Ilda House: Home to the brewer who brought Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees

This is the landscaped view from the Hudson River looking uphill, east, at the rear of the Victorian Ilda House, built ca. 1865. The house stands today at 80 Church Street in Tarrytown. It is believed to have been moved to its present Church Street location from the old Colonel Jacob Ruppert Jr. estate one-half mile south off South Broadway. The house has been extensively remodeled and divided into five condominium apartments ranging from about 800 square feet to about 2,400 square feet, and has porches, decks and views of the nearby river. The house's original location was similarly elevated likely with very similar river views. (Photo from Trulia.com)

Ilda House was an intriguing estate with ties to a pseudo princess and a pseudo sultan -- “Princess” Josephine del Drago, and the man who brought the“Sultan of Swat,” Babe Ruth, to New York.

The estate began as a 13-acre slice of land three to four times as long as it was wide between the Hudson River and today's South Broadway, pre-dating the incorporation of the Village of Tarrytown.

Hand-drawn maps from 1867, 1872 and 1876 show the property featuring a house, what appears to be a stables/carriage house, a fish pond and an extensive garden owned by the widow of John Beeston Copcutt who had died at the estate in 1855.

The significance of the name Ilda House seems to have been lost to the sands of time.

On an 1881 map, the estate is in the hands of the Copcutts' son, John (1805-1895), like his father a prominent importer and manufacturer of mahogany, who played a key role in the development of the City of Yonkers.

This 1911 map shows the Ilda House estate of Jacob Ruppert Jr., a New York brewer who would go on to buy the New York Yankees in 1915. Ruppert next-door neighbor John Dustin Archbold, whose estate was named Cedar Cliff, was the wealthy right-hand man of Gilded Age robber baron John D. Rockefeller Sr. To put Ruppert’s property in perspective, it was located just south adjacent to Cedar Cliff which lay directly across South Broadway from the Roman Catholic Carmelite Church of the Transfiguration. (George Washington Bromley, 1911, David Rumsey Historical Map Collection)

The younger Copcutt’s Yonkers home, which was built in 1854, was sold and became a convent from 1900 to 1955. It has been known since 1955 as St. Casimir’s Rectory, home of the pastor and his assistants at St. Casimir Roman Catholic Church, and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

“Princess” Josephine del Drago was the remarried widow of New York City brewer August Schmid, a partner in Lion Brewery, who died in 1889. Josephine Schmid built on her late husband’s $1.2 million estate ($35 million today), keeping one daughter’s one-third share when the daughter died just after reaching her majority age of 21. Schmid's widow also managed to hang on to her second daughter’s one-third share for years before the daughter sued to get it and money realized by her mother from investments made with it.

This house at 59 Church Street, Tarrytown, is believed to have once been home to support staff, quite possibly the family of the superintendent, of the Jacob Ruppert Jr. Ilda House estate one-half mile south off South Broadway. The small house is believed to have been moved to its present location around 1950 when the estate was sold to commercial developers. (Google Maps Street View, 2018)

Mrs. Schmid lived in a Manhattan mansion at 807 Fifth Avenue (2 East 62nd Street since it was razed in 1913). It was rebuilt in 1915 and since then the site has been home to the famed Knickerbocker Club, Mrs. Schmid purchased Ilda House from John Copcutt’s heirs after his death in 1895.

The widow had turned the original $1.2 million estate of August Schmid into more than $10 million by 1908 ($288 million today) through Manhattan real estate investments and by buying out her late husband’s brewery partner’s heirs in 1903 for $1.4 million, gaining complete control of the brewery and paying herself $500,000 ($14.4 million today) per year.

Josephine Schmid eventually married Don Giovanni del Drago, member of an aristocratic, but out of power Spanish family living in Rome. Del Drago, known as “Prince” in the media, was 47 and Josephine 50 at the time of their 1909 wedding. Josephine thereafter demanded she be called princess despite the fact her husband was not a prince.

Colonel Jacob Ruppert Jr. (left) is pictured in a publicity still during a break in contract talks for the 1938 season with star New York Yankees slugger Lou Gehrig (right). Ruppert would be dead within a year, on Jan. 13, 1939. Gehrig retired on July 4, 1939 after being diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS, commonly known as Lou Gehrig's Disease. Gehrig himself would die on June 2, 1941. Ruppert owned the Yankees when the team signed Gehrig after his second year at Columbia University in Manhattan's Morningside Heights, less than two miles away from Yankee Stadium. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)

In Don Giovanni's family, titles passed only from father to eldest son and del Drago’s father, a prince by title and grandson to a former Spanish queen, was alive at the time of the marriage to Mrs. Schmid and del Drago had three older brothers in line -- with sons of their own ahead of Don Giovanni in the line of title succession -- who would have received the prince title before Don Giovanni, putting Don Giovanni about 12th in line in the succession to the title.

It should be mentioned that Don Giovanni was originally reported to be 27 at the time of marriage, his second, but that was later corrected by his family. He was 47 at the time and had a 20-year-old son from his first marriage.

Babe Ruth (foreground, left) leads his New York Yankees into the new Yankee Stadium at its grand opening on April 18, 1923. Playing against his former team, the Boston Red Sox, Ruth blasted a three-run home run in a 4-1 win that led sportswriter Fred Lieb to refer to the new stadium in his column as “The House That Ruth Built.”  The nickname stuck. In case you're wondering, the Yankees are walking towards the third-base dugout, which housed the home team at the stadium from 1923 through 1945. The team moved to the first-base dugout for home games at the start of the 1946 season. (Bain News Service, Library of Congress)

The del Dragos in 1913 sold Ilda House to Jacob Ruppert Jr., who appears to have leased it for several years before buying it outright. Ruppert was the New York brewer of Knickerbocker beer who would buy and build Major League Baseball’s winningest franchise, the New York Yankees, in 1915 after inheriting a fortune from his late father, Jacob Ruppert Sr. The newly rich son, a lifelong bachelor, had been living with his parents in a mansion at today's 1119 Fifth Avenue directly across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Ironically, despite breweries' long connection with baseball, Ruppert's Knickerbocker beer didn't affiliate itself as a sponsor of a baseball team until the 1950s -- long after Ruppert's death -- when it became associated with the rival New York Giants. It also hooked up with the Boston Braves -- later the Milwaukee Braves and today's Atlanta Braves -- around the same time.

Ruppert Jr., who later purchased the contract of George Herman “Babe” Ruth from the rival Boston Red Sox on Jan. 5, 1920 for $125,000 and $300,000 in loans to new Red Sox owner Harry Frazee, was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2013.

Ruppert Jr., who spoke with a German accent, seldom referred to the Sultan of Swat as “Babe” except, according to Ruth, on the night before Ruppert’s death in 1939. At other times, Ruppert called his star “Root,” unable to pronounce the dipthong “th” in his German accent.

Ruppert was a four-term Democratic U.S. Congressman (1899-1907) from New York with deep roots in the Tammany Hall political machine who had reached the rank of colonel in the New York National Guard and was widely known as Colonel Ruppert.

Ruppert's stay in Tarrytown was relatively brief as he built and moved to a summer estate in Garrison, N.Y., in early 1919. He also inherited a summer estate in Rhinebeck, 41 miles north of Garrison

Ruppert sold both his renovated and expanded mansion and 287 South Broadway estate -- about 100 feet southwest of the Roman Catholic Carmelite Church of the Transfiguration -- in June 1919 to William Howard Buckley. The mansion at the time reportedly had 40 rooms including a ballroom with glass floor. The estate included landscaped lawns with views of the Hudson River, a fish pond, a garden and an orchard.

Buckley, 45 at the time, was a New York City financier, attorney and insurance expert who had lived in Albany until 1916. When Buckley and his wife, Kathleen, moved into the Ilda mansion, which they renamed Kathwill, a combination of their first names, in 1919. At the time, they had seven children -- four girls and three boys ages 1-13 -- and six servants, five of them immigrants to the United States, including a chauffeur, a “houseman,” a maid, a housemaid and two nurses (most likely nannies who cared for the children).

Also living on the estate in a separate house was the Buckleys’ estate superintendent, Thomas Roberts, an Irish immigrant, and his son who doubled as an extra chauffeur for the family. By the 1930 federal census, the Buckley family had grown to eight children, a fourth son having been born in 1923.

The Ilda House, ca. 1865, is pictured from the front (the Hudson River is a rear, not pictured) at its current 80 Church Street, Tarrytown location, about a half mile south of its original South Broadway location. (Photo from Trulia.com)

Professionally, Buckley associated with people on their way up the ladder financially and it paid off. His closest business associate was Nicholas F. Brady who, with his brother James Cox Brady Sr., oversaw a vast business empire built by their father. James Brady died in 1927, and Nicholas continued running the businesses.
He chaired the board of New York Edison, was a director of Anaconda Copper Mining, Westinghouse Electric, National City Bank, Union Carbide and numerous other utility companies in the U.S. and Japan.

The Brady brothers provided much of the capital Walter Chrysler used to take over the ailing Maxwell Motor Company and roll it into his newly created Chrysler Corporation, today’s Fiat-Chrysler. If you’ve never heard of Brady, you’ve likely heard of his namesake great-nephew. Nicholas F. Brady was U.S. Secretary of the Treasury in the successive administrations of presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Note that Maxwell Motor Co. originally was the Sleepy Hollow-based Maxwell-Briscoe Co.

Buckley had friends in high places politically, too, among them four-time New York governor Al Smith, the Democrat nominee for president in 1928, losing to Herbert Hoover.

Buckley died after being hit by a car while walking to weekday morning Mass at the Church of the Transfiguration on May 20, 1930. He was crossing South Broadway about 100 feet from his driveway when a car horn blew, startling him and backing him up a step into the path of an oncoming southbound car. He was 56.

The estate no longer exists. It lay at 287 South Broadway -- what is now 303 South Broadway -- immediately south adjacent to today's The Quay at Tarrytown townhouse community. It is the site of businesses MVP Health Care and Ultrafabrics.

* Links to other Gilded Age stories by Mark Donovan