MTM: Merestead

Not far from our house is Byram Lake, and right across from that fabulous fishing spot is Merestead, a turn of the (20th) century Georgian Revival estate built in 1906 by William Sloane and his wife, Francis. Sloane belonged to the family that founded W&J Sloane, a famous rug and furniture store in New York City that furnished such famous homes as the Vanderbilt mansion and the White House.

Unlike many of their colleagues who had country manors to visit while they lived in the city, William and Francis lived at Merestead, which is the Scottish word for farmland, and William commuted to work every day. Despite its name, Merestead is an estate, not a gentleman's farm. William and Francis bought acreage encompassing two farms and cleared a good deal of it for their house and gardens. Still, the farmland does remain, and it was farmed for years by members of the estate staff.

Although the families knew each other for years, William and Francis married late in life and had only one child. They did, however, have plenty of dogs, and they buried them in a small pet cemetery in the trees between the manor house and the farmland. You can see in the picture at left that before the storms a year or so back, there was even a fire hydrant for the dogs.

The Sloane's daughter's name was Margaret. She married a doctor from the city named Robert Patterson. Patterson had moved to New York from Georgia, and he added peaches to the apples and pears already being grown on the Merestead lands. He also arranged for the only "off-site" use of the products grown on the farm: the gift of apples to the hospital where he worked. The apples were harvested by local youths, packed into barrels and shipped down to the city.

The Pattersons created a living trust that designated the property to go to Westchester County's Parks department after the last heir died, which happened in 2000. Unfortunately, Westchester hasn't done nearly enough with this property. The apple trees are not replaced when they fall down, nor are the peach trees. The staff who manage the estate do still plant tomatoes, peppers, flowers and berries in the gardens. The tomatoes were suffering from the local blight when we went, and the peaches were still hard, but the raspberries and blackberries were yummy!

The interior of the house is maintained better than the grounds, but Westchster isn't doing anything to maximize usage. Many other historic homes have grounds that can be rented for weddings, etc, which would be wonderful at Merestead if they needed the money for maintenance, but it's not happening.

Recently, Westchester County decided that Merestead would become part of the Copland House complex. While this has some benefits--bringing more people to the grounds with concerts, etc, and giving musicians practice space in some of the Merestead outbuildings--it's problematic for those of us who like to go through historic buildings and who believe the historicity of those buildings has value in and of itself. At the moment, while the bottom floor is a bit bare for various reasons, the upper floors are furnished. You can see the bedrooms as they were, imagine the people living in them. The furniture is, of course, W&J Sloane, and the house itself and the rooms were used in advertisements for the company.

Currently, the art on the walls, the books on the shelves, everything is original. But when the Copland deal gets finalized, people will be living in the house, which means that it must, perforce, be renovated. It has to come up to code for a residential hotel since the people living there would be "musicians in residence," transients, not owners. Will tours cease completely? I have no idea. But certainly they won't have the poignancy or immediacy they do now.

So whatever is in your neighborhood, go see it now while you still can! And see more My Town Monday posts over at the My Town Monday blog.