The Cedars: Gilded Age residence for a century thrives today

This aerial photo by Robert Yarnall Richie, ca. 1932-36, shows the snow enveloped Moller mansion in its 10-acre park-like setting The Cedars while owned by newspaper publisher and attorney John Holliday Perry. (Robert Yarnall Richie Photograph Collection, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University Libraries)

The Cedars is one of the few Gilded Age mansions in the lower Hudson River Valley which survives in private hands today.

The estate stands at 830 South Broadway in Tarrytown, though it was in Irvington when it was first built and was still referred to colloquially as part of Irvington into the middle of the 20th century. It was built by Irvington real estate mogul Edmund Edwin Coffin (1844-1928) in 1854.

Coffin owned the small estate “Repose” a couple of blocks south of The Cedars on North Broadway in Irvington.

The second owner of The Cedars was the one with whose name it became synonymous, William Moller. But it was Greenwich Village dry goods merchant John Daniell Jr., son of an English immigrant made good, and publisher/attorney John Holliday Perry Sr. who longest associated with the estate.

Moller (1817-1897), a German-born sugar merchant, was a key player in the 19th century U.S. sugar industry. After gaining experience in sugar refineries in London, Boston and New York, Moller made his fortune by inventing the machine that cut sugar into cubes as well as a high quality sugar filtering device and a way to re-use filter carbon, known as bone black, cutting costs in the sugar-processing industry.

Moller was at one time in partnership with sugar moguls W.F. & F.C. Havemeyer in the firm Havemeyer & Moller -- who themselves were later in business with Moller’s Irvington Gilded Age estate neighbor Franz Otto Matthiessen as part of the so-called “Sugar Trust.”

Later, Moller founded William Moller & Sons Steam Sugar Refiners and by the end of the Civil War (1865) the company was producing 17 million pounds of sugar a year, valued at $2.8 million per year ($43.4 million today).

But Moller’s business ran into financial problems, prompting an 1875 New York Times story about its creditworthiness or lack thereof. In 1876 his estate was in foreclosure and he was forced to work for the shipping firm founded by his cross-Broadway neighbor Moses H. Grinnell. Grinnell, Minturn & Co. dominated the shipping industry before the Civil War, controlling a fleet of some 50 sailing ships.

This 1872 hand-drawn map by J.B. Beers shows the William Moller estate "The Cedars" immediately north of Sunnyside Lane (horizontal main road) and just east of South Broadway (vertical main road). (J.B Beers & Co. 1872, David Rumsey Map Collection)

By 1881, the property, its 12,000-square-foot Gothic Revival stone mansion and carriage house were in the name of Moller’s brother Peter, also a sugar refiner, who died in 1879. Peter's heirs sold it to Baltimore physician Arthur Gerard Watts (1861-1888). Watts died of tuberculosis at age 27 in 1888 and his widow Lucy B. (Hollstein) Watts (1861-1926) took control into the early 20th century. Mrs. Watts was an absentee owner who appears to have leased the estate to Gustav Henry Schwab.

Schwab was a shipping agent whose Oerlichs & Co. represented the powerful German firm North German Lloyd Steamship Company. He summered on the estate before moving to Scarborough. His main home was in the Fordham section of Westchester County at the time, now the Bronx. His house, called South Hall, stood on what became New York University's University Heights campus in the Bronx. It's now part of the Bronx Community College campus.

Dry goods merchant Daniell, a remarried widower, then took up residence on the estate with his second wife, Nellie, and his adult children from his late wife Katherine. The Daniell family would own the property for most of the first quarter of the 20th century.

Daniell's father, John Sr., emigrated to the United States at age 15 from England in 1836 and founded the family's dry good store John Daniell & Sons in Manhattan. The store, a forerunner of today's big box department stores, would be located at 759 Broadway, the corner of East 8th Street and Broadway, after its founding in 1867.

Daniell inherited the business upon his father's death in 1902 and maintained his property in southern Tarrytown until his death at age 80 in 1927. His heirs were his widow Nellie and his surviving children, Colonel John F. Daniell, Major Griswold B. Daniell and Katherine Daniell Piersall. The children were left to run the family's department store business.

The Moller Mansion at 830 South Broadway, Tarrytown, is the historic centerpiece of the Edmund Edwin Coffin estate “The Cedars,” built in 1854 and repurposed for office use from the mid-1950s on. According to the management company that owns it, the mansion features 18 private offices on 10 acres, boasts large french doors, patios, balconies, hardwood floors, tall ceilings, fireplaces with marble mantles and ornate woodwork. (Photo courtesy Diamond Properties, dpgmt.com)

Col. Daniell had deep roots to the neighborhood besides those put down by his father. He married the widow, Vera, of his family's late neighbor Russell Fox Hopkins of the Veruselle estate on the west side of South Broadway a block or so north of Daniell's father's estate. Vera had eloped with Hopkins in 1906 at the scandalous age of 14 (reports said she was 17 at the time, but the 1910 Census and birth records say she was 14). Hopkins was 22 when they eloped. Hopkins died of pneumonia in 1919 at  35. At the time of Hopkins' death, the couple had four children ranging in age from 1 to 10.

Vera died three months after her new father-in-law, in February 1928. She was 36 and left her second husband a widower. Her four children from her marriage with Hopkins ranged from 10 to 19 at the time of her death. She left an estate valued at more than $7 million ($108 million today) with half going to Col. Daniell and the rest equally divided among her children, about $13.5 million each in today's money.

The Daniell family sold the estate shortly after John's 1927 death to newspaper publisher and attorney John Holliday Perry Sr. who wintered at an estate in Palm Beach, Fla., and eventually owned six daily and 15 weekly newspapers in Florida, including the Palm Beach Post.

The estate remained in private hands until after Perry's death in 1952, allowing the Moller mansion to avoid the wrecker’s ball that claimed so many Hudson Valley Gilded Age properties. 

After Perry's demise, the estate would become a commercial property. It became the corporate headquarters of Duracell, Inc., the North Tarrytown-based division of Mallory Corp., which manufactured state of the art batteries, and eventually became part of Kraft General Foods Inc. A modern 29,000-square-foot building was built on the property in the mid-1950s as the offices of World Publishing Co., publisher of authors including Michael Crichton, Ayn Rand, Robert Ludlum and Rex Stout. The estate's old coach house/garage was repurposed for professional use. The entire property was sold to the American Booksellers Association in 1993.

The Booksellers group used some of the space on the property and rented out the rest before selling the entire estate to Diamond Properties in the early 2010s. Diamond Properties now rents out offices on the estate, including the 18 private offices in the Moller mansion, which stands on 10 landscaped acres at 830 South Broadway.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: The estates on both sides of South Broadway north of Sunnyside Lane -- Sunnyside, the estate of Washington Irving, Irvington’s namesake among them -- were originally thought of as Irvington properties. That was before Tarrytown absorbed all those properties in its incorporation as a village in 1870, beating Irvington to the punch by two years. Irvington's northern border became Sunnyside Lane, belying the fact that the Irvington Union Free School District draws students from as far north as the Pennybridge section of southern Tarrytown and some unincorporated areas of the Town of Greenburgh.

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