Charlton Hall: Financier, grain merchant, visionary David Dows' Irvington legacy

Charlton Hall, the mansion and 35-acre summer estate of grain merchant David Dows off today’s Dows Lane (once Terrace Avenue) in Irvington, is pictured in 1880. The house was razed in 1941 by owner Adam K. Luke. Parts of what was the estate are now the sites of Dows Lane Elementary School and Half Moon Co-op Apartments. (Irvington Public Library, Local History Collection)

If you lived in Irvington and attended Dows Lane Elementary School or lived in the Half Moon Co-op Apartments, you might not know those sites were originally home to the Charlton Hall mansion and 35-acre estate of renowned grain dealer David Dows (1814-1890).

The estate was named after Dows' native Charlton, N.Y., a small hamlet in Saratoga County, north of Schenectady.

Dows came to Irvington shortly after his sister's son John Dows Mairs, a partner in his uncle's firm, had built his own estate called Lynwood of about 20 acres immediately north of what would become Charlton Hall shortly after the end of the Civil War; Dows followed in 1870.

Mairs would go on to found the Thompson & Mairs brokerage firm.

This is an undated photo of the Lynwood mansion of John Dows Mairs. (Photo courtesy Irvington Public Library, Local History Collection)

The Mairs and Dows estates, combined, encompass all the land on which Dows Lane Elementary School and its athletic fields, as well as Half Moon stand today. Mairs' property was split after his death by 1890, with his eldest son, Edwin Hays Mairs, taking the northern third. Their estates ran east from the river to about today's El Retiro Lane and north to near the ends of Willow, Oak and Maple streets, today's Spiro Park neighborhood. At the time, Spiro Park was the 30-acre Rosedale estate of Danford Newton Barney, who bought it in 1860 from Theodore McNamee.

This 1893 map shows the estates of the heirs of David Dows, (who had died three years earlier), his nephew John D. Mairs and Mairs' son Edwin H. Mairs, north of West Clinton Avenue, east of the Hudson River (left), and south of Danford Newton Barney's estate (today's Spiro Park and Barney Park. The acreages of the lands shown do not include acreage under the Hudson River west of the railroad tracks. (Joseph Rudolf Biens map, David Rumsey Map Collection)

The estate included an extravagant landscape designed by the firm of Frederick Law Olmsted —- he designed Manhattan's Central Park — woven throughout a series of buildings that included a gate house, coach house, stables, gardening shed and separate horse and hen yards.

The 1886 book "History of Westchester County, New York, which includes Morrisania, Kings Bridge and West Farms, which have been annexed to New York City," by J. Thomas Scharf (L.E. Preston & Co., Philadelphia) mentions Charlton Hall and Lynwood. Lynwood had yet to be divided into a separate property for Edwin Mairs:

"[Charlton Hall] is a massive stone house built and occupied by Mr. David Dows as a country residence. It is a two-story edifice, and the stone used in erecting it was quarried in the immediate neighborhood, on the 207-acre property of entrepreneur Charles Harriman [on nearby Harriman Road]. The situation is exceedingly pleasant, being near the river, toward which the well-kept grounds gradually descend. To a spectator from without, the most remarkable feature about the house is it great solidity, combined with its great size. It was completed in the summer of 1870 ..."

The Dow family kept a costly art collection including Frederic Edwin Church's masterpiece oil-on-canvas The Heart of the Andes (pictured), now property of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Image courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Harriman's estate, which later became Richmond Hill, extended from South Broadway east along the south side of the road that would later bear his name — Harriman Road — and past today's Irvington Reservoir and south to Terrace Avenue, today's Dows Lane.

Scharf goes on to describe Lynwood:

"Adjoining the grounds of Mr. Dows, on the north, is the somewhat smaller but very attractive residence of Mrs. John D. Mairs [by then a widow]. The house ... stands upon the site of the old British encampment in the Revolution."

The Odell Tavern, shown c. 1930, still stands a few blocks west of what would become John Dow Mairs' Lynwood country estate in Irvington. (Photo courtesy Westchester County Historical Society)

Scharf was referring to earlier reports that British soldiers in 1776, likely after the Battle of White Plains, had fallen back to land leased by Captain William Buckhout of the Philipsburg Manor plantation (later to become Irvington) and camped not far from the tavern of Patriot Capt. John Odell, which still stands at the southwest corner of Dows Lane and South Broadway (100 S. Broadway) today just a couple blocks west of what would become Lynwood.

The loss at the Oct. 26 Battle of White Plains forced Gen. George Washington's Continental Army to abandon New York and New Jersey to the British.

Dows was a member of a distinguished Colonial America family. His father, Eleazer, a fifth-generation American, joined the Continental Army in 1779 at age 15. He was serving at West Point when American General Benedict Arnold’s betrayal was discovered by General George Washington.

Dows was the 11th of veteran Eleazer Dow’s 12 children.

The family, also known as Dowse, emigrated to Massachusetts in 1630 from Essex, England and were involved in the founding of Boston.

The Corn Exchange Bank building at 81-85 E. 125th St. in Harlem at the northwest
corner of Park Avenue is located next to the Metro-North Railroad's 125th Street Station. It's shown here shortly after its 1883-84 construction when it was known as the Mount Morris Bank Building. Only the lower two floors — the semi-basement and first floor— were used for business at the time. The top four floors were used for private residences until they were turned into office space towards the end of the century. The building was abandoned in the 1970s and mostly destroyed by fire in 1997. For safety, the top floors were demolished and only the bottom two floors survived. The entire building was rebuilt and reopened in 2015. (Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

David Dows, 20, began making his mark in 1834, joining a grain and produce firm in which his elder brother, John Dows, was a partner. John was the second oldest boy in a farming family of 12 children — six girls and six boys. David was the youngest son and 11th child. David Dows stuck with John when John formed a new firm with Ira B. Cary in 1836 and David was soon elevated to partner. He continued to move up the ladder when John died in 1844 and later Cary became ill and left day-to-day operations to David. Cary died in 1854 leaving David Dows as the sole surviving partner, the firm renamed David Dows & Co.

Dows organized the Corn Exchange Bank — its headquarters still stands as a rebuilt Harlem landmark at 81-85 E. 125th St. in New York — and he was heavily involved in the successful supply chain for the Union army during the Civil War. His support for the war effort was unquestioned. While never a politician, he was a staunch Republican behind President Abraham Lincoln's crusade to end slavery and return the breakaway states of the Confederacy to the Union.

His visionary use of railroads and construction of grain elevators into the western U.S. and his support of the founding of five banks — the Corn Exchange, Fourth National, Central Trust and Merchant's banks in New York and Union National Bank in Chicago — eased federal borrowing and spending issues and were part of the Lincoln administration's institution of a National Banking System in 1863 to establish a uniform federal currency, the so-called greenback, introduced on March 10, 1862. The greenback was the government's first official paper currency and was not backed by silver or gold, just the government's credit.

The schooner David Dows, shown on a postcard of the era, was built in Toledo, Ohio in 1881 and named after grain merchant David Dows of Irvingon. Here she’s pictured picking up a load of grain at a Union Railroad Elevator Co. grain elevator in Toledo in 1882. The schooner was the only five-masted ship to ever sail the Great Lakes. She wrecked on Lake Michigan in 42 feet of water 10 miles southeast of Chicago harbor on Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 29, 1889. Fortunately, her crew all survived.

Dows and wife Margaret Esther Worcester Dows, who already maintained a mansion at 1 East 69th Street at Fifth Avenue in Manhattan directly across the street from Central Park (which was built in 1858), built Charlton Hall as a country residence in 1870, David died at the Manhattan residence in 1890, Margaret in 1909. Margaret inherited Dows’ entire estate valued at $30 million in 1890, $864 million in today’s dollars. The estate was put up for sale shortly after her death on Feb. 3, 1909 and purchased by the family of Edward Henry (E.H.) Harriman, president of both the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific railroads. His son, W. Averell Harriman, would become 48th governor of New York, secretary of commerce to President Harry S Truman and ambassador to both the Soviet Union (1943-46) and Great Britain (1946).

This was the house built for David Dows at 1 E. 69th St., corner of Fifth Avenue, overlooking Central Park. The mansion's entrance was within the portico on 69th Street (center right in photo). To the mansion's far right is its carriage house with an enclosed garden in between the two buildings. (King's Views of New York City, A.D. 1903, public domain. Photo courtesy Tom Miller, Daytonian in Manhattan)

Dows business interests also included the Produce Exchange at 2 Broadway, Manhattan, which grew out of the Corn Exchange The Produce Exchange dealt in commodities futures including flour, grain, cotton, oil and steamship trades. In late 1860s, he became involved with the creation of Manhattan's first elevated rail system, which was replaced in 1872 by the New York Elevated Railroad Company of which he was an investor and treasurer. He later held the same position in the Metropolitan Elevated Railway Company. The first operated lines on Third and Ninth avenues, the latter on Sixth Avenue (the Avenue of the Americas today).

The elevated lines were New York's attempt to reclaim its streets from the ever dangerous ground level trains that threatened the lives of pedestrian and horses alike on a daily basis.

They also helped turn New York into the city that never sleeps: By 1881, the Third Avenue Line and and the Sixth Avenue Line were both running trains 24 hours a day and seven days a week.

A steam engine pulls a train in 1886 on the New York Elevated Railroad's Sixth Avenue Line
in Manhattan. David Dows was an original investor in and treasurer of the railroad. (Public domain photo)

Charlton Hall at the time included the stone mansion, greenhouses, a barn, a lodge and outbuildings. Elliman & Co. in turn sold the estate to Adam K. Luke, owner of the West Virginia Pulp and Paper Co., in 1914.

A note in the local Irvington Gazette newspaper of the day said that all the estate employees had been laid off by real estate developer Elliman & Co. but were promptly rehired when Luke bought the place.

The Luke family lived on the property — which they renamed Devon Hall — until at least 1940. The 1940 census showed the Luke family had eight live-in employees on the estate, four in Charlton Hall itself — two maids, a waitress and a cook — and four others including a pair of chauffeurs in two outbuildings on the estate, likely the coach house and either the gatehouse or a gardener's cottage.

Luke was one of four brothers living in mansions in Irvington and Tarrytown. His brother John Guthrie Luke lived on North Broadway in Irvington in the former estate of S.C. Millett, a one-time owner of what is now the Atlanta Braves Major League Baseball team. The former estate at 100 N. Broadway is now home to non-profit Abbott House, a charity that benefits foster children and adults with developmental disabilities.

Another brother, David Lincoln Luke, lived at Maplehurst in Tarrytown which today lies in the footprint of the Tappan Zee Bridge east entrance complex. The fourth brother, Thomas Luke, lived at Braemar, a 17.5-acre estate at the northeast intersection of Broadway and White Plains Road in Tarrytown. Thomas' 1905-build Colonial Revival brick mansion is the only one of those owned by the four brothers that remains today, albeit as an office building and only on 4.5 acres of the former estate that lay east of the Old Croton Aqueduct, at 99 White Plains Road, Tarrytown.

The brothers were all pulp and paper manufacturing company executives of the West Virginia Pulp and Paper Co., founded by their father, Scottish immigrant William Luke.

After several mergers and acquisitions, the company is now known as WestRock, a corrugated packaging company. It was formed in July 2015 after merger with MeadWestvaco (the successor company to West Virginia Pulp and Paper) and RockTen. WestRock was then acknowledged as the second largest American packaging company and one of the world's largest paper and packaging companies with $15 billion in annual revenue and 42,000 employees in 30 countries.

This gray fieldstone gatehouse stood at the entrance to David Dow's estate, Charlton Hall, after the estate's construction in 1860.The gatehouse and coach house were both converted into private residences after the estate’s glory days and survive today. The gatehouse is pictured c. 1960. (Irvington Public Library, Local History Collection)

The house was demolished in 1941 by Luke, as property taxes soared and the approximately 35-acre estate — 8-1/2 of those acres being reserved underwater land in the Hudson River west of the railroad tracks — became irresistible to developers.

This is a photo of an oil-on-linen painting of grain merchant David Dows released one year after his death by artist Eastman Johnson. Dows died in 1890. (New York Historical Society Museum & Library)

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