Cedarmere-Clayton Estates - History

History

The property that became Cedarmere had been in use since the early days of local settlement in the 17th century. The earliest known house on it was built in 1787 by Richard Kirk, a Quaker farmer. Bryant bought a small house first built by Joseph Moulton in 1843 with the intent of establishing a retreat for himself from his job in the city as editor of the New York Evening Post, where he could contemplate nature and write his poetry. He expanded both the land and the house through the 1850s and 1860s into the present structure, following the then-popular principles of Andrew Jackson Downing and disciples like Calvert Vaux, who supposedly designed the mill house, calling for small Gothic Revival cottages, sometimes in a Picturesque mode, that maintained harmony with their rural surroundings. At Cedarmere, as he later named the property, he received not only Vaux and his sometime collaborator Frederick Law Olmstead, but other cultural notables of the era such as painter Thomas Cole, James Fenimore Cooper and actor Edwin Booth.

He sold it to his daughter Julia in 1875, as long as he was allowed to live the remainder of his life there; and he did, dying three years later. She in turn sold it to her nephew, Harold Godwin, in 1891. Eight years later, he sold the undeveloped property that became Clayton to Lloyd Bryce, a former congressman and heir to industrial fortunes.

The upper stories of Cedarmere were damaged considerably by a 1903 fire. On the other property, Bryce hired Codman, a young architect responsible for many seaside homes in the Northeast, to design the main house, and began creating gardens in the property's northwest corner. The Fricks hired Charles Allom to modify the house for their use when they moved in 1919, renaming it Clayton, but Codman's design remains largely unchanged. Allom's main changes were the replacement of the original entrance loggia with the porch and, inside, creating a large entrance hall in keeping with the Fricks' intention to emulate an English country house, a popular aspiration of wealthy Americans during the 1920s. To that end, Guy Lowell designed the gatehouse, and Marian Cruger Coffin designed the main garden a decade later.

Four years after Frick's death, in 1969, the family sold the estate to Nassau County for use as an art museum. In 1989 the county transferred control to a private foundation. The Godwin family continued living in Cedarmere until they, too, donated it to the county for use as a museum in 1975.