The Forty Steps covers every kind of Newport County wedding room: Gilded Age ballrooms, harbor lawns under sailcloth, working vineyards, an army fortress, and America's oldest lending library. Each listing runs on verified numbers, fees, capacities, and end times, stamped with the date we checked them.
See the venues ›The richest families in America came to Newport for six to eight weeks a summer and called what they built cottages, with a straight face. Marble House put $7 million of its $11 million budget into 500,000 cubic feet of marble. The Elms dug a 150 foot tunnel so coal deliveries would never cross a guest's sightline. These houses were party machines, engineered for a short season, and a wedding is the one thing they still do at full power.
Then walk the Cliff Walk and notice the legal joke at the heart of town: 3.5 miles of public right of way running between the mansions and their own ocean, a path the Vanderbilts could not buy. At the end of Narragansett Avenue the Forty Steps drop straight down the cliff face, open to anyone, and we named the site for those stairs. Down the hill, the harbor faces west, so the sun goes down over the fleet while halyards ring on a few hundred masts.
This directory exists because wedding sites tend to whisper about money. We print the fee schedules: Rosecliff from $16,000 in winter to $40,000 on a peak weekend, the Eisenhower House lawn from $4,500 through the state parks office, the $24 marriage license from the clerk on Broadway. We print the end times too, because in Newport the music has a curfew. Every figure is dated.
“The Gilded Age built the ballrooms. The harbor built the view.”
Newport keeps a harbor pointed at the sunset, and the anchored fleet swings right under it.
From the caterers-of-choice ballrooms to a town pavilion you book with a $250 deposit, sorted by what the contract actually says.
Gilded Age Mansions & Estates
The palaces of Bellevue Avenue were built for a social season of six to eight weeks and have been hosting receptions ever since.
Harbor & Waterfront
Newport Harbor opens west, which buys these venues the East Coast rarity of a sunset over the water.
Hotels & Inns
Hotels answer the two questions every mansion couple eventually asks: where do 200 guests sleep, and where does the party go after 11.
Vineyards & Farms
Aquidneck Island and the towns around it still farm, and five of those farms host weddings.
Landmarks & Originals
Four venues that exist nowhere else: a fort guarding the harbor entrance, the 1880 Newport Casino, America's oldest lending library, and a gallery of collector cars.
Rosecliff at peak, Castle Hill above its light, and the Eisenhower House on the state fee schedule.
Stanford White modeled the house on the Grand Trianon, and the ballroom served as a set for The Great Gatsby in 1974.
Alexander Agassiz built the estate in 1875 as a summer home and marine laboratory, and the light under its lawn still guides every boat entering the harbor.
Eisenhower ran the country from this porch in the summers of 1958 and 1960; now the lawn rents for less than most catering bills.
Every number here moves by season and by year; confirm current rates with the venue, and anything we could not verify is marked as an estimate.
Scenes from thirty one venues, from the coal baron's cottage to the docks at Goat Island.
Frescoes end at 11. The harbor keeps its light until 8:20. Pick the hour you want to remember.
Browse by categorySeventy rooms, built in about two years, and they called it a cottage.
The Breakers finished in 1895 with 70 rooms after roughly two years of construction. Alva Vanderbilt took Marble House for her 39th birthday, divorced, and later hosted suffrage rallies at its Chinese Tea House. Mrs. Astor's list of 400 was sized to the capacity of her New York ballroom. The season those houses served is gone, but the houses hold on: Rosecliff, Marble House, and The Elms now open their floors for evening events, museum staff standing by, one party per night.
Newport has already hosted the most famous wedding in American memory. On the morning of September 12, 1953, John F. Kennedy married Jacqueline Bouvier at St. Mary's on Spring Street, 800 guests in the church and more than 1,200 on the terrace at Hammersmith Farm, Meyer Davis's orchestra playing under a canopy. Even Consuelo Vanderbilt's duke was landed at Marble House during the 1895 season, though the wedding itself happened in New York, a fact Newport rarely volunteers. The other Newport defended the America's Cup from 1930 to 1983, the longest winning streak in sports; the 12 Metres that raced for it still charter out of a harbor that opens west, so the light that ends your reception comes down over rigging and open bay.
The calendar is specific. June is the fog month, warm air sliding over 60 degree water, gone by noon more often than not. July brings the daily southwest breeze; September brings the year's clearest skies, its warmest ocean, and its earliest sold out dates, along with the hurricane peak that makes weather clauses standard. From November to April the fee schedules loosen, and sunset lands at 4:40pm.
Listings on The Forty Steps are free and stay free. Send your current fee schedule, capacities, and house rules, and we publish them with a date attached.
List your venue
