Craig Anel: Showplace of child of immigrants; celebrated physician; independent Nigeria

The original Craig Anel residence of Alfred and Margaret Eliza McEwen is pictured in a 1918 photo some eight years after the McEwens and their four children first occupied it after moving from a farm in Frederick, Md. (Unattributed, published in Tarrytown historian Rob Yasinsac's Hudson Valley Ruins blog)

Millionaires' Row in the Hudson River Valley village of Tarrytown featured many glamorous mansions and estates, most long gone, but among those still standing is Craig Anel, originally the property of a brush manufacturer, later home to one of the nation's preeminent Black physicians, publishers and businessmen.

The extravagant mansion on a hill on a 9-acre estate (later expanded to 16.6 acres) at 548 South Broadway, east uphill between today's Gracemere and Carriage Trail roads, was built around 1910 by Alfred F. McEwen (1867-1945), the son of a Scottish immigrant, and his wife Margaret (Robinson) McEwen. It featured views of the Hudson River to its west and terraced formal gardens.

The estate was carved out of the 170-acre Hibriten estate of American Tobacco Company executive Robert Dula. The property had earlier been one of three estates that grew out of the old 300-acre Requa Farm in 1849. The other two estates, both on the banks of the Hudson River, became Lyndhurst, which still exists, and Pinkstone to Lyndhurst's immediate north. Hibriten had originally been called Greystone when developed by Josiah W. Macy Jr., a close associate of Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller Sr., who owned nearby Kykuit.

The Craig Anel property was carved out of Robert B. Dula's Hibriten estate (misspelled Hibriton on this 1914 map) at the time of its mansion's construction, ca. 1910. Note the property is listed in the name of Alfred McEwen's wife, Margaret (abbreviated) Robinson McEwen. The future Gracemere is the unpaved road to the left (north) of the McEwen property running parallel to Sheldon Avenue and intersecting with the unlabeled road below (west) of Front Street. That unmarked road is now Browning Lane, which intersects with Gracemere just south of the Pennybridge lake (top center left). South Broadway is at west (bottom) of this map, not pictured. Modern Carriage Trail is the east-west line at right on this map. (George Washiington Bromley Co., David Rumsey Historical Map Collection, 1914)

If the Greystone name seems familiar, it should be. It has been developed in the last decade or so as the Greystone-on-Hudson subdivision, accessed off Carriage Trail at South Broadway, a collection of just over 20 individual mansions, each built on two to five acres of land, 100 acres in all.

The Greystone mansion itself burned over New Year's Eve/New Year's Day of 1971-72 when it was last used to house Pinsly Day Camp. The camp operated on the estate  from 1956 to 1984. The surviving buildings from the estate were demolished in 1996.

Alfred was president of Ox Fibre Brush Co., once the world's largest maker of whisk brooms and brushes of all types, with offices and factories throughout the eastern half of the nation.  

The origins of the name of the Scottish family's estate are obscure. An educated guess might connect the Scottish surname Craig with its Scottish Gaelic equivalent creag, synonymous with the English crag or rocky hilltop, and Anel, the Norman-French word for ring, thus "hilltop ring" or something similar. Norman French was the court language of the Scottish monarchy after 1100 A.D.

Alfred McEwen Sr., wife Margaret Eliza and daughters Anna Laura and Eleanor Frances are pictured in this image copied from a May 1924 application for United States passport.

Patriarch John McEwen -- in the 19th century, the name was commonly abbreviated M'Ewen and the family interchangeably used the prefixes Mc and Mac as in MacEwen -- emigrated to the U.S. from Scotland in 1849. He wound up working as a building contractor in Chicago, birthplace in 1868 of Alfred, the sixth of seven children of John and his Irish immigrant wife Elizabeth (Brennan) McEwen.

Alfred was born into wealth in 1868 and married into more of it in 1900 when he wed Margaret Robinson, daughter of businessman and entrepreneur extraordinaire John Kelly (J.K.) Robinson Sr. 

Alfred's father had accumulated a personal fortune of $100,000 ($2.2 million today) by 1870, when Alfred was 2, only 21 years after arriving in his adopted homeland.

Alfred's brother, internationally renowned artist Walter MacEwen was the most famous of the first generation McEwen siblings, painting and studying primarily in the Netherlands, but also in Germany and France.

But Alfred's future was undeniably wrapped up with his father-in-law, J.K. Robinson.

J.K. founded what would become Ox Fibre in Sanford, Fla., in 1884. He had found his first success inventing and patenting the process for making the diamond-shaped head of the groundbreaking Diamond Match in 1871. 

This is a 1905 advertisement for
 Ox-Fibre Brush Co. (Wikimedia
Commons, public domain)

Like his future son-in-law, J.K. married into an entrepreneurial dynasty, serving as an executive with Diamond Match Co., under his father-in-law, founder George Barber. While in Florida in 1881 researching new wood sources for Diamond's wooden match sticks, Robinson stumbled across the palmetto, a diminutive cousin of the palm tree, which he learned could be developed as a premier fiber resource to be used in brushes, laying the foundation for what would eventually become the world's largest brush maker.

Robinson and wife Henrietta Barber -- the Akron, Ohio-born daughter of George Barber -- had five children who survived to adulthood including son J. Kelly Jr. who became Ox Fibre president in 1906 and Margaret, who married McEwen around 1900. 

Alfred was elected president in 1926. He and his brother Peter McEwen, who would go on to marry one of Margaret's sisters in 1911, were both named directors of the Ox Fibre in 1907.

Peter McEwen would go on to become general superintendent of Ox Fibre and own an estate of his own in Ossining where he died in 1947.

In addition to his Ox Fibre and Diamond Match efforts, J.K. Sr.'s financial wins came from railroad and banking enterprises and the Barberton Land & Improvement Company (BLIC) in which he invested with his brother-in-law O.C. Barber.

BLIC created the town of Barberton, Ohio just outside Akron as a model residential, commercial and manufacturing center. The family moved Diamond Match manufacturing to the town which thrived until the general Rust Belt crash of the 1970s and 1980s when much U.S. manufacturing moved overseas.

Walter MacEwen's oil-on-canvas "The Ghost Story" is displayed at the Cleveland (Ohio) Museum of Art. MacEwen, famed older brother of Craig Anel builder Alfred McEwen, painted the picture while living in Holland in 1887. It depicts a prosperous peasant's dwelling, where the women of the house have gathered to spin and prepare food. McEwen showed the narration of a ghost story at its most dramatic moment—all eyes are fixed on the storyteller, the spinning wheels are idle, the listeners lean toward her in fascination, and the little girl clutches her doll in fear. When this work was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1888 and at Walter's hometown 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition, it won praise for both its technical approach and for capturing the essential qualities of the Dutch people. (Gift of Mrs. Edward S. Harkness, 1923)

Alfred and Margaret had four children, three born in Chicago the other in Frederick, Md., while working at Ox Fibre facilities nearby before moving into Craig Anel after the company moved him to its Manhattan offices.

The children included Alfred R. II born in 1903, John Augustus II born in 1905, Anna L. born in 1907 and Eleanor F. born in 1909. Alfred R. would go on to replace his father as Ox Fibre president after Alfred F.'s death in 1945. Alfred R. and his wife would go on to a tragic end, both dying in a fire at their extensive Hartland, Vt., vacation mountain estate Densmore Hill on Jan. 26, 1958.

Part of that estate, 252 acres about 10 miles south of Woodstock, Vt., is now known as Densmore Hill Wildlife Management Area. The property was sold by Alfred R.'s heirs and is now owned by the State of Vermont. 

While living at Craig Anel, McEwen and/or his family were members of Manhattan's Metropolitan Club and New York Yacht Club, Rye's American Yacht Club and Sleepy Hollow Country Club in nearby Scarborough-on-Hudson.

Interestingly, it was not for business, but rather a hobby, that Alfred is most remembered. He was fascinated by microscopic engraving -- extraordinarily miniaturized writing. He perfected his own micro-engraving machine that allowed him, writing with a master pen in a normal fashion and size, to have levers mirror his writing on an increasingly tiny scale using a diamond engraving instrument. He engraved the Lord's Prayer in 1/781,250 of a square inch. To give an idea of that scale of miniaturization, 89,000 copies of the prayer would fit in one square inch. According to a New Yorker magazine article on Sept. 27, 1941, McEwen calculated he could engrave "half the [Biblical] Book of Genesis on the head of a pin."

His machine produced the smallest writing ever engraved.

He hoped the government could use his machine in spycraft during World War II, saying that spies could carry even the longest communications engraved on the edge of a watch crystal, on a boot nail, perhaps a button. It is unclear if the machine was ever used by the government for spycraft, but the machine was displayed for years after its 1922 introduction at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

Alfred's wife, Margaret, was a familiar figure for years in charity and horticultural circles. She prided herself on her iris cultivars propagated at the couple's Tarrytown estate, the most famous of which was the iris named Craig Anel that she introduced about a year before her 1943 death.

After Alfred's death in 1945, his heirs sold Craig Anel to Manhattan physician and businessman Philip Maxwell Hugh Savory, M.D., and his second wife, the former Gladys Erskine, whom he'd married in 1942 after divorcing first wife Gertrude. The Savorys added an indoor swimming pool and sauna to the mansion.

Dr. Savory was a self-made man, an immigrant to the U.S. from British colonial Guiana who completed undergraduate studies and earned a medical degree at McGill University in Montreal by 1919 at age 30.After finishing at the top of his class in medical school at McGill, Savory returned to the U.S. and went into practice in 1920 with perhaps America's first African-American radiologist, Clilan Bethan (C.B.) Powell, M.D., variously listed as a son or grandson of former slaves, who was born in Virginia in the Jim Crow South in 1894. Powell later purchased an estate of his own in Briarcliff Manor where he died in 1977.

Dr. Philip Maxwell Hugh Savory is shown in an undated photo.
(Photo courtesy Journal of the National Medical Association)

Savory was born in Georgetown, British Guiana -- since 1966 the independent nation of Guyana -- on Sept. 27, 1889. From ages 16 to 22, Savory worked as a printer and compositor for two newspapers in Guiana and another, later, in Brazil. In 1911 he emigrated to New York.

The newspaper experience would pay dividends. 

In 1933, Savory and Powell, in a partnership formalized as the Powell Savory Corporation, purchased and revived the failed Victory Mutual Life Insurance Company of Chicago. On Christmas Eve 1935 the pair bought the Harlem-based New York Amsterdam News, a weekly Black issues-focused newspaper, for $5,000 (about $100,000 today).

Their ownership proved a remarkable success. They built the paper's circulation to 100,000 with between 75 and 100 employees.

Savory was listed as co-publisher of the Amsterdam News -- with Powell, and served as president and chairman of Victory Mutual Life. The partners also founded Community Personal Finance Corp., which like Victory Mutual focused on serving the needs of the under-served Black community. 

Savory also served as treasurer of Powell Savory Corp.'s Community Personal Finance and president of the National Association of Life Insurance Medical Examiners.

The front page of the Aug. 8, 1936 edition of the New York Amsterdam News, which had just come under the co-ownership of Dr. Philip M.H. Savory and C.B. Powell, celebrates the performances of track and field legend Jesse Owens and fellow Black athletes at the Summer Olympics in Nazi-run Berlin, Germany.

Powell bought out Savory's share of the Amsterdam News from Savory's widow Gladys after his longtime business partner's death in 1965. Powell sold the paper outright and retired in 1971.

The Savorys sold Craig Anel to the newly independent (Oct. 1, 1960) former British colony of Nigeria in June, 1961. Philip and his wife moved to 1 Washington Square Village in Manhattan, directly across West 3rd Street from New York University medical facilities and a block from Washington Square Park. Savory was chronically ill from 1960 or earlier until his death and required easily accessible medical care on a regular basis.

Gladys, Savory's widow, was his only survivor.

Savory served as a deacon at Madison Avenue Baptist Church, 129 Madison Avenue, Manhattan, some 75 blocks south of his city home at 119 West 131st St., and played a prominent role in the political life of the Democratic Party, as did his business partner, Powell.

Tijjani Muhammad-Bande, a former university professor, has been Nigeria's permanent representative to the United Nations since 2017. He was preceded in the post by Joy Uche Angela Ogwu, the first woman from Nigeria to hold the post, from 2008-17. (United Nations photo by Evan Schneider)

Upon its purchase for $234,000 ($2.2 million today) by the Nigerian government, Craig Anel became the official residence of Nigeria's permanent representative to the United Nations and has retained that role ever since. 

In 2022, the Nigerian government began the process of renovating/restoring the property for the first time in the six decades since it purchased the estate. In 2009, Nigerian sources reported that preliminary estimates costs of repair for the estate neared $17 million, but no work was apparently done at that time.

The 2022 advertisement stated that the proposed work would include the main house, guest house, service quarters, squad court, greenhouse, sauna, tennis court and swimming pool as well as landscaping and road work.

The Craig Anel mansion, since 1961 the official residence of Nigeria's permanent representative to the United Nations, is shown from the back in a 2016 aerial Bing Maps photo. The property lies east of South Broadway and south of Sheldon Avenue between Carriage Trail and Gracemere roads near what is now the tony Greystone-on-Hudson subdivision of multi-million dollar homes,

EDITOR'S NOTES: Researchers should be aware that the names Craig Anel, Pinsly and Greystone are sometimes misspelled as Craig Annel, Pinsley and Graystone, respectively.

LINKS TO OTHER GILDED AGE STORIES BY MARK DONOVAN