An Uncommon Cape , livre ebook

State University of New York Press - Eleanor Phillips Brackbill

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197 pages

English

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When Eleanor Phillips Brackbill bought her suburban Westchester house in 2000, three mysteries came with it. First, from the former owner, came the information that the 1930s house was "a Sears house or something like that." Thrilled to think it might be a Sears, Roebuck & Co. mail-order house, Brackbill was determined to find evidence to prove it. She found instead a house pedigree of a different sort.

Second, and even more provocative, was the discovery of several iron stakes protruding from the property's enormous granite outcropping, bigger in square footage than the house itself. When queried about them, the former owner told her, "Someone a long time ago kept monkeys there, chained to the stakes." Monkeys? Was this some kind of suburban legend?

A third mystery came to light at closing, when a building inspector's letter contained a reference to the house having had, at one time, a different address. Why would the house have had another address? Her curiosity aroused, and intent upon finding the facts, Brackbill gradually peeled back layers of history, allowing the house and the land to tell their stories, and uncovering a past inextricably woven into four centuries of American history. At the same time, she found thirty-two owners, across 350 years, who had just one thing in common: ownership of a particular parcel of land.

An Uncommon Cape not only tells the story of an eight-year odyssey of fact-finding and speculation but also answers the broader question: "What came before?" and, through material presented in twenty-two sidebars, offers readers insights and guidelines on how to find the stories behind their own homes.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction

Part I: Mysteries of the House

1. Something Like a Sears House
2. The House Finds a Home
3. The Cape Cod House: Why So Common, Why So Popular?

Part II: Thirty-Two Owners in 350 Years: A Focus on Four

4. Wappaquewam: Siwanoy Sakima
5. Caleb Heathcote: Manor Lord
6. Isaac Gedney Jr.: The Neutral Ground
7. Louis Block and Harry Rich Mooney: From Farm Subdivision

Part III: Mysteries of the Land

8. In New York or In Connecticut?
9. Moon Over Mamroneck: When and Where?
10. Monkey Business and More: The Possibilities

Epilogue: Kernels of Truth

Appendix
Notes
Sidebar Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Sujets

Architecture

Regional

History of the Americas

Region

Local history

Informations

Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	07 septembre 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781438443096
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	3 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1248€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

an UNCOMMON cape

R ESEARCHING THE H ISTORIES AND M YSTERIES OF A P ROPERTY

ELEANOR PHILLIPS BRACKBILL

cover photograph: Michael Torlen painting, page i: Michael Torlen © 2011 Michael Torlen
Slightly different versions of chapters 2 and 6 were previously published in The Hudson River Valley Review and The Westchester Historian .
Published by STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, ALBANY
© 2012 Eleanor Phillips Brackbill
EXCELSIOR EDITIONS is an imprint of State University of new york Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photo-copying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production and book design, Laurie Searl Marketing, Fran Keneston
L IBRARY OF C ONGRESS C ATALOGING - IN -P UBLICATION D ATA
Brackbill, Eleanor Phillips.
An uncommon cape : researching the histories and mysteries of a property / Eleanor Phillips Brackbill.
p. cm.
“Excelsior editions.”
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4307-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Brackbill, Eleanor Phillips—Homes and haunts—New York (State)—Mamaroneck. 2. Cape Cod houses—New York (State)—Mamaroneck. 3. Mamaroneck (N.Y.)—History. 4. Mamaroneck (N.Y.)—Biography. I. Title.
F129.M17B73 2012
974.7'277—dc23
2011036270
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Michael and Liz, who have shared our place and my journey
Illustrations FIGURE 0.1 The house today. FIGURE 0.2 The cities, towns, and villages of Westchester County today with roads discussed in the book. FIGURE 0.3 The rock viewed from the front yard of the house. FIGURE 0.4 The rock and a five-foot ladder viewed from the back yard. FIGURE 0.5 Several foot-long stakes marked with white ties are embedded into the rock a little more than six feet from the ground. FIGURE 0.6 The copper match safe dug up in 2001 in the house's back yard. It measures about two by one and three-quarter inches by one-quarter inch thick when closed. FIGURE 1.1 The Attleboro in the 1934 Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalogue, Modern Homes . FIGURE 1.2 A builder placed this ad in the weekly real estate section of a local newspaper for several weeks in the fall of 1937. FIGURE 1.3 Amelia Earhart on the cover of the May 1937 issue of McCall's magazine, purchased in 2005 on eBay. FIGURE 1.4 The May 1937 McCall's article, “The May Home of the Month.” FIGURE 1.5 A page from the May 1937 “McCall's Home of the Month” booklet. FIGURE 2.1 The house in the distance, now mine, is ready to be moved in September 1956 along with others from the neighborhood. FIGURE 2.2 The Garth Woods section of the Bronx River Parkway in Yonkers, New York in 1925. The river can be seen to the left of the road. FIGURE 2.3 One of the original sixty footbridges built on the Bronx River Parkway Reservation, this one in Mount Vernon, New York. FIGURE 2.4 Parks and Parkways of Westchester County, New York showing six proposed parkways in 1925, among them the Pelham-Port Chester Parkway to the east, as well as the Bronx River Parkway, completed that year. FIGURE 2.5 The unused parkway underpass is today a part of Memorial Park playground in Larchmont, New York. FIGURE 2.6 An Interstate 95 entrance ramp where the house once stood in the area near the car. FIGURE 2.7 A Mamaroneck family evacuates their house before a dynamite detonation for the construction of Interstate 95 in 1956. FIGURE 2.8 The house as it appears in the town's tax assessor's records in its original location in 1938 and in its current location in 1957. FIGURE 3.1 Jonathan Collins House, South Pamet Road, Truro, Barnstable County, Massachusetts. Built in the 1800s. FIGURE 3.2 Royal Barry Wills. Jacob Shore House, Providence, Rhode Island. 1941. FIGURE 3.3 Aerial photograph of a portion of Levittown, New York, in 1948, shortly after the suburb was completed on Long Island farmland. FIGURE 4.1 The three necks of land along Long Island Sound that made up John Richbell's 1661 purchase from Wappaquewam and other Siwanoys. FIGURE 4.2 Sample page from a three-page, handwritten 1895 deed to the property. FIGURE 4.3 Nicolaes Visscher. Novi Belgii Novæque Angliæ …. 46 × 55 cm. Hand colored. [Amsterdam?, 1685]. A copy with modifications of the 1651 Jan Jansson map. Just above Long Island near the center of the map can be seen the word Siwanoys , among the many Native American peoples named. FIGURE 4.4 The New York City tri-state region. FIGURE 4.5 Herman Moll. A New and Exact Map of the Dominions of the King of Great Britain on ye Continent of North America …. 101 × 60 cm. Hand colored. [London] 1715 [i.e. 1731]. Commonly known as the “Beaver Map.” FIGURE 4.6 Warren Chase Merritt. John Richbell and Wappaquewam Negotiate the Sale of the Land in 1661 . 1936. Mural. Mamaroneck Public Library. FIGURE 5.1 Caleb Heathcote (1666–1720/21). FIGURE 5.2 Warren Chase Merritt. Caleb Heathcote Installed as Mayor of New York, 1711 . 1936. Mural. Mamaroneck Public Library. FIGURE 6.1 The cover of [Samuel Seabury]. Free Thoughts on the Proceedings of the Continental Congress … in a Letter to the Farmers …, 1774. FIGURE 6.2 Charles Willson Peale (1741–1827). George Washington . ca. 1779–1781. oil on canvas. 95 × 61¾ in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. Gift of Collis P. Huntington, 1897 (97.33). FIGURE 6.3 John Trumbull (1756–1843). The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776 . 1786–1820. Oil on canvas. 20⅞ × 31 in. Yale University Art Gallery. Trumbull Collection, 1832.3. FIGURE 6.4 Stone walls are common in wooded areas of Westchester County and other parts of the Northeast where rocky soil led early settlers to build “sheep fence” as they cleared the land for planting. The fences served to contain animals and to define property boundaries. FIGURE 6.5 The Eleazor Gedney Cemetery, Mamaroneck, New York, is entirely surrounded by an Interstate 95 cloverleaf entrance/exit ramp, just visible in the background. FIGURE 7.1 Map of Mamaroneck, 1797, showing Captain Gray's house. Drawn by nineteenth-century historian Edward Delancey from a manuscript map found in New York State records in Albany. FIGURE 7.2 Sanborn Map of Mamaroneck, New York, 1919, showing the Louis Block property. FIGURE 7.3 Sanborn Map of Mamaroneck, New York, 1934, showing the property after Harry Rich Mooney had developed the neighborhood and sold his remaining empty lots at the onset of the Great Depression. FIGURE 7.4 Larchmont Gables as shown in Mooney's Megaphone in 1928. FIGURE 7.5 The cover of Mooney's Megaphone newsletter promoted the residential real estate development of Harry Rich Mooney in 1928. FIGURE 7.6 Artist's rendering in Mooney's Megaphone of the proposed apartment building where my house is today. The drawing shows the sliced-off corner of the building, designed to accommodate the rock outcropping, in the left foreground. FIGURE 7.7 A page from Mooney's Megaphone depicting four of the houses Harry Rich Mooney offered for sale in November 1927. FIGURE 7.8 The Gainsborough, one of Mooney's houses, in 2011. FIGURE 7.9 Harry Rich Mooney's bronze “Seal of Integrity” appeared somewhere on each of his houses. FIGURE 7.10 Sanborn Map of Mamaroneck, New York, 1963. After the real estate development of the 1920s, the greatest changes in the neighborhood took place in the fifteen years following the Second World War. FIGURE 7.11 Sanborn Map of Mamaroneck, New York, 2003. The neighborhood has changed little since the early 1960s. FIGURE 8.1 Map graphically summarizes the 250-year boundary dispute between Connecticut and New York. FIGURE 9.1 Edward Steichen (1879–1973). The Pond—Moonrise , 1904. Platinum print with applied color, 15⅝ × 19 in., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1933 (33.43.40). FIGURE 9.2 Author's letter to the editor of the New York Times . FIGURE 10.1 The rock in four seasons. FIGURE 10.2 A view looking down on the top surface of the rock. The 48-inch measuring stick is centered in the rectangle marked by four broken vertical stakes. From the center point, marked by the rectangular block of rock, strings extend out to nine of the ten stakes on the periphery of the rock. The tenth stake, off toward the left, was found later. The strings mark the angles and the roughly symmetrical placement of the stakes. FIGURE 10.3 A stake, about twelve inches long with the eyehole visible. FIGURE 10.4 A bird's-eye-view schematic drawing of the rock indicating its orientation, its relationship to the house, and the location of the ten stakes. FIGURE 10.5 Plane-spotting in White Plains, New York. The tower stood on Partridge Road, now in a fully developed residential neighborhood. Travis Collection, Westchester County Historical Society. FIGURE 10.6 D. W. Griffith shooting under lights for Way Down East in Mamaroneck in 1921. FIGURE 10.7 A production still from Griffith's Orphans of the Storm , 1921. Here Mamaroneck has been turned into a 1793 Paris street scene. FIGURE 10.8 John Warner Barber (1798–1885). Bolton Stone Quarry . 1838. Ink on paper. 9 × 12 cm. FIGURE 10.9 Rawlins Grey Sandstone Quarry,