Updated: Aug 24, 2022
Generous donations enabled Durand-Hedden to purchase a wonderful addition to our collection in 2009 that honors Maplewood artist Asher B. Durand: a 19th century folk-art portrait of Durand painted by an untrained artist, based on an 1845 daguerreotype portrait. It hangs in the parlor along with works by Durand.
Donors: Irene Kosinski, the Noble and Gamble families in memory of Joseph Veach Noble, and Linda Ferber.
Updated: Aug 24, 2022
The earliest residents of the Maplewood-South Orange area were The Lenape (len-AH-pay), Native Americans who once populated “a vast domain stretching along the Middle Atlantic coast from New York Bay to Delaware Bay, between the Hudson and Delaware River valleys,” according to Robert Grumet’s book, The Lenapes.
John Kraft, an archaeologist, educator and director of Lenape Lifeways, presented a slide-illustrated lecture at Durand-Hedden in 2005 under the aegis of the Horizons Speakers Bureau of the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, a state partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Fluted spear points document the arrival of the Lenapes’ ancestors in the Middle Atlantic region12,000 years ago, during the last ice age. Around 1000 BC the advent of the bow and arrow, pottery and farming made a new, more settled way of life possible for the Lenape people, who lived in New Jersey at the time of European exploration and settlement.
Early 17th century estimates of the Lenape population range from 8,000 to 20,000, divided into some 20 bands or villages. Sadly, 125 years later, following the arrival of European explorers and settlers, their numbers had fallen to a few hundred.
Chief Tuscan (or Tuskin), who is said to have lived in our valley, was reputedly born a Mohican. The late Maplewood historian Beatrice Herman wrote that according to James Ricalton, the village’s famous schoolmaster, Chief Tuscan had migrated from Upper New York State, and married a young Native woman, joining the Lenni Lenape and setting up household with her in the ravine along what is now Tuscan Road.
By one account, Chief Tuscan died in 1801. Members of his tribe staged an elaborate funeral ritual, and he was buried in the vicinity of his home. Some historians, including Mr. Kraft, believe that the Native Americans were long gone from this area by that time.
In the early 1920s, Mr. Ricalton, along with William Sayer, a member of the Board of Education, explored the swampy area near the East Branch of the Rahway River, which runs through Maplewood Memorial Park and the Tuscan School area. Mr. Ricalton collected not only artifacts but stories from descendants of the early residents.
Updated: Aug 24, 2022
The executors of the C.V.S. Roosevelt Jr. estate were enmeshed in a long dispute over his
will, but upon its resolution, William Howard Curtiss of Ralston Ave., South Orange purchased the grand house and its land in March 1902. It is interesting to surmise his motives.
Curtiss was a financier of sorts who had just had a series of well-publicized failed business ventures. A private secretary to John D. Rockefeller in the 1890s, (and before that an oil merchant, then a broker), Curtiss went on in 1900 to be the treasurer of the Third Avenue Elevated Railway in Manhattan, an enterprise that went bankrupt despite his efforts to raise capital. He was a promoter of a Colorado silver mine which failed in 1901, and in 1902 took on the role of an aggrieved stockholder, suing U.S. Steel over the conversion of $200 million ($5 billion today) in bonds.
After these harsh losses, no doubt W. H. Curtiss was tired of the financial world and wanted a change when he purchased the Roosevelt property from the estate’s executors for $60,000. Perhaps he saw real estate as a safe investment, or he wished to protect whatever wealth he had by buying land (in his wife, Lillie’s, name), or he had a vision of how to develop the hillside into homes, including perhaps a home for himself in the old mansion. His real estate brochure for Roosevelt Park extolls the parklike land and “the benefits of railroad, trolley, telephones, telegraph, express and livery service” as well as a new school and delivery service from New York stores.
Yet, despite Curtiss’ connections with influential New Yorkers, real estate was not his forte either. He made only four sales in the two years before he sold the property to T.B. Ackerson in 1904.