'Woolen King' Detmer crafted natural paradise at Gilded Age Edgemont

This undated photo shows Julian F. Detmer’s Edgemont, a turreted Norman chateau and magnificently landscaped estate in Tarrytown, New York. The Hudson River is shown in the background backed by the wooded shore of Rockland County. The mansion was originally built by James Monroe Sigafus and was located east of Broadway a few blocks behind today's Roman Catholic Church of the Transfiguration between Prospect and Martling avenues. (Images of America, Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow, The Historical Society, Inc. -- Serving Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow, Arcadia Publishing, 1997)

Edgemont, one of the 20th century's Hudson River Valley landmarks, began as a patchwork collection of Gilded Age Tarrytown estates called home by miners, hoteliers, Civil War veterans, an ex-governor, a doctor, bankers and stockbrokers.

The 40-acre horticultural wonderland of "Woolen King" Julian Francis Detmer came together off Benedict Avenue between Martling and Prospect avenues during the Great Depression. The final piece of the puzzle came to Detmer at the auction block in 1937, a couple of years after Detmer retired from a half-century career as founder and chief executive of Detmer Woolen Co., a preeminent international wool and textile import/export and tailor's trimmings wholesaler..

Julian F. Detmer, 1924 photo.
(Photo courtesy History of Westchester
County, Vol. 3, 1925)

In 1935, Detmer hired 35 gardeners and devoted the final two-plus decades of his life to turning his Edgemont into a showpiece botanical garden and arboretum -- it was called Detmer Nurseries officially, Detmer's colloquially -- open to the public on Saturdays and Sundays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

This 1910 postcard was a commercial promotional tool for Julian F. Detmer's
Detmer Woolen Co.

While Edgemont's Detmer chapter was the estate's best known, the story of the property with the fabulous views of the Hudson and the Tappan Zee had its modern origins a half century earlier.

The four-story, 22-room Norman chateau was designed and built by Tarrytown architect James Bird for soldier-rancher-miner James Monroe Sigafus. The stone foundations of the mansion were laid in late 1882 and the villa was completed in March 1884. Sigafus spent an estimated $170,000 ($5.14 million in 2022 dollars) on his showpiece home.

This is an undated engraving of mining 

investor and Civil War veteran
James Monroe Sigafus ca. 1870 who
built the 22-room Tarrytown chateau later
known as Edgemont with the father of his
 daughter's future husband, James Bird.

The house was surrounded by wide stone verandas and built on a property of about 6 acres purchased by Sigafus after his 1882 arrival in Tarrytown, newly enriched by the first of what became several mining windfalls.

The building was made of pressed brick with terra cotta trim, likely produced by Clark Colored Brick & Terra Cotta Co. in Glens Falls, N.Y., some 185 miles north of Tarrytown on the Hudson River. The mansion included granite columns quarried in Quincy, Mass. It was claimed at the end of the 19th century that Edgemont included more terra cotta than any other house in the United States.

This flight of stone stairs once led to the veranda of Edgemont. The Norman chateau is gone now, but the stairs to what was the veranda remain atop the chateau's stone foundation laid in 1884 by James M. Sigafus and still standing next to the Edgemont at Tarrytown Condominium clubhouse on the old mansion site today.

Sigafus was born in Wayne County, Pa., in 1837 and was named after James Monroe, the nation's fifth president and last chief executive from among the Founding Fathers. Monroe had died just six years earlier. Like his namesake who served with honor in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, Sigafus also fought in a war for the nation's survival.

Sigafus had made his way West at 17 in 1854, finding work as a lumberjack in Wisconsin. He volunteered for the Union Army at the dawn of the Civil War and served as a private in the 8th Independent Battery, Wisconsin Light Artillery assigned to the Army of the Ohio (later called the Army of the Cumberland) by November 1861. 

A gazebo overlooks an Edgemont fountain and water feature in this hand-colored photo illustration titled: "Fountain Pool in May." This image was part of a brochure Julian Detmer used to produce annually and give as Christmas/New Year gifts to friends and acquaintances. (Photo courtesy Westchester County Historical Society)

Sigafus and his unit fought in many of the major battles of the Western theater of the war including Stone River, Murfreesboro, Chickamauga, Lookout Mountain, Missionary Ridge. They were eventually attached to the command of General William Tecumseh Sherman for the march on Atlanta which broke the back of the Confederacy.

By then a sergeant, Sigafus was discharged on Jan. 20, 1865 and by April, as General Robert E. Lee was surrendering his Army of Northern Virginia to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomatox, Va., Sigafus had forged his way West to Colorado, briefly dabbling -- unsuccessfully -- in prospecting and latertrying his hand at ranching by buying farms, first one of 160 acres then, after selling that one, another of 920 acres. 

In 1878 he and his wife Augusta sold their 920-acre ranch and bought a stake in a  mining company. The investment paid off as partner George W. Belt hit one of the world’s richest veins of silver in February 1879. In 1881, Sigafus sold his share in Belt's Robert E. Lee mine in the mining boom town of Leadville, Colorado for $1 million, $23 million today adjusted for inflation.

James Sigafus made his fortune investing in the Robert E. Lee Mine in Leadville,
Colo.The mine is pictured here between 1879 and 1894. (Photo courtesy
Yale University Library, public domain)

At the instigation of Augusta, Sigafus moved to Tarrytown to find an appropriate spouse for the couple's only child, teenaged Effie. Tarrytown, nicknamed "Millionaire's Colony," was said to be home to the most millionaires per capita in the world – some 61 at the time.

In Tarrytown, Sigafus celebrated the sway the West still held over him by dressing in Mexican attire -- Colorado had been ceded to the U.S. after the 1848 Mexican American War -- and regularly riding through town in a Mexican-styled horse-drawn carriage. 

This hand-colored photo illustration of Edgemont is titled: "Boulder Path in Spring." It was part of a brochure Julian Detmer used to produce annually and give as Christmas/New Year gifts to friends and acquaintances. (Photo courtesy Westchester County Historical Society)

He found the ideal site for his home-to-be between Prospect and Martling avenues close to Benedict Avenue and bought a pair of undeveloped neighboring lots -- about 3 acres apiece -- from Manhattan real estate speculator Alexander A. Meldrum and Mrs. H.W. Platt in April 1882. 

Meldrum had purchased the lot prior to 1881 from Samuel H. Crooks. Crooks was a lower Manhattan hotelier who owned S.H. Crook's Hotel and Dining Saloon at 84-90 Chatham Street, Chatham Street has been known since 1886 as Park Row. New York's City Hall has been located in City Hall Park off that street today as it has been since 1811. 

This undated postcard titled: "Rock Garden Pool," shows its position on the Edgemont estate overlooking the Hudson River and Rockland County on the far western shore of the river. (Photo courtesy Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian Gardens Collection, Richard Marchand Historical Postcard Collection)

The nouveau riche Westerner turned to Tarrytown architect Bird to design his showcase home and establish his family among Tarrytown's elite. Ironically, he didn't need to look far afield. It was Bird's son James Everett "Everett" Bird who caught Effie Sigafus' eye and the couple married on June 25, 1884, just after Edgemont was completed. Effie had just turned 17 at the time.

Sigafus' choice of architect was an inspired one. Bird had already undertaken a major 1868 commission in the expansion, repair and improvement of the crumbling 29-year-old Christ Episcopal Church at 43 South Broadway with his builder brother Seth Bird. The so-called "Washington Irving Church" had been facing possible demolition because of its condition.

James Bird had earlier designed Westchester County's longest active African-American church, Foster Memorial African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Zion Church. The cornerstone for that building was laid at its 90 WIldey Street location in October 1864 and it opened in 1865. It's congregation famously sheltered escaping slaves heading up the Hudson River on the Underground Railroad as they fled to freedom in Canada where slavery had been fully outlawed since 1834. Some escaped slaves settled in the Tarrytown area with help from the congregation.

Both Christ Episcopal and Foster Memorial are protected today on the National Register of Historic Places.

A variety of spring flowering shrubs bloom in profusion,
 nearly obliterating a stone stairway at Edgemont in this 1962
photo titled "Azaleas and Cotoneasters." (Photo by
John Horace McFarland courtesy Smithsonian Institution,
Archives of American Gardens, J. Horace McFarland
Company Collection)

In 1888, Sigafus got back into the mining business and brought his son-in-law J. Everett Bird, in with him, buying the North Homestake Mine in White Oaks, New Mexico Territory and selling it in 1895. In 1889, Sigafus bought an interest in the Good Hope Consolidated Gold Mine in Pinacate, Calif., today's Perris. Bird was an ownership partner with Sigafus in both mines -- each proved fruitful -- and ran both of them successfully.

Before 1902, the Sigafus family had sold Edgemont and moved permanently to California where he died of heat exhaustion while visiting his desert mine on July 13, 1910 and is buried at the Grand Army of the Republic Memorial at Historic Evergreen Cemetery in Riverside, Calif.

This aerial photograph, published in The Tarrytown Daily News newspaper in December 1955, shows the Edgemont estate just a few years before the death of its owner/designer Julian F. Detmer. (Photo by Dante Raffaelli, Tarrytown Daily News, 1955)

A couple of Manhattan-based real estate speculators had their hands on Edgemont very briefly before it was sold to Detmer. They were Helen A. Thompson and Franklin Pettit. Some sources incorrectly credit Pettit with building Edgemont, but that is certainly not true. At most, he might have had some modernization work done to make it more saleable since electric power had become available in Tarrytown beginning in around 1895.

This hand-colored photo illustration shows Edgemont's flowering landscape in late spring/early summer. It was part of a brochure Julian Detmer used to produce annually and give as Christmas/New Year gifts to friends and acquaintances. (Photo courtesy Westchester County Historical Society)

Sigafus was remembered by Tarrytown residents for the free public Fourth of July fireworks displays he provided at Edgemont during his time there.

Detmer moved into Edgemont from his Manhattan home in 1902 with wife Esther, daughter Esther 5, and sons Eugene 3 and Jerome 1.He made changes to the interior of the chateau, in particular installing a panelled living room that was a near exact duplicate of the State Room in England's 1606 Old Palace at Bromley-by-Bow on the west bank of the River Lea in East London, England. The original English home of the room was likely an early 17th century hunting lodge of King James I of England. 

Julian Detmer's panelled Edgemont living room (pictured) was a copy of the State Room in the 1606 Old Palace at Bromley-by-Bow on the west bank of the River Lea in East London, England. The original building was likely a hunting lodge of King James I of England. The State Room panelling and ceiling were moved to the Victoria & Albert Museum in London after the demolition of the Old Palace in 1894. They remain on display at the V&A today. From Detmer's replica, the oak panel above the fireplace was save and is in Tarrytown's Warner Library today (see next photo, below). (Photo courtesy Warner Library)

This hand-carved oak panel on display at the top of the stairs that lead to the Children's Room at the Warner Library in Tarrytown, N.Y., comes from the Edgemont living room of Julian Detmer. The panel, which stood above Detmer's living room fireplace, has as its centerpiece the coat of arms of Britain's King James I, with one difference. The original panel from James I's early 17th century hunting lodge outside London, features the royal family's crest -- the lion -- above the crown. In Detmer's version, the lion is supplanted by a sheep (center above knight's helmet), likely because Detmer's fortune was based on wool. (Photo courtesy Warner Library)

On Feb. 27, 1958, about eight months before Detmer's death, the Tarrytown Daily News newspaper wrote this in a feature about Edgemont: 

"Detmer was ... a man of broad culture with strong interests in the direction of tree culture and landscape gardening (and had) an extensive outlay of the best selected collections of evergreens and deciduous trees in America . When Detmer bought the land, he made many alterations with his creative talent. His study of nature has revealed a magnificent castle in beautiful form with harmonious combinations. 

Edgemont and its snow-covered landscaped lawns, trees and shrubs are pictured in this hand-colored photo illustration from a brochure Julian Detmer used to produce annually and give as Christmas/New Year gifts to friends and acquaintances. Tarrytown residents of the 1950s and 1960s reached out to the author of this story to share fond memories of sledding down this slope towards Martling Avenue from Edgemont as children and teenagers. (Photo courtesy Westchester County Historical Society)

"When James M. Sigafus owned the mansion on the hilltop off Benedict Avenue, it was a crowning feature of beauty. The terra cotta trimmings, the broad encircling verandas, the noble porte cochere and lofty tower gave it a character of its own. 

"The ornate parlors were finished in cherry, richly carved, and beautiful Minton tile were the setting of the fire places with massive gold plate fender and andirons. The dining room was trimmed with maple and the library with butternut. Th» second story was finished in pine."

A pink magnolia is pictured in full bloom in spring at Julian Detmer's Edgemont estate in this undated postcard titled: "Magnolia Garden Path." (Photo courtesy Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian Gardens Collection, Richard Marchand Historical Postcard Collection)

Educated in his mother's hometown of Cincinnati,  Ohio, at age 20 Detmer moved to Columbus, Ohio in 1885 and worked -- as had his father and grandfather before him -- as a merchant tailor. He founded Detmer Woolen Company in Columbus in 1888, a woolens wholesale and import companyl. In 1890 he moved the company headquarters to Chicago and in 1900 opened his Manhattan office. In about a quarter century, the company had become the world's largest distributor of woolens to the tailor trade with offices in New York, Kansas City, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle as well as European offices in London and Paris. It added offices in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Boston, Portland and Oakland in or after 1912.

He loved sailing and his 154-foot yacht Florence D was said to be the largest twin-screw, gasoline-propelled yacht afloat at the time of its construction in 1914. The Florence was almost certainly a regular visitor to the Tarrytown Boat Club where Detmer was a longtime member. 

The 154-foot pleasure yacht Florence D (pictured) was built for Julian Detmer in 1914. It was purchased by the U.S. Navy in 1942 and commissioned as the training vessel USS Iolite. It was badly damaged in an 1944 explosion, removed from service and sold in 1945, likely for scrap.

The Florence D was built in Neponset, Mass., for Detmer. It was  154 feet long, displaced 200 tons and had a beam -- width at midship -- of 20 feet. Its top speed was 10 knots -- 11.5 mph. After enjoying the Florence D for 28 years, Detmer sold it to the U.S. Navy on Sept. 4, 1942 for service during World War II.

The Navy converted the yacht for training use and commissioned it as the U.S.S. Iolite Patrol Yacht Coastal (PYc 41) on Nov. 9, 1942. The Iolite sailed to Naval Station Key West, Fla., and saw duty at Fleet Sonar School hosting training exercises in sonar use and anti-submarine warfare in the Straits of Florida through May 1944.

Iolite then returned to New York where she was used as a training ship for reserve officers. She was damaged by an explosion on Aug. 26, 1944, stricken by the Navy and sold in 1945, likely for scrap..

The 22-room Norman chateau Edgemont, built by James M. Sigafus in 1884, is shown in an undated photo that gives a glimpse of its elevation and sweeping, landscaped lawns on property between Prospect and Martling avenues off Benedict Avenue in Tarrytown.

In addition to the Tarrytown Boat Club, Detmer was a member of the Larchmont and Columbia yacht clubs, the New York Athletic Club, the nearby Sleepy Hollow and Rockwood Hall country clubs.

His eclectic tastes led to memberships and subscriptions in a wide variety of other organizations including the Metropolitan Opera Company, the New York Zoological Society, New York Botanical Gardens, American Museum of Natural History, Audubon Society.

Edgemont, under Detmer, contained one of the nation's largest collections of evergreen and deciduous trees and his flowers. He imported more than 1,500 varieties of trees and shrubs for display and propagation by his extensive gardening team at both Edgemont and a nearby annex he called "The Evergreens" at the hamlet of Glenville -- Glenville Woods Park Preserve today -- at 629 White Plains Road, 1.2 miles east of Edgemont. 

This 1914 hand-drawn and colored map shows the extent
of Edgemont after 12 years and the additions of several
neighboring estates by owner Julian F. Detmer. The estate
would grow more in the following 23 years. (George
Washington Bromley & Co. map, David Rumsey
Historic Map Collection)

During his years in Tarrytown, Detmer continually purchased the property from Edgemont neighbors, eventually enlarging the origial property to about 40 acres. He later purchased another large property between Benedict Avenue and 119 White Plains Road, 1.6 miles east of Edgemont, in the hamlet of Glenvlle which had once served as a stone quarry called Sackett's Quarry. Detmer called that property "The Evergreens," built a network of roads through it open to the public and used it as an extension of Edgemont's arboretum and nursery. The Evergreens today is a public park, Glenville Woods Park Preserve and remains open to the public.

At the time of Detmer's death weeks before his 95th birthday in 1958, Edgemont and The Evergreens, a combined 100 acres or so of landcaped acreage and nursery, featured more than 100,000 flowering and ornamental shrubs.

Detmer's days at Edgemont weren't entirely idyllic. His first wife, the former Esther Marie Downey of Chicago, who he married in 1896, died in 1924 at age 48. Fortunately, the couple's three children were in their 20s by that time. Detmer was to marry again, this time to the widowed Marie Bungay Walsh on Sept. 16, 1933. Walsh's husband John had died earlier that year. The marriage was a failure. Marie Detmer traveled to Reno, Nevada to grab a quickie divorce, citing spousal "cruelty." The divorce was finalized on Aug. 13, 1934.Baden

It's not clear if the failed marriage had anything to do with it, but Detmer retired within a year of the divorce. In retirement, he remained at Edgemont, although he often wintered at The Breakers, a 140-acre oceanfront resort built in 1896 in Palm Beach, Florida, and maintained a private Manhattan residence since its 1930 opening at The Pierre hotel at Fifth Avenue and 61st Street overlooking Central Park.

Edgemont and its snow-covered landscaped lawns, trees and
shrubs are pictured in this hand-colored photo illustration
looking east, uphill from Martling Avenue, from a brochure Julian
Detmer used to produce annually and give as Christmas/New Year 
gifts to friends and acquaintances. Tarrytown residents of the 1950s
and 1960s reached out to the author of this story to share fond
memories of sledding down this slope towards Martling Avenue
from Edgemont as children and teenagers. (Photo courtesy
Westchester County Historical Society)

Despite his personal problems, famous newspaper columnist Dale Carnegie called Detmer in a 1938 column, “one of the happiest men [Carnegie] had ever met.” Carnegie credited Detmer's happiness to his enthusiasm with flowers and trees.

His childen, Eugene Julian Vincent Detmer, Julian Vincent Detmer and Esther Marie Detmer Baden kept the estate in the family after their father's death, but Edgemont itself remained vacant until the mid-1960s when it was used as a temporary priory to house the Roman Catholic Carmelite pastor and his associates from the nearby Church of the Transfiguration which had been razed and was being rebuilt. It was likely vacant again after the new church opened during the 1967 Christmas season and Edgemont's days were numbered. On Sept. 17, 1971, a fire destroyed the historic chateau. 

The shell of the building still stood, but was soon sold to developers led by future New York Mets baseball team owner Fred Wilpon's new business entity Sterling Equities and demolished in 1972 to make room for the Edgemont at Tarrytown Condominiums, a 26-acre development begun in 1973 that still features some of the historic Edgemont landscaping. The project was the first for Sterling Equities and gave the business a major boost. The clubhouse of the complex is built close to the footprint of the chateau and some of the chateau's stone foundations and stairs remain in place.

The granite and wrought iron entry gate that Julian Detmer installed for his estate at today's 200 Benedict Avenue also remains at the Benedict-Prospect avenue intersection.

This stone and wrought iron entry gate once led to Julian Detmer's Edgemont
estate and still stands at 200 Benedict Avenue near its intersection with Prospect
Avenue.(GoogleMaps 2013 screen capture)

Detmer's children, like their father, lived long lives. Eugene died in Tarrytown at age 83 in 1982. His siblings had moved away from Edgemont long before their father's death. Jerome was 87 when he died in Greenwich, Connecticut in 1987. Esther Marie Detmer Baden was 94 when she died in Los Angeles in 1992.

SOME OF THE ESTATES ABSORBED BY DETMER'S EDGEMONT

 WHO WERE EDGEMONT'S GILDED AGE NEIGHBORS? This 1891 hand-drawn map shows the James Monroe Sigafus estate that became known as Edgemont. It's marked "J.M. Sigafus" and is listed at 7-1/4 acres. The acreage is an estimate. Other maps show it as small as 5 acres. This map also shows properties that would be absorbed into Edgemont in the 35 years after its 1902 sale to Julian Detmer. 

    Some of those properties and some neighboring ones include those of Frederic Elliott Lewis, president of Adams Express Co., a lucrative railroad freight transport firm and now an investment firm called Adams Funds. His brother Percival Pyne Lewis, known as Percy P. Lewis, lived directly north across Prospect Avenue from F.E.'s estate"Springvale." Percy inherited millions from his father-in-law, Moses Taylor -- a  railroad owner who controlled today's Citibank, and investing associate of John Jacob Astor who was worth about $2 billion in today's money. F.E. Lewis also owned the 7-acre estate listed errantly here under "P.E." Lewis at the southwest corner of Benedict and Prospect avenues. An 1893 map lists F.E. Lewis as the owner. Those seven acres would eventually become part of Edgemont, likely because of the presence of its pond and stream which provided a year-round water source for the larger estate. The Lewises' father, George Lewis Jr., owned the estate "Glen Mary" of about 26 acres that ran from the Hudson River east across Broadway to a block northwest of F.E.'s home. 

    Col. C. Graham Bacon headed up one of the nation's premier pharmaceutical manufacturing companies. His estate was called "The Nest." Stockbroker Robert Sewell owned the "Ardmore" estate. Samuel Bradhurst "S.B." Schieffelin owned an import firm known today as Schieffelin & Somerset Co. Founded in 1794, it began as a pharmaceutical importer and today imports premium wines and spirits. Interestingly, it began the transformation during Prohibition by dealing with prescription alcoholic beverages, which remained legal during the ban on alcohol sales. Schieffelin himself retired young and became a published author.

     Former New York Governor Alonzo B. "A.B." Cornell was briefly in control of the small property shown on this map conveyed to him by his son Charles Ezra Cornell in 1889. Henry Dale was a partner in the successful New York and Philadelphia based commission dry goods firm Meigs, Dale & Co. and son of prominent Philadelphia attorney Gerald FitzGerald Dale. 

    Dwight Miller "D.M." Harris was a stockbroker with the Wall Street firm Weaver, Harris & Co. and a nephew of robber baron Jay Gould, whose Lyndhurst estate lay a short distance south on Broadway. Harris, like most of the others on this list, maintained a permanent residence in Manhattan and used Tarrytown as his country seat. He maintained another estate in Lakewood, N.J., near his first cousin, Gould's son George Jay Gould. 

    The Bacon and F.E. Lewis estates would eventually come into the possession of Manhattan banking magnate Henry Ollesheimer, in or about 1916. Ollesheimer was a director of what is now JPMorgan Chase as well as Metropolitan Life Insurance. Detmer purchased the approximately 8.4-acre combined estate he called "Isalina Court" at auction in 1937 after Ollesheimer's 1933 death in Paris. Isalina Court featured a three-story brick residence. 

    Some other neighbors on this map include William N. "W.N." Crane, a school book publisher, grain merchant and financier. Dr. John Conner Barron of "Barron Court," practiced medicine in Manhattan for a half century after serving as an assistant surgeon for the 69th New York Regiment of the Union Army at battles that included the first Battle of Bull Run in 1861. He was president of the United New Jersey Railroad and Canal Company and the Kentucky Coal Lands Company and owned a large ranch in the West. He was an avid yachtsman whose exploits under sail were frequently featured in newspapers during the day when yachting was a premier sport along with horse racing, shooting and crew. Crane and Barron were prominent members of the exclusive Ardsley Club in southern Irvington. At the time Sigafus was building Edgemont, attorney Frederick Sheldon owned the northern 14 acres of Barron's later estate (marked Dr. J.C. Barron on this map) as well as the 23-acre tract east of Barron's estate as shown on this map. Sheldon's father, also named Frederick, was a New York merchant who lived in Tarrytown until his death in 1859, 11 years before it incorporated as a village in 1870.

    William Cleaver "W.C." Wilkinson was a Baptist pastor, university professor of theology, poetry, language and literature and a writer who opened a private school in Tarrytown in 1866 which lasted for about a half dozen years. He spent most of the rest of his life teaching and writing.

    Mrs. Fannie Albert was the widow of a physician.

    Major Robert E. "R.E." Hopkins, owner of "The Lindens" estate near the future Detmer property, was an executive of Tidewater Oil Company and remained company secretary until his death in 1901.Tidewater Oil showed that oil could be moved cheaply by pipeline allowing producers to circumvent much more expensive and restrictive railroad freight.

    Scottish immigrant John Daniell Sr., (J. Daniell on the map), was the 1867 founder of Manhattan's John Daniell & Sons dry goods store at East 8th Street and Broadway. The Daniell store is considered the forerunner of the big box department store. Daniell later moved to The Cedars estate at the northeast corner of South Broadway and East Sunnyside Lane. That mansion still exists. (Map by Frederick W. Beers, David Rumsey Map Collection, 1891)

AUTHOR'S NOTES: A scene from the 1962 science fiction movie “The Brain that Wouldn’t Die” starring Jason Evers was filmed at Edgemont in 1959 and is shown here beginning at the 13:35 mark and lasting for approximately two minutes and 21 seconds. The clip shows some of the landscape and exterior of the chateau …

... For anyone interested, here's a 2008 video presentation on the 100th anniversary of the Tarrytown Boat Club ...