Hillcrest: The estate of Mark Twain and Capt. Wm. Casey is home to today's Tappan Hill Mansion

This is an illustration of the Capt. William Casey-built Hillcrest mansion with its first floor stone-walled, covered piazza in Tarrytown Heights in 1884. A first-floor floor plan is at upper right. The mansion was designed by architect Henry Rutgers Marshall. American Architect and Building News magazine said of the mansion's proposed design in its January-June edition of 1884: "The house will stand on a ridge overlooking the valley of the Hudson below it some eight hundred feet; the main view shows the Highlands in the distance on the left hand. The piazza all is of rough stone; all the rest of the house to be of wood, clapboarded to the level of the second story, and shingled above that line; the roof will be of stained red-cedar shingles, and the face of the projeciting gable in dark chocolate; the first and second stories in olive brown relieved with black." (Illustration by architect Henry Rutgers Marshall, American Architect and Building News, Jan. 1, 1894)

Author and humorist Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, and his chronically ill wife, Olivia “Livy” Langdon Clemens, bought the 20-acre Hillcrest estate at the northwest corner of Highland and Benedict avenues of what was known as Tarrytown Heights, from businessman and Civil War veteran Captain William Chandler Casey in April 1902.

The purchase price was $47,500 ($1.42 million today).

Samuel Langhorne Clemens reads a newspaper in this 1902 photo. Clemens, who wrote under the pen name Mark Twain, purchased the Tarrytown estate Hillcrest at the time of this photo. (C.E. Bolles, Brooklyn, N.Y., 1902. Library of Congress)

The Clemenses never actually lived in the mansion, both because they planned to renovate it and because of Livy’s ill health.

Sam Clemens recorded the estate’s potential, saying it had a stable large enough to hold a circus and a second floor grand enough to host a ball. "Ah," he said, "that's a stable that banishes care and makes life worth the living."

On April 9, 1902, the New York Times commented on the estate: “It is high and beautifully situated, commanding some of the best views along the Hudson.”

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, a.k.a. Mark Twain, is pictured standing on an outdoor stone stairway in 1903, the same period he owned Hillcrest in Tarrytown. The location of the photo is not known. (Library of Congress)

The Clemenses ended up almost immediately leasing the house to Manhattan Railway Company attorney Charles A. Gardiner as a summer estate with an option to buy. The deal was contingent on Gardiner being able to purchase an adjoining 20-acre site from Edward B. Cobb, an attorney and heir of the Augustus Cobb/James Benedict family, which was not accomplished until December 1904 according to a Dec. 22, 1904 New York Times story.

FROM BENEDICT/COBB ESTATE

Wm. C. Casey had purchased his land from the 193-acre estate of Augustus Cobb in 1882, and immediately built Hillcrest, a summer mansion with stables, barns, coach house and other outbuildings. 

Cobb himself had gained title to the land by inheritance. He was the son of Ann Augusta Benedict Cobb, a daughter of Major General James Milton Benedict, who owned what became the Cobb estate in addition to an adjacent 26-acre plot along the Hudson River that eventually came into the possession of Mary A. Benedict.

The combined Benedict/Cobb estates ran east from the Hudson River just south of Franklin Street, then across South Broadway roughly north of Benedict Avenue and well east of Tarrytown Heights into the unincorporated land of the Town of Greenburgh.

This hand-drawn 1893 map shows the former estate of Major General James Milton Benedict in the hands of his heirs, Mary A. Benedict and Augustus Cobb (referred to here as Cobb Estate or Cobb Est). Mary Benedict’s share of the estate was about 26 acres. Cobb, who married into the Benedict family, controlled about 173 acres, running east up from about halfway between the Hudson River and South Broadway across South Broadway and well past the incorporation line of Tarrytown. The Capt. William Chandler Casey “Hillcrest” estate of about 20 acres shown on the map was part of the old Benedict estate sold by Augustus Cobb to Casey in 1882. (George Washington Brumley, 1893. David Rumsey Historical Map Collection)

Casey was a well-known National Guard officer and businessman who eventually became a prominent poultry breeder, owning the 185-acre Aratoma Farm, a so-called gentleman’s farm he occupied during the summers outside Katonah, N.Y.

By 1893 Aratoma Farm was the largest poultry farm in the state with 25,000 square feet of poultry houses, all personally designed by Casey. He only raised the best breeds, telling people it cost no more to feed top breeds than poor fowl. Attesting to his status as the producer of the finest poultry available were his top customers, Delmonico’s Restaurant and the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

Casey, born in 1838, was the son of noted Manhattan surgeon William B. Casey, who served in the Union army during the Civil War as a brigade surgeon and finally surgeon-in-chief of 12th Corps at the Battle of Chancellorsville, Va. (April 30-May 6, 1863). 

He later returned north to establish hospitals for wounded Union soldiers. William B. Casey also served two terms as mayor of his native Middleton, Connecticut.

This is an 1884 architect's illustration of the first floor foyer looking towards the rear stairway leading upstairs in the Hillcrest mansion of Capt. William C. Casey. (Illustration by architect Henry Rutgers Marshall, American Architect and Building News, Jan. 1, 1894)

A CIVIL WAR VETERAN

Capt. Casey was a second-generation American, scion of two English immigrant grandfathers, both of whom prospered in business, one in retail, the other with an import-export fleet operating between New York and India.

Capt. Casey was a New York City native and fought for the Union during the Civil War. He enlisted as a private in 1861, rising through the enlisted ranks until becoming an officer over the winter of 1863-64. In 1873 he was made captain of Company I, 7th New York National Guard and remained with that unit until he left the service in 1886. He had the opportunity to become a lieutenant colonel, but turned it down to remain with his military company.

Casey’s business career began as proprietor of New York’s U.S. Bonded Warehouse, where he could legally control and store fine imported products duty-free for up to five years.
Casey was a Republican and director of the National Rifle Association and an active Freemason. He married Flora MacDonald Woodcock, who became well known in New York for her charitable affiliations.

YOU KNOW HIM BETTER AS MARK TWAIN

Twain, the renowned American author born Samuel Clemens in antebellum Missouri, bought the property after emerging from an 1894 bankruptcy, courtesy of a years-long worldwide writing and speaking tour. He had made a fortune with his novels “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” -- among others -- but lost everything, including his Hartford, Conn., mansion and estate after a series of bad publishing and business investments.

The Clemenses returned to live in a rented house in Riverdale and were to summer at Hillcrest until everything changed. Livy, after a lifetime of health issues, was advised to find a better climate and sailed to Florence, Italy on Oct. 4, 1903. She died there of heart failure on June 5, 1904.

The Clemenses’ deal to sell to Gardiner was held up by both the need to add Cobb’s acreage next door, north of Hillcrest, and over a right-of-way issue with the new electric trolley line owned by the New York, Elmsford and White Plains Railroad.
The line, completed in October 1897, ran from White Plains to the Tarrytown Railroad Station and included tracks adjacent to Benedict Avenue that crossed the Clemens estate. Solving the tracks problem took two years.

Gardiner died at age 53 in 1909 and his widow, Alice May Driggs Gardiner, inherited the property, remarrying in early 1912 and sharing the property with her new husband, Manhattan-based surgeon William T. Moynan, M.D.

The Tappan Hill mansion, formerly Halleston, is pictured on a 1965 postcard well after it had been turned into a restaurant. The mansion was built in 1915 on the site of the former Hillcrest mansion of Captain William Casey.

FROM HALLESTON TO TAPPAN HILL

The Moynans sold the estate to Jacques Samuel Halle, an 1890 founding partner of the New York Stock Exchange brokerage firm Halle & Stieglitz, in 1915. Halle demolished the 33-year-old Hillcrest house and built a larger mansion that he called Halleston.

It is unclear if he ever actually lived in the new mansion since he died in Manhattan on Dec. 1, 1916 at age 52. He had had an earlier brush with death in February 1901 when he and two of his servants were poisoned with arsenic in coffee served at dinner. All three survived and the case went unsolved.

Halle’s widow, Hattie Sidenberg Halle, lived at Halleston until 1941 when she moved to a large apartment on Fifth Avenue and the Halleston property was sold to businessman David Swope. 

Halleston was renamed Tappan Hill and as such has become a destination restaurant for many years. Today, Tappan Hill Mansion, 81 Highland Avenue, Tarrytown, is owned by Abigail (Greenberg) Kirsch and is an elegant reception/special events venue.

Mrs. Halle lived in Manhattan until about 1960, living into her 90s.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: On the trivia front … Samuel Langhorne Clemens, a one-time antebellum riverboat pilot on the Mississippi, took his pen name from the call “mark twain,” a leadsman's cry for a measured river depth of two fathoms (12 feet), the required depth for steamboat clearance.

Another 1884 view of the proposed Hillcrest mansion by its architect. (Illustration by architect Henry Rutgers Marshall, American Architect and Building News, Jan. 1, 1894)