Linden Court: Estate with roots in tobacco lives on as Tarrytown House

Pictured is the Mary Duke Biddle Mansion Linden Court.The mansion was built by American Tobacco Company executive William R. Harris in 1895 of granite quarried nearby and was originally named Grey Court. (Tarrytown House Estate & Conference Center, Tarrytown, N.Y.)

The Tarrytown House Estate & Conference Center comprises what were once three Gilded Age estates: Malkasten of famed landscape artist Albert Bierstadt; Uplands of broker James S. Cronise; and Grey Court of American Tobacco Company executive William R. Harris.

It was tobacco heiress Mary Duke Biddle who brought the estates together for a final time in 1960 and together they make up the Tarrytown House Estate campus purchased by former Time and Harper's magazine writer and editor Robert Schwartz, who used it as the site of the nation’s first corporate conference center.

Bierstadt's Malkasten mansion was destroyed by fire on Nov. 10, 1882 and was never rebuilt. Its land was rolled into Cronise's Uplands estate next door.

Video presentation on the Biddle Mansion Linden Court.

Uplands was the white Georgian home now known as King Mansion. It was built around 1840 by Cronise and had several owners before Thomas M. King, vice president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, purchased it around 1900. If you’ve ever played the Parker Brothers’ board game Monopoly, you’ve likely landed on the B&O Railroad square.

King, a Pennsylvania native, had enlisted in the Union Army at the start of the Civil War and served primarily in the military railroad service of the Army of the Potomac, taking part in the transportation of troops and supplies during the conflict that proved key to ultimate victory.

In 1895, American Tobacco’s Harris bought the site of what became the Duke Biddle Mansion. He used local granite to build the stone house that is the focal point of Tarrytown House Estate today. He named his new estate “Grey Court.”

Shortly after, Thomas King’s son Frederick married Harris’ daughter Sybil and the couple reigned over both estates until the fabulously wealthy heiress Mary Lillian Duke Biddle of the Duke tobacco family of North Carolina -- for whom Duke University is named -- purchased the granite mansion from the Kings and renamed her part of the estate Linden Court in recognition of the linden trees on the property.

Video presentation on the King Mansion, "Uplands."

Mary Duke Biddle’s net worth in 1912 was estimated at $60 million (approximately $1 billion today). Before she married for the first and only time, she was engaged in 1912 to Italian/Spanish nobleman Prince Ludovic Pignatelli d'Aragon. It was a match better canceled: the well-known playboy prince some 30 years later was charged in the U.S. with attempting to extort $500,000 from a cousin's ex-wife. His threat? He said he'd tell the world that his cousin didn't have the right to call himself prince and the ex-wife therefore couldn't continue to call herself princess.

Mary Biddle imported pink clay from France for a glass-roofed indoor full-size championship tennis court she built in 1933. She also had a bowling alley installed on the lower level of the mansion and a golf tee built off the West Terrace. The tennis court featured its own lounge, kitchen and dressing rooms. Her 60-foot lighted swimming pool featured a large cabana encompassing several rooms as well. The estate also included four heated greenhouses, three staff houses and an assortment of other smaller buildings, garages and apartments.

The King Mansion “Uplands” (pictured) was built and owned by broker James S. "J.S." Cronise, ca. 1840. (Tarrytown House Estate & Conference Center)

Mary Biddle and her husband from 1915 to 1931, Anthony Joseph Drexel Biddle Jr., hosted famously lavish parties. Tony Biddle, later a U.S. ambassador and U.S. Army Major General, was at various times U.S. ambassador to Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, Yugoslavia, Norway, Czechoslovakia and Poland -- most to their governments-in-exile while occupied by Nazi Germany. He was appointed by Democrat U.S. presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. He served in the Army in both World War I and World War II.

Sybil and Frederick Harris lived in the King House as neighbors to Mary Biddle after the Biddles’ divorce in 1931 and until Sybil’s death in 1955. The story goes that the ghost of Sybil continues to walk the halls of the King Mansion today, making it a popular stop for hunters of the haunted every Halloween.

Like many of their neighbors on country estates, the Kings occasionally opened Uplands' formal gardens to the public as part of the early May Westchester County Children's Association Garden Day series. The garden was notable for its statuary, fish ponds, arbors and terracing.

In 1959, Mary Biddle bought the King House and reunited the two estates. She died in 1960 and she and ex-husband Anthony Biddle's children, Nicholas and Mary, sold Linden Court to the government of the Republic of Mali, the newly independent former French colony in Africa. Mali which used the estate briefly as a diplomatic retreat center.

This is an aerial view of the “Uplands” (white building upper right corner obscured by trees) and “Linden Court” (center) estates, ca. 1932-36. (Robert Yarnall Richie Photograph Collection, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University)

The estate sold for a reported $525,000, well under the $750,000 Mary Biddle paid to rebuild just the Linden Court mansion itself after it was destroyed by a 1955 fire.

Robert Schwartz bought the combined estate and opened it in 1964 as the Tarrytown House Conference Center.

This 1908 map of the border of Irvington and Tarrytown shows the proximity of the William Harris and Thomas King estates Grey Court and Uplands, respectively. The road to the left of the estates is South Broadway, to the bottom is East Sunnyside Lane and the black-and-white line to the far left is the Old Croton Aqueduct State Historic Park trail. The name Helen at top right refers to Helen Miller Gould and her Lyndhurst estate which ran from the Hudson River (not pictured) to the west (left) of Broadway and east of Broadway into unincorporated Town of Greenburgh land. (E. Belcher & Hyde, Publisher. 1908. Historic Map Works)

Visitors to the estate while Schwartz owned it included artist Andy Warhol and cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead. Well-known film critic and 50-year Columbia University School of Journalism adjunct professor Judith Crist from 1971 to 2006 hosted regular "Judith Crist Film Weekends" for about 200 people at a clip at Tarrytown House featuring guests from the movie industry including Jack Lemmon, Charlton Heston, Robert Redford, Lee Marvin and Sylvester Stallone among many others. 

AUTHOR’S NOTES: Remarkably, three of the mansions once called home by Mary Lillian Duke Biddle still exist. You've heard the story of Linden Court, but her one-time home on Fifth Avenue is one of just nine Gilded Age houses of that period to still exist. It was built at 1009 Fifth Avenue at East 82nd Street between 1899 and 1901 and purchased by her father, American Tobacco Co. chairman Benjamin Newton Duke, and given to her ca. 1920. If you've ever been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you've seen it. It's directly across Fifth Avenue from the museum's main entrance.

The Benjamin N. Duke House remained in the hands of Mary and Tony's daughter Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans (1920-2012) until 2006, undergoing a major restoration in 1986. It most recently has been in the hands of Mexican telecom billionaire Carlos Slim -- at the time the richest person in the world -- since 2010 when he purchased it for $44 million. He's had the eight-story, 20,000-square-foot Beaux-Arts mansion on the market for $80 million since 2015.

Mary Duke Biddle's estate, Pinecrest, in Durham, N.C., also stands today. ...

* Click here for links to dozens of other Gilded Age stories by this author.

In this video, Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans reflects on her years

living in the Benjamin N. Duke House at 1009 Fifth Avenue at East 82nd Street opposite the Metropolitan Museum of Art.