Irving Cliff: Among last Hudson GIlded Age estates to fall to wrecker's ball

Irving Cliff, home of Eliphalet Wood, ca. 1880. (The Winterthur Decorative Arts Photographic Collection Online Resource)

Eliphalet Wood's Irving Cliff mansion and 103-acre estate was one of the last of the Gilded Age in Irvington to fall to the wrecker's ball.

Wood, known as "The Lumber King," was born in 1819 in Washington, Mass., a small town near Pittsfield in the Berkshires. He made his fortune in the lumber business based in Chicago but with its mills and landed estate in Newaygo, Mich.

His business was highly regarded for providing high quality lumber sawn to standard, dependable sizes, earning him the nickname “the lumber king.” In Chicago he was nominated to run for mayor in 1860, but declined and instead became active in Union military activity during the run-up and early years of the Civil War. His April 11, 1900 obituary in the New York Times called him "a trusted friend of President Abraham Lincoln" in its opening sentence.

After the war, Wood moved to Irvington and an estate just northeast of the intersection of Main Street and Broadway, an estate his descendants, the Wood Rutters, would own and occupy until the latter quarter of the 20th century. The northern boundary of the estate flanked the old Immaculate Conception Roman Catholic Church and rectory.

Joseph Ormsby Rutter (2nd from right, receding hairline) holds daughter Caroline, known as Daisy, at the family estate, Irving Cliff, ca. 1883. The other people in the photo are not identified, although the woman standing is likely Rutter’s wife, Caroline, and the girl at far left his daughter, Esther. (Irvington Public Library, Local History Collection)

While in Irvington, Wood served two terms as president of the Board of Education -- today's mayor -- and was involved as an investor and manager with one of the nation’s first farm equipment manufacturers, Walter A. Wood Mowing and Reaping Machine Co., based in Hoosick Falls, N.Y. The company became the nation’s largest farm implement manufacturer by the 1890s.

Wood and his wife, Mary Grant, had eight children, only one of whom, Caroline, survived into adulthood. They named their Irvington estate “Irving Cliff,” presumably to honor famed local author Washington Irving and to acknowledge the dramatic Hudson River views from their lofty hill perch.

The stone carriage house/stable of Irving Cliff is pictured ca. 1960. The estate was a working farm throughout the 1960s as well as a residence. (Irvington Public Library, Local History Collection.)

When J. Wood Rutter died, his unmarried sisters Caroline -- who went by the nickname Daisy -- and Esther remained at Irving Cliff. Esther died in 1959 at 81, leaving Daisy the last of the siblings to live on the estate. She died at age 93 in 1973.

His other sister, Rebeckah Rutter, married well-known New York physician Eugene F. DuBois and went by the name Rebeckah Rutter DuBois.

August C. Richards' Ridgeview mansion is shown, ca. 1890, in a winter photo looking up from North Broadway across today's Riverview Road (outlined by evenly spaced pine trees running from middle  left to lower right, giving viewers an idea of the breathtaking view of the mansion. The mansion was remodeled by new owner Isaac Stern at the turn of the 20th century, becoming a crenellated stone "castle" in the process. Partially visible middle right of the photo in the junction of a deciduous tree trunk and its first branch is Irving Cliff, the mansion of Eliphalet Wood. The two mansions survived well into the 20th century with Stern Castle falling to fire and the wrecker's ball in the early 1960s and Irving Cliff facing the same demise in the mid-1980s. (From the collection of the Museum of the City of New York)

To give an idea of the types of furnishings Irving Cliff featured in its heyday, it's worth taking a look at a news item journalist Rita Reif reported in the July 8, 1983 edition of The New York Times:

"Decoratie arts from Victorian times and later will be in the spotlight next week at two of New York's art-auction houses," Reif wrote. "Highlighting a sale next Wednesday at 10 A.M. at the William Doyle Galleries, 175 East 87th Street, is an 11-piece suite of Victorian parlor furniture made after the Civil War, for a house in Irvington, N.Y.

"The Louis XVI-revival-style suite is expected to sell for more than 10 times the original cost of $704.80. Consisting of four armchairs, six side chairs and a sofa, it was ordered by Eliphalet Wood, a wood merchant, for his home, Irving Cliff, built in 1868 and still standing on Main Street in Irvington The ebony suite was ordered from Leon Marcotte, a French-trained New York cabinetmaker who designed the pieces to fit floral-patterned Aubusson tapestry coverings that Wood bought in Paris in the year the house was built.

"Copies of correspondence between the cabinetmaker and his client, and of bills for the suite and the tapestry shipment, will accompany the sale. The suite, consigned by Wood's descendants, is expected to sell for as much as $9,000. Other lots from the same family include a carved square Steinway piano in rosewood, which may bring up to $1,200; a Victorian rosewood four-poster bed (up to $1,200), and a megalethoscope -- a kind of stereoscope with a huge magnifying lens - with 36 glass transparencies, which Wood bought in Venice in 1868 (up to $1,800)."

The Wood Rutter heirs sold Irving Cliff to developers in 1983 and it was destroyed by  fire a short time afterward.

To be permitted rezoning that would allow for a mixed townhouse/single-family home development called Fieldpoint on the estate, developers agreed to donate 50 acres of the property as undeveloped land for village and community use. Today it makes up a part of the Irvington Woods.

The Fieldpoint neighborhood of 95 townhomes and 63 single-family houses off Fieldpoint Drive is accessed by an entrance on the east side of Broadway across from the top of Main Street.

A derelict Irving Cliff is shown in a 1976 photo three years after the death of the last of the Wood Rutter family siblings, Daisy, in 1973 at age 93. (Westchester County Historical Society photo)