall Leavitt was the connection to the other New York City families who formed an extended family community at the head of Grindstone Island. Whisky island passed to Bernard Carter, president of the J.P. Morgan bank branch in Paris, who enjoyed the property with his wife, Hope Thatcher Carter. Norvin Hein recalls that "Whisky Island was the scene annually of the mustering of the far flung Wolfe-Morgan-Leavitt clan, of dumbfounding genealogical complexity." Whisky island then passed to the related Boyers.

Stanley Norcom provides a fuller account of the head-of grindtone community in his lovely, evocative book, Grindstone: an Island Remembered. Paul Malo covers some of this same ground in his Fools' Paradise focussing more on lifesstyle of the interrelated "old-money" families at the head of Grindstone Island.