Leader Quits at the Mount, Former Home of Edith Wharton - New York Times Annotated

Following months of increasing financial troubles for the Mount, Edith Wharton’s home in Lenox, Mass., the president of the organization that owns and maintains the property has resigned rather than accept a new position in a restructured management, trustees said.

A grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities enabled the Mount to secure a one-month extension from the bank, until April 24, and the five-member board is meanwhile trying to raise $3 million, which an anonymous donor has promised to match.

Ms. Burns said in a phone interview Wednesday that the trustees had determined that the future of the Mount depended on a new management structure, and that the board intended to recruit both a director of finance and a development officer.

The responsibility of a board is to be the development committee,” she said. “They sign off on a vision, and then they commit to the funding of it.” She added: “You can only succeed as well as your board succeeds, and that to me was always an enormous frustration. I failed to rally our board to become fund-raisers.”