Pinkstone: Estate had colonial Dutch, Revolutionary War roots, survived into mid-70s

The east facade of Pinkstone is shown in this engraved sketch looking towards the Hudson River from South Broadway, Tarrytown, in 1886. (From "Westchester County New York: Biographical," compiled by Walter Whipple Spooner, a compendium to the book "History of Westchester County, New York, from Its Earliest Settlement to the Year 1900," by Frederic Shonnard and Walter Whipple Spooner, The Winthrop Press, New York)

Pinkstone, an estate with Dutch, Revolutionary War, Gilded Age robber baron and deep 20th century financial ties lies today between Historic Lyndhurst and the Montefiore Health System property (formerly owned by Kraft Foods, later Kraft-Heinz) east of the Hudson River and west of South Broadway in Tarrytown.

In its early days, the estate was said to be in Irvington but was assimilated into Tarrytown when Tarrytown beat Irvington to incorporation by two years, 1870 to 1872. The area basically north of Sunnyside Lane in Irvington to White Plains Road in Tarrytown remains in the Irvington Union Free School District today.

The property was originally part of the 1693 52,000-acre charter grant Philipsburg Manor estate of Frederick Philipse who built a provisioning depot at the confluence of the Pocantico and Hudson rivers to serve his family’s trans-Atlantic trade and shipping business -- a business that included the slave trade.

French Protestant immigrant Glode Requa Sr. leased a farm of 296 acres from the Philipse family in what became the Pennybridge area of southern Tarrytown along the Hudson River after moving from New Rochelle in 1723. 

This is the Requa farmhouse on what became the Pinkstone and later the Willow Pond estate at 575 South Broadway, Tarrytown, immediately north of Lyndhurst. The farmhouse dated to around 1735 and is shown after many renovations in about 1970. The house basically fell down from disrepair in the mid-1970s. It had been used as a gardener's cottage for years. (Irvington Public Library, Local History Collection)

Requa’s son, Glode Jr., served in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. Meanwhile, Glode Sr. was able to purchase his 296-acre Philipse leasehold in 1785 -- the farm encompassing what would become Lyndhurst and Pinkstone -- after all Philipse holdings in America were seized by American authorities as punishment for the Philipse family’s loyalty to the English crown during the Revolution.

Requa’s actual name was Claude Equier, but the predominant local Dutch holdovers from the defunct New Netherlands colony couldn’t pronounce the French correctly and Claude/Glode changed the spelling to reflect the guttural Dutch pronunciation.

Glode Sr.’s farmhouse on the property became a hotbed of Patriot revolutionary opposition to the British. 

From the "History of Westchester County, New York, from Its Earliest Settlement to the Year 1900," Frederic Shonnard and W. W. Spooner wrote of the house: “It formed a part of the old Requa farm, which in May 1779, was the scene of a bloody encounter. The episode was thus described by author Robert Bolton: 'A strong (British) detachment under the command of Colonel Emmerick, advanced upon Tarrytown so rapidly that the Continental guard, quartered at Requa's house, were completely taken by surprise. Four of them were killed upon the spot, and the remainder, consisting of ten or twelve, taken prisoners. …

“It was upon this occasion that the one-armed Patriot, Isaac Martling, as recorded on his tombstone, was ‘inhumanly slain by Nathaniel Underhill,’ a notorious Tory of Yonkers, and Polly Buckhout was shot by a British rifleman while standing in the door of her cottage'.”

This engraved sketch is the view from the Hudson River east to Pinkstone, the mansion and estate of John Taylor Terry in 1886. (From "Westchester County New York: Biographical," compiled by Walter Whipple Spooner, a compendium to the book "History of Westchester County, New York, from Its Earliest Settlement to the Year 1900," by Frederic Shonnard and Walter Whipple Spooner, The Winthrop Press, New York)

The Requa family sold the property in 1853 to 31-year-old John Taylor Terry Sr. (1822-1913), a merchant, financier and investor, as well as a friend and business partner of some of the Gilded Age’s most prominent robber barons, including members of the Gould and Morgan families.

Terry was a founder on June 4, 1853 of the Irvington Presbyterian Church and was an officer of the church for the rest of his life.

The farmhouse which had been attacked by the British was rebuilt as a five-room, two-story building on its original footprint by the Requa family before the sale to Terry and was later used as the home for the family of Terry's gardener. The historic farmhouse remained on the property into the 1970s when it collapsed and was removed. The collapse rendered moot local attempts to obtain and preserve the building.

John Taylor Terry Sr. is pictured in an undated photo possibly ca. 1886. (Photo from "Westchester County New York: Biographical," compiled by Walter Whipple Spooner, a compendium to the book

"History of Westchester County, New York, from Its Earliest Settlement to the Year 1900," by Frederic Shonnard and Walter Whipple Spooner, The Winthrop Press, New York)

In 1858 Terry began construction of a pink granite mansion next door to what would become Jay Gould’s Lyndhurst estate. Sharing a property line on the north side of Lyndhurst stretching west between South Broadway and the Hudson River, Terry would call his 35-acre estate Pinkstone, and it would remain in the Terry family until his death in 1913.

Writer J.O. Donovan described Pinkstone in the "Biographical History of Westchester County, New York, Volume 1": “In the beautiful district of Tarrytown, immortalized by (Washington) Irving stands Pinkstone, the palatial home of John Taylor Terry. Bordered by the Hudson, so justly famed in story and song, the grounds cover an area of 35 acres, diversified by hill and vale and adorned by splendid old forest trees. Shady walks and winding drives, velvety lawns and the wilder tracts left to Nature's gardener add diversity and charm to the scene. The large square mansion of stone, suggestive of stability and comfort, was erected in 1859 and has ever since been occupied as the family residence.”

This 1914 hand-drawn map shows the Pinkstone estate during the 1913-1915 transitional ownership of the Rev. Alfred Duane Pell between the passing of John Taylor Terry and the incoming regime of Harold Mayer Lehman. To the immediate north of the estate is the Croydon estate of T.C. Eastman, at this point in the hands of his heir, Lucy Eastman. The Eastman land would be divided into father and son Sigmund and Allan Lehman’s Millbrook and Elmbrook estates a year later. At bottom, south, is the Lyndhurst estate of the former Helen Miller Gould who had just married Finley J. Shepard. (Map by George Washington Brumley, 1914, David Rumsey Historic Maps Collection).

Terry traced his lineage to Gov. William Bradford of Mayflower and Plymouth Colony fame as well as Continental Army Colonel Nathaniel Terry, several Connecticut governors and Union Civil War Major General Alfred H. Terry.

Terry’s father, Roderick, was president of a Hartford, Connecticut bank and John Terry moved to New York in 1841 to clerk for Edwin Denison Morgan, a future New York governor, U.S. senator and Civil War major general.

In 1843, Morgan organized E.D. Morgan & Company, an import house, in partnership with cousin George D. Morgan of the Woodcliff estate on North Broadway in Irvington, and Frederick Avery, who left the firm in 1844, whereupon Edwin Morgan elevated Terry to partnership after only three years as his clerk.

Terry’s business career soared thereafter and included directorships with several banks, railroad companies and communications organizations.

The once prominent entrance to what was the Pinkstone estate of Tarrytown’s John Taylor Terry Sr. and later the WIllow Pond estate of Harold and Cecile Lehman and later Cecile's with second husband Dr. Edgar Mayer, lies overgrown and largely forgotten at 575 South Broadway adjacent to the northern property line of historic Lyndhurst. The estate was sold and absorbed into the General Foods Corporation, later Kraft Foods, campus to the immediate north in 1975. It is now a little-used part of the Montefiore Medical Center campus. (Google Maps Streetview, 2020 photo)

Terry married Elizabeth Roe Peet in 1846 and the couple had seven children. Tragically, the couple’s four daughters all died before age 6. Of their three sons, the eldest, Frederick, died at age 27 in 1874. Only Roderick, born in 1849 and the youngest child, John Jr., born in 1857, lived past age 27.

The 1900 federal census shows the recently widowed Terry, 67, living at Pinkstone with his 41-year-old son Walter and daughter-in-law Fannie and their two sons. Also living in the main house were five female servants, all Irish immigrants -- a cook, a chambermaid, a “kitchen girl” and a laundress.

George Jay Gould,Terry and the Estate of Russell Sage controlled the board and management of Western Union Telegraph Company until they all sold their stock in the company in November 1909 to American Telephone & Telegraph Company which took control of Western Union.

Gould was the son of Terry’s one-time neighbor, Jay Gould, and a financier and railroad executive in his own right. Russell Sage, who died in 1906, was a frequent business partner of Jay Gould and a financier and railroad executive in his own right.
Terry was a member of the inaugural 1895 board of directors of Ardsley Country Club whose membership included brothers William Rockefeller Jr. and John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan.

Terry continued working through at least 1912, commuting daily by rail to his Manhattan office.

Willow Pond is shown ca. 1972 as restored by Harold Mayer Lehman and his wife, Cecile Seligman Lehman, after they purchased the former Pinkstone estate of John Taylor Terry Sr., ca. 1915. The mansion built by Terry in 1858-59 was originally made of pink granite. The Lehmans under direction of architect Frank Newman of Philadelphia added a brick exterior to modernize the property. Lehman, his brother Allan and their father Sigmund bought three estates in the Pennybridge section of Tarrytown west of South Broadway, immediately north of Lyndhurst, and established neighboring estates Willow Pond by Harold, Millbrook by Sigmund and Elmbrook by Allan. The trio were partners in their family-owned Lehman Brothers investment house of New York. At the time of this photo, Mrs. Lehman’s widowed second husband, Dr. Edgar Mayer, was living on the estate. Mrs. Lehman Mayer had died a decade earlier. (Westchester County Historical Society)

Sons John Terry Jr. and the Rev. Roderick Terry put Pinkstone up for sale in 1913 after their father’s death. He left them the bulk of his $1.2 million estate -- $31.4 million adjusted for inflation.

The purchaser was the Rev. Alfred Duane Pell of 929 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, rector of New York’s Anglo-Catholic Church of the Resurrection, 119 E. 74th Street, from 1904-1920 and Rector Emeritus from 1920 until his death in 1924.

It’s unclear if Pell ever lived on the estate, which he sold in 1915. Pell, who was independently wealthy and did not accept a salary from his church, already owned a country home at Tuxedo, New York, in Orange County, in addition to a Manhattan townhouse at 923 Fifth Avenue.

This photo from the June 15, 2006 edition of The Journal News (White Plains) newspaper shows Elmbrook, the mansion built in 1917 by architect John Russell Pope for financier Allan Sigmund Lehman. The mansion was demolished in 1957. 

Sigmund Mayer Lehman and his sons, partners in their family-owned Lehman Brothers investment banking firm, built three contiguous estates on the Hudson: Sigmund’s Millbrook -- named after the stream, Mill Brook, now known as Sheldon Brook, that traverses the property -- son Allan’s Elmbrook, and son Harold’s Willow Pond.

Harold Mayer Lehman and his wife, Cecile Seligman Lehman, renamed Pinkstone Willow Pond or, alternatively, Willowpond.

Harold (1889-1933) and Cecile (1893-1962) commissioned Philadelphia architect Frank Newman to transform the granite villa into a Georgian Colonial mansion. The mansard roof was raised, brick veneer covered the granite, wings were added to the north and south of the main building and a 3-story columned portico was added to create a riverfront façade.

Landscape architect Annette Hoyt Flanders was commissioned to design the grounds of the renamed Willow Pond estate in the 1920s. Flanders laid out hardscapes that included terraces, walkways, fountains, stairways and goldfish ponds and also “borrowed” scenery, creating living frames that incorporated views of Lyndhurst, the Hudson River and the Palisades west of the river. At the same time, she designed the Sigmund Lehman and Allan Lehman estates as well.

Cecile Lehman married Dr. Edgar Mayer in June 1948, 15 years after Harold Lehman’s death.

Thoracic specialist Edgar Mayer, M.D., (left), is pictured during his tenure as head of the National Vaudeville Artists Lodge in Saranac Lake, N.Y., ca. 1928. He is pictured next to actor/singer Eddie Cantor and, at far right, famed theatrical agent William Morris. The man lighting a cigar next to Morris is not identified, but may have been actor/singer Al Jolson. The NVAL later changed its name to Will Rogers Hospital and Mayer chaired its medical and scientific advisory board until his death at 85 in 1975. Mayer taught at the Cornell University Medical School and New York University and was founder and first president of the New York State chapter of the American College of Chest Physicians. (Photo via localwiki.org, courtesy Gail Brill)

By the mid-1950s, Willow Pond's north neighboring Millbrook and Elmbrook properties were acquired by General Foods Corporation.

The original 74-acre estate that was divided into Millbrook and Elmbrook was called Croydon after the New Hampshire birthplace of its owner, Timothy Corser Eastman. Eastman was a cattle dealer who in 1873 made history -- and his fortune -- by exporting chilled beef by steamship from New York to London. The insulated cargo space was cooled by ice loaded on departure.

Eastman died in 1893. His wife survived him by 15 years, dying in 1908. The Eastman heirs sold the estate to father and son Sigmund and Allan Lehman of the Lehman Brothers financial firm ca. 1915.

T.C. Eastman owned the Croydon estate that was later divided by the Lehman family and became the Millbrook and Elmbrook estates in 1915. The American business of Timothy C. Eastman and Joseph Eastman of New York merged with the British company John Bell & Sons in 1889 to form a new company known as Eastmans Limited in England and Eastmans Company of New York in the U.S. The company had a near-monopoly on the trans-Atlantic beef trade between the U.S. and Great Britain and later expanded operations to Argentina and Uruguay. T.C. Eastman was the first to ship chilled beef from the U.S. to Great Britain, causing a sensation in the beef-loving nation. Previously, meat was transported on the hoof. Now it could be transported dressed and ready for sale to consumers. Pictured is an Eastmans store in the southern England coastal resort town of Bournemouth ca. 1900. (Walter Scott photo)

Willow Pond remained the home of Dr. Edgar Mayer from his wife’s death in 1962 until his death in 1975 when it was added to the General Foods corporate campus. The house was razed and the site was expected to become a parking lot. That never happened, but the landscape was abandoned to nature and the hardscape was generally stolen or vandalized.

In 2013, Montefiore Medical Center (now Montefiore Health System) bought the property from General Foods successor Kraft Foods Group for $33 million and Montefiore occupies the site today.

This oil-on-canvas “The Minuet” by Venetian artist Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo (1727-1804), 13 x 19 inches, was purchased by Dr. and Mrs. Edgar Mayer from Maurice de Rothschild ca. 1952 and was housed at Willow Pond. It was sold at auction in 2007 for an inflation-adjusted $5.4 million by an anonymous heir of Cecile Seligman Lehman Mayer’s daughter with first husband Harold Mayer Lehman, Susan Lehman Cullman.

The original Montefiore, the “Montefiore Home for Chronic Invalids,” was founded by leaders of New York’s Jewish community in Manhattan in 1884 and named after Jewish financier, philanthropist and proto-Zionist activist Moses Montefiore. It originally focused its care on patients with tuberculosis and other chronic illnesses and accepted its first patients on Oct. 24, 1884, Moses Montefiore’s 100th birthday.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: As a postscript, it couldn’t be more fitting that the final resident of Willow Pond before its eventual Montefiore takeover was a Jewish physician who specialized in tuberculosis as an outgrowth of his own battle with the disease as a child -- Edgar Mayer.