Beechlawn: Harper's Weekly publisher, U.S. senator among its notable owners

Union Army soldiers welcome cartoonist Thomas Nast's iconic
Santa Claus to the front lines of the Civil War in January 1863
on the cover of Fletcher Harper's "Harper's Weekly."

Publisher Fletcher Harper (1806-1877) was the founder of Harper’s Weekly, Harper’s Magazine and Harper’s Bazaar. He gave famed cartoonist Thomas Nast his start in Harper's Weekly encouraging Nast’s nascent creativity by giving him vast editorial freedom.

Harper's Irvington estate, Beechlawn, was where he, his wife and two sons summered for many years. Beechlawn stood at the southwestern corner of West Clinton Avenue and South Broadway.

Fletcher Harper, ca. 1870. (Photo illustration by William Kurtz,
New York Public Library Digital Collection)

Harper's Weekly rose to fame during the Civil War because of Nast's depiction of the war. It was called by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, "The greatest recruiter for the United States military." Harper's Weekly was also responsible for publishing the first modern image of Santa Claus (drawn by Nast).

Beechlawn (some references call it Beech Lawn or even Beach Lawn), was an eight-acre estate with a 20-room, five-bathroom Colonial frame mansion. The estate included a garage with servants’ quarters and a gate lodge.

The estate, by this time renamed Hillingdon Terrace, was sold in 1927 by the family of real estate investor and advertising executive George Augustus Prince Oliver, who had purchased the estate from Edward Livingston Coster in the early 1920s after renting it from him for several years.

Coster, who lived on the property with his wife, Frances Lurman (Stewart) Coster, and their seven children, had purchased it from Harper's family in the late 19th century and left it to move to a larger estate called White Hall in Katonah, N.Y., that they purchased in 1913.

Edward Livingston Coster, ca. 1910

Edward L. Coster was a direct descendant of Francis Lewis, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and Lewis' son Morgan, a former governor of New York. A student of mathematics and science, Coster made a name for himself in the field of locomotive engineering during the age of railroading and taught the subject as an unpaid faculty member at Columbia University from 1898 to 1900. His compensation was his love of the subject. He was not known to have ever been compensated for his expertise in the subject because he was financially independent, born into wealth.

This is a satellite view of the former Beechlawn estate of Fletcher Harper and later Hillingdon Terrace property of the Oliver family next to Columbia University's Nevis estate. The Beechlawn mansion is long gone, its footprint south of West Clinton Avenue, west of South Broadway and east of the Old Croton Trailway State Park hosts maintenance facilities for Nevis today. (Google Maps)

Oliver's 1915 marriage to the younger former Florence Hill Buysse made headlines in New York after it was learned she had granted her first husband, Armand Buysse of St. Louis, a divorce only two weeks earlier. Armand Buysse, who taught languages, claimed his wife had abandoned him two years prior to the divorce, a claim Mrs. Buysse did not contest.

The society pages were hooked. It turned out Mrs. Buysse, before her marriage to Buysse some 15 years earlier, had been engaged to Oliver when both lived in St. Louis. Neither Oliver nor Mrs. Buysse explained why their first engagement ended, Oliver telling the papers merely that his new wife's marriage to Buysse was an unhappy one.

Oliver had left St. Louis, first for Chicago, later for New York, after Florence wed Buysse. Florence was 40 when she finally married Oliver, 49, but they did have a son, George Jr., in 1918. Oliver Sr. became stepfather to Florence's children with Buysse, who lived with the Olivers in Irvington.

The Olivers maintained a second summer home with Florence's Hill family members in Rye Beach, N.H. and the Olivers relocated to the New Hampshire property after selling Hillingdon Terrace.

Beechlawn was then sold twice in less than two years, finally to future Republican U.S. Sen. Thomas Coleman du Pont of Delaware. Du Pont added it to his Nevis estate next door in 1928. Du Pont was president of E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company and with a partner owned three of the nation’s foremost hotels: the Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan, the WIllard in Washington and the Bellevue-Stratford in Philadelphia.

Du Pont was appointed to the U.S. Senate in 1921 to fill out an unexpired term, lost a bid to complete that term in a special election in 1922, but was elected to his own six-year term in 1924 but was forced to resign in December 1927 when he was diagnosed with cancer of the throat, the disease that would go on to cost him his life in November 1930.

He died of cancer in 1930 and his widow, Alice, donated Nevis -- then known as Nevis Farms because of the du Ponts' use of the property as agricultural land -- and adjoining Beechlawn to Columbia University in 1935. Nevis has been the property of Columbia since then.

This 1881 hand-drawn map shows the Fletcher Harper estate, which was known as Beechlawn, at the southwest intersection of West Clinton Avenue and South Broadway. The estate was later incorporated into the larger Nevis estate to its south which was owned in 1881 by descendants of the family of Founding Father Alexander Hamilton. The Hudson River, now shown, would be located below Nevis. The Joseph Stiner property next to Harper's, remains the site of Irvington's famed Octagon House, or Armour-Stiner House, today. (David Rumsey Historical Maps Collection, G.W. Bromley publisher, 1881)

The property's use as a farm was referred to in a newspaper article that mentioned the shipment of a large number of livestock to the property from the du Pont farm in Delaware in September 1920. Mrs. du Pont was repeatedly mentioned in the local Irvington Gazette newspaper for donating milk from Nevis for use by patients and staff at the nearby Dobbs Ferry Hospital.

Interestingly, du Pont's widow was also a du Pont by birth. She was his second cousin, Alice du Pont, and married him in 1889. Du Pont himself seemingly preferred the honorific "general" over "senator" and was generally referred to as Gen. Coleman du Pont during most of his years in Irvington. The title referred to his position as Brigadier General in the Delaware National Guard under five Delaware governors.

U.S. Sen. Thomas Coleman du Pont, R-Del., ca. 1922. Du Pont, who went by the name Gen. Coleman du Pont and owned the neighboring Nevis estate, added the former Fletcher Harper estate Beechlawn to the Nevis property in 1928 before his family donated the combined properties to Columbia University in 1934. (Wikimedia Commons)

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