Ella and Warren Design a Resort

ELLA AND WARREN DESIGN A RESORT

ELLA’S PLACE IN THE RESORT HISTORY

As I have discussed in past posts, I feel certain that the conversion of the Deserted Village of Feltville into the renamed resort of Glenside Park came out of the joint efforts of Warren Ackerman, the man who owned the village, and Ella King Adams (aka Mrs. Frederic Adams), one of Warren’s friends. There is direct evidence—if tantalizingly brief—concerning Ella’s influence in the creation of the resort.

From Anna Molloy Walsh, whom we will meet, along with her family, in next month’s post, we learn:

A visitor to the Deserted Village [in 1884] was a family by the name of Mrs. Frederick Adams—took a liking to the house for a summer—so Mr. Ackerman repaired the adjoining cottage for us. . . . Mrs. Adams was the one who induced Mr. Ackerman to turn the place into a summer resort—and he did just that. Mrs. Norris—widow with 2 daughters (friend of Mrs. Adams from Norfolk, Va.)—operated [Glenside] Park  for two seasons.¹

We even have a time for Ella’s influence and work on the resort, five years, presumably starting from the Ella’s first summer in the village, 1884. From one of Ella’s obituaries, we learn:

Upon the invitation of Mr. Ackerman Mr. Adams and his family occupied one of his cottages for the summer, and Mr. Ackerman’s disposition to improve the estate was greatly aided for five years by the good taste and enthusiasm of Mrs. Adams.²

And from another, we learn:

For five years, the family spent their summers at Glenside, better known to old residents of this region as Feltville and saw that romantic spot transformed by the owner, Mr. Warner [sic] Ackerman, from a ruinous manufacturing hamlet into an attractive summer resort. To this result the activity and good taste of Mrs. Adams largely contributed.³

My past posts have been setting the stage for the making of Glenside Park, by describing the nineteenth century contextual elements without which no one would have been considered creating a resort, and also describing the existing resorts which could easily have drawn Ella away from working with Warren on the resort. I am pleased to have arrived at a post that allows me to pull the past posts together, and bring you into the resort which Ella and Warren created.

WAS ELLA LOOKING FOR A PLACE TO GET OUT OF HER CORSET?

I will begin with my preconceptions about Ella. The most obvious change to the cottages at the village was the addition of Adirondack style porches, meant to convey a sense of being in the country, of being in nature, as at Adirondack resorts. Those porches left me visualizing Ella as more or less camping out in a rustic cabin in the woods, at least compared to her city existence in fashionable East Orange. My twenty-first century sensibilities—from a lifetime of forsaking professional clothing to dress down whenever I was camping or staying at rustic cabins—caused me to go looking for evidence that Ella was looking for a place to get out of her corset.

Corsets are perhaps the ultimate symbol of female repression. Corsets have been featured in literature as torture devices that could lead to miscarriages—e.g. in the book The Case of the Gypsy Goodbye: An Enola Holmes Mystery.⁴ Corsets have been seen as signals of female respectability and class: in a book whose title I cannot remember, a female time traveler, unable to complete her period costume with a corset, is mistaken for a loose woman and barely escapes assault.

In her study of corsetry and its impacts, The Corset, a Cultural History, Valerie Steele notes that the corset was an element of “fashionable dress” for four centuries and was still worn into the early twentieth century. Steele indicates corsets were seen as both an element of fashion, and indeed, an indication of character, so that the book I read, where the lack of a corset translated into being a loose woman was not so far off.

In order to be “decently” dressed, women had to wear corsets … By simultaneously constructing an image of irreproachable propriety and one of blatant sexual allure, the corset allowed women to articulate sexual subjectivity in a socially acceptable way. The corset was also supposed to make women look more “beautiful” by concealing physical features that were less than “ideal.”⁵

As the Industrial Revolution allowed the rise of a larger middle class during the nineteenth century, even working-class women could afford corsets, and so acquire increased fashion and reputation. Steele calls this “the democratization of fashion,” with the silhouette produced by the corset being associated with an aristocratic feminine beauty that women of many classes were seeking to project.

But, even during the nineteenth century, corsets were not created equal in terms of their ability to create a perhaps unnatural silhouette. Moreover, individual women tightened corsets according to their own desires, and hopefully mostly found ways to wear them in a way that was not severely detrimental to health. Steele says that it was primarily younger women, “more interested in fashion,” who were more likely to tend toward “tight lacing.”⁶ Some critics of tight lacing saw it as the worship of fashion and an evidence of an overabundance of vanity on the part of women—yet more examples that men could point to in asserting the mental and moral inferiority of the female sex.⁷

In an effort to accommodate the rise of sports, including horseback riding or bicycling, corset manufacturers created versions which were meant to provide both fashion and comfort during these activities.

A note on the beginning of the end of corsets comes from Betty Kreisel Shubert’s book Out of Style: A Modern Perspective of How, Why and When Vintage Fashions Evolved. She notes that freedom from corsets began when a French designer, Paul Poiret, created a narrow sheath dress which was incompatible with the shape created by a corset, and suggests that women’s desire to be free from their corsets may have helped make this new silhouette popular. Shubert observes: “It is said that when the U.S. entered World War 1 in 1917, the steel collected from abandoned corsets yielded enough steel to float two battleships.”⁸

Weirdly, corsets can still be an element of fashionable dress. In the week in which I did much of my initial research on corsetry the New York Times carried a picture of a woman in a modern-day corset, worn as outer wear, which I reported in a post in the Facebook group “Feltville Features.” I thought it was striking that the photographer had cut off the woman’s head in taking a closeup of the corset.

Ella’s letters do have occasional references to clothing purchases, reflecting some interest in fashion, but she doesn’t spend time relating what she wore to any event, nor does she (quite understandably) transfer any information about her undergarments. I am now highly doubtful that she was, indeed, looking for a place where she could completely shuck confining undergarments and not be at danger of being taken to be a loose woman. In my last post, I told you that Ella’s Aunt Helen was one of the people who visited Glenside, where Aunt Helen was taken for a wild goat cart ride by Ella’s daughter Rebecca. Ella might have been permissive about her children’s outdoor activities, but I don’t think she wanted Aunt Helen to see her without her corset. Nor, I think, would Ella want the other socially upscale individuals whom I believe she was instrumental in getting to the village, to see her less than well-dressed.

At the same time, as the last post has made clear, part of the attraction of the resort Ella was helping to create was its aspect of being in nature, of a sort of camping out, close to home, with cottages, not tents, and with the support of an excellent dining cottage. In Working at Play, Cindy S. Aron ties the rise of the camping craze to “the rehabilitation of nature” promoted by artists and photographers. This rehabilitation took the “suspicion and dread” with which Americans had approached nature early in the nineteenth century, and replaced it with an increasing attraction for the wilderness especially during the last quarter of the nineteenth century.⁹

From the start, some of the guidebooks featuring the more natural vacation destinations advocated women camping along with the men. We remember William Henry Harrison Murray exhorting ministers to get out into the wilderness; simultaneously he suggested clothing for women—who, he was sure, would also benefit from a natural vacation—e.g. “a pair of buckskin gloves,” “thick balmoral boots, with rubbers,” and ”a short walking dress, with Turkish drawers fastened with a band tightly at the ankle.”¹⁰ I can only hope that Ella brought clothing that would allow her to get out with Rebecca into the goat cart which had so enchanted Aunt Helen.

CULTURAL CONTEXT FOR THE RISE OF RESORTS

Before I go on to what Ella and Warren did together at the village to make it a successful resort (with the help of scores of workers, of course), I will briefly review the contextual developments and trends that allowed resorts to arise. Most of these elements have been explored in previous posts. I will begin with nineteenth century cultural trends underpinning the rise of resorts, since, whether or not Ella was looking to get into more comfortable clothing, the creation of Glenside Park would not have been possible without these cultural changes.

Both religious beliefs and patriotism underlay the way that taking vacations and visiting resorts not only came into vogue but came to be seen as a necessary way for the working man (and his family)—of all classes—to unwind from the stress of workaday living and return refreshed and better able to do the work which served God and the country. I have traced some of the developments in religious thought in one of my previous posts, Religion and the Move to Resorts.

Cindy Aron’s book, Working at Play, spends considerable time identifying the particular concerns of nineteenth century Americans regarding vacationing in general, and resorts in particular, rooted in both the country’s Puritan/religious roots and a sense of what being American—and living in the democracy which had required so much effort—required of citizens. From both religion and a sense of patriotism came a work ethic which led Americans to see idleness as both ungodly and a characteristic of the monarchy which they had rejected.¹¹ Work was, especially for Puritans, a means of glorifying God.

So arose a dichotomy of leisure, in which enjoyment of innocent pleasures, e.g. the pure delights of nature, was acceptable, as opposed to more dangerous forms of leisure—the exact nature of which Americans were still working out.

As noted above and in a previous post, I have described how prominent clergyman William Henry Harrison Murray wrote an entire tourist guidebook of sorts advocating vacations to get away from one’s everyday work and life and into rustic settings, where one could camp or otherwise live more simply. Ministers and other religious leaders found ways to let their flock know, directly or indirectly, that it was more than okay to take a vacation, it was in the public and God’s interest. As we have seen, the vacation destinations of these figures, and other clebrities of the time could be front page news, in the newspapers. Not all of these destinations were the seemingly uncomplicated settings advocated by Murray. As I noted in a previous post, one clergyman, prominent Unitarian minister, William Ellery Channing, exhorted the creation or choosing of resorts where innocent pleasure could be pursued, not more dangerous and questionable ones. Channing was one of the most prominent Unitarian pastors at a time when Unitarianism was a religion particularly associated with the upper class.

Leisure at a resort could pose particular challenges for women. Aron notes that the endorsement of a work ethic during the nineteenth century took men’s work, not women’s, as its measure. For women, a “cult of domesticity” arose as the model for womanhood. Victorian women acquired middle class status not only by being relieved of the necessity of wage work, but by having a domestic servant to lighten household chores.¹² Even though then, as now, women home in the domestic setting—even with the aid of servants in the home—have substantial day to day obligations and work, women at home were seen as being at leisure all the time.

Aron observes:

Victorian culture assigned these women other duties—the care and socialization of children, the creation and maintenance of a refined domestic unit that would soothe and revitalize their over-worked and harried husbands, and responsibility for those unfortunates in their communities who needed moral, spiritual, or material assistance. Although the nineteenth century did not designate such tasks “work,” the middle-class women who performed them remained exempt from any of the negative associations with leisure.

There were concerns that resorts and the leisure there could seduce women away from appropriate feminine behavior. Women were often in the majority at resorts, for a variety of reasons, including the fact that husbands might have to return to work for much of the week, leaving their wives on their own during that time.

TECHNOLOGICAL CONTEXT FOR THE RISE OF RESORTS

The growth of resorts, including Glenside Park, would have been impossible without improvements in transportation, particularly the railroad. Dominic Mazzagetti, author of a book studying the Jersey Shore’s history and current status, has credited the railroad as the thing that gave birth to Atlantic City, one of New Jersey’s—and indeed, the northeast’s—most successful and popular nineteenth century resorts.

While Feltville was not located directly on a railroad route, it was only a short carriage connection away from two different railroad lines. Without this, the resort probably could not have been successful.

HOW TO CREATE A RESORT/WRY OBSERVATIONS ON RESORT MAKING

Thus, cultural and technological changes were in place to allow resorts to arise within the United States, particularly in the busy northeast. But, context alone is not enough to turn a deserted village into a thriving resort. What steps needed to be taken to turn the Deserted Village into a resort?

One year before Ella’s first visit, the influential editor of The Nation, Edwin Lawrence Godkin, had set out in an editorial a set of wry observations on just how American vacation spots of the time were being created and were proliferating. Godkin, originally from Ireland, saw as exemplary “the force of reason, of humanity, of human equality, of a good example.“¹³ Godkin often had strong opinions, and his opinions were listened to closely. An article published in The Nation, looking back at Godkin’s influence from 1950, 48 years after his death, gave him the chief credit for sustaining and growing the influence of The Nation, a weekly journal of criticism, “of attack,” designed to strike fear into “every charlatan and scoundrel,” of which he saw many in post-Civil War America.¹⁴

Godkin’s comments on resorts reflect both the process of resort making itself, and some of the not-so-republican tensions it could create:

Nothing is more remarkable in the history of American summering than the number of new resorts which are discovered and taken possession of by “the city people” every year, the rapid increase in the means of transportation both to the mountains and the sea, and the steady encroachments of the cottager on the boarder in all the more desirable resorts.¹⁵

Godkin identifies discrete steps in the creation of a resort:

The place is usually first discovered by artists in search of sketches, or by a family of small means in search of pure air, and milk fresh from the cow, and liberty—not to say license—in the matter of dress. Its development then begins by some neighboring farmer’s agreeing to take them to board—a thing he has never done before, and does now unwillingly, and he is very uncertain what to charge for it. . . After they leave, he is apt to be astonished by the amount of cash he finds himself possessed of, probably more than he ever handled before at one time, except when he mortgaged his farm, and comes to the conclusion that taking summer boarders is an excellent thing, and worth cultivating.

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In the next stage he seeks them, and perhaps is emboldened by the advice of somebody to advertise the place, and try to get hold of some editors or ministers whose names he can use as references, and who will talk it up. He soon secures one or two of each and they then tell him that his house is frequented by intellectual or “cultured” people; and he becomes more elated and more enterprising, enlarges the dining-room, adds on a wing, relieves his wife of the cooking by hiring a woman in the nearest town, and gives more meat and stronger coffee, and, little by little, grows into a hotel-keeper, with an office and a register.

At this stage of development of a tourism destination, Godkin calls the visitors “boarders.” But soon, warns Godkin, the boarder stage gives way to the cottagers—people who buy up land in the same area as the boarders, and begin building “cottages,” perhaps at first calling them “shanties” or “log huts.”

Caste has been established, with all its attendant evils. The community, once so simple and homogeneous, is now divided into two classes, one of which looks down on the other. [The boarder] finds that the cottagers, who are the permanent residents, have a society of their own, in which he is either not welcome, or is a mere outsider. He finds that the very name of boarder, which he once wore like a lily, has become a term of inferiority. Worse than all, he finds himself confounded with a still lower class . . . . called the excursionist—who comes by the hundred on the steamers in linen dusters and is compelled by a force of circumstances to “do” [the resort] in twenty-four hours, and therefore enters on his task without shame or scruple, roams over the cottager’s lawn, stares into his windows, breaks his fences, and sometimes asks him for a free lunch. The boarder, of course, looks down on this man, but when both are on the road or on the piazza of the hotel how are they to be distinguished? They are not, and cannot be.

We have the article which I have quoted extensively in a previous post, “Introducing Warren”, by an unnamed New York Times reporter, to thank for the report that Warren Ackerman was already contemplating using his newly purchased village as a place for guests to stay—and that he was planning to spend considerable resources on readying the place for guests. So the intent was there. Warren just needed a partner to help him design a resort. He found that in Ella.

The process of resort making at Glenside Park follows many of the steps identified by Godkin. One of Godkin’s steps had taken place even before Warren Ackerman bought the Deserted Village, and long before he thought of making it a resort. The Deserted Village had already been “discovered” by artists. Guillermo Thorn had made visits to create his series of stereographic tourist “Artistic Photo Views.” Likewise, Thomas Moran, who would later help create the fame of and National Park status of the Yellowstone region, arranged to stay for a number of days, along with family and friends, at Feltville, while considering the village as a possible site for an summer-time artists’ colony.

Warren and Ella took the village from the discovery step to a sort of amalgam of the boarder and cottager stages. While cottages were available for shorter rentals than entire seasons, it is clear that many individual guests established rights to rent their favorite cottage year after year, becoming cottagers of sorts. Indeed, there are several newspaper mentions of one individual opening or closing his or her cottage at Glenside, as though the individual had ownership of the cottage.

NEW YORK HERALD, SUNDAY, JUNE 30, 1907.–NEW JERSEY SECTION.

Summer Plans of Jersey Society Include Extended Trips to Europe

Hundreds of Residents Are Also Leaving the Cities for Mountains and Seashore.

Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin H. Atha, of No. 24 Waverly avenue, recently opened their cottage at Glenside Park.

A column entitled “Personal and Social Notes” in the Saturday, November 2, 1894 edition of the New-York Tribune led with the following three items:

A. Pennington Whitehead and his daughters have closed their Park Place House and will live for the winter in Sixteenth st., New-York.

General and Mrs. Joseph W. Plume and Miss Laura Plume have closed their cottage at Glenside Park and returned to town.

Mr. and Mrs. W. Campbell Clark closed their country place, “The Oaks,” near Elberon, this week and returned to their home, No. 1010 Broad st. ¹⁶

The New York Tribune column apparently does not distinguish cottagers at Glenside Park status-wise from the owners of  a “country place” near Elberon. You may recall that wealthy Elberon was where President Grant had his summer cottage.

Oddly, nearly a century later, Dr. Richard W. Butler gave a nod to Godkin’s article, as Butler set out—as an academic discipline—a model of tourism destination development known as “the Tourism Area Life Cycle (TALC),” a “sigmoidal life in the growth of a tourism destination with identifiable stages, namely exploration, involvement, development, consolidation and stagnation.”¹⁷ 

THE VILLAGE AND ITS VERSION OF EXCURSIONISTS

It was not only artists who had discovered the charms of the Deserted Village before Warren bought it. Thorn’s Feltville series calls it “a favorite spot for picnic parties.” For Glenside Park, picnickers were its version of the “excursionist,” mentioned with some scorn by Godkin. Here is a description of a picnic excursion to the village one year after Warren’s purchase, but before the resort conversion began:

The party of twenty-four persons that went to Feltville yesterday, in Mr. Gerber’s two-house ombinus [sic, probably omnibus], had various experiences. The company was pleasant enough, but it was impossible to control the elements of nature. On the grounds where the party camped, a stroke of lightening flashed from a cloudless sky, shattered a tree only a short distance from where Mr. E. C. Beltel and some friends stood, and the fragments of the tree were scattered in almost every direction, but fortunately doing no injury to any one. . . . Feltville is a romantic place for pic-nic goers, and those who went there yesterday enjoyed the trip, despite the rain.¹⁸

Warren soon took steps to exclude picnickers, as reported by the local press:

–Plainfield’s young people regret very much, this season the same as last, the closing of the Feltville grounds to picnic parties. Feltville was formerly a favorite resort for small parties.¹⁹

Even with all Warren’s best efforts at exclusion, the picnickers kept coming. Picnickers were so certain that they could visit Glenside Park at will that Warren Ackerman had to provide an alternate location for at least one group which had been holding its annual picnic at the village for some years.

Would Show No Partiality.

As we related in our issue of yesterday, our reporter was unable to induce Mr. Warren Ackerman to say anything in defense of, or in relation to, the attack made on him in a New York city paper. But Secretary Crane of the Union County Board of Agriculture, says that Mr. Warren Ackerman was very pleasant and considerate in declining to permit the Association to hold its annual picnic at Glenside. It had been his custom to allow pleasure parties the freedom of the place but they so abused the privilege that he was compelled to adopt a prohibitory rule, and could not well make any discrimination. Mr. Ackerman expressed his regret and offered to accommodate the board by the use of a very pretty place on the mountain side.²⁰

Throughout the resort period at Glenside Park there continued to be a tension between allowing picnickers and excluding them, with Warren Ackerman stating that the reason for exclusion was to protect the peaceful enjoyment of his resort by the paying guests staying in the cottages. The only one-day visitors the resort promoted were people who came to the resort’s dining cottage—called the Inn—for a meal and probably a stroll.

This delightful spot was formerly frequented by those who participate in Sunday school picnics and other pleasure-seeking parties; but since Mr. Ackerman has procured the property picnics and similar gatherings have been prohibited on account of molesting the inhabitants.²¹

Feltville/Glenside Park also seems to have been a frequent location visited by parties of bikers and walkers.

As a measure of the continuing tension over would-be picnickers, in a letter to James Hawley, author of the 1964 booklet The Deserted Village, Mrs. Bertram Berry described two visits to the village. During her 1905 visit to the village, she had luncheon at the “Hotel,” which she remembered as being about to close. She notes that she and her husband were actually interested in purchasing the property. She apparently faced nothing but welcome on this visit.

She returned again some years later, this time to picnic:

It was guarded closely during the first world war. We had a picnic there with some of the wounded soldiers from Colonia and we were forced to move in the middle of our supper by the guard. It was annoying as one of the boys was minus a leg.

WARREN AND ELLA—THE PERFECT TEAM

By his early twenties, Warren had made his first fortune through his controlling interests in at least two rubber companies with Goodyear licenses. By the time he bought the Deserted Village, Warren had moved on from his first fortune building enterprise, rubber, to a second, road building, including cement manufacturing and macadamizing. His amassed fortune was more than equal to playing with the transformation of an entire village.

Even before he began his serious resort building, Warren had begun work at the village, fitting it out for raising fancy cattle, and beginning some renovations. Anna Molloy Walsh’s recollections include specific descriptions of Warren destroying the dilapidated Felt mansion, and fixing over a nearby cottage, into which Warren moved the Molloy family, Anna’s parents, Thomas and Annie who were live-in employees at the village. An 1883 newspaper note has a more general description of the pre-resort renovations:

Warren Ackerman has all the spare laborers in the neighborhood of Feltville employed in fencing, grubbing and making other improvements on his 800 acres there. Mr. Ackerman has the most extensive and beautiful lawn in Fanwood, with abundant beds of flowers, arranged with rare good taste.²²

Ella and her family were apparently Warren’s first guest at the village. She was married to a successful lawyer. She and her husband hobnobbed with the wealthy of East Orange and Newark. All this made her a good partner for resort creation.

What did a collaboration to create a resort at Feltville offer Ella? It was a chance to create a rustic resort, a place to take her three children that would satisfy her love for the country. Warren offered her the chance to help redesign the buildings of Felt’s village, and create one or two new ones; so it was a chance for Ella to create the resort of her dreams, and do it with someone else’s money. Anna tells us that Ella prompted the hiring of at least the first manager at the resort—so, the partnership offered Ella the chance to hire and perhaps direct staff, and again, to do it with someone else’s money.

Why would Ella choose to take her children to crowded Long Branch or other shore resorts, or Lake Hopatcong, where she might face being under the possibly judgmental eyes of strangers. At the Glenside Park she helped to create, she could be safe and removed from both random resort goers and excursionists; moreover, there would be no fancy gaudy attractions to tempt the kids or herself. Moreover, at Glenside Park she could let her children act somewhat wild outdoors—in good, innocent pleasures—without any judgment. Indeed, I think Glenside Park offered Ella the chance to not only choose at least some of the staff but assemble a colony of her friends there—as people like Thomas Moran were wont to do in creating their own little vacation colonies. These would be people who would not judge her, and with whom she could easily socialize.

The new resort at Glenside was also only a few train stations away from Ella’s East Orange home, with a short carriage ride from the station to the village. Ella lived close enough that she could probably take her own carriage.

Finally, I think that Ella, at least unconsciously, saw the partnership at Glenside as a way to use her considerable talents—the “good taste,” “enthusiasm,” and “activity” noted in her obituaries, in doing her work at the village. Ella later showed her attention to detail, and her sense of herself as being capable of having been an architect, in a letter to her beloved Aunt Ellis.

MAKING A RESORT CALLED GLENSIDE PARK

What were the changes that Ella and Warren designed, and Warren saw carried out, to make Feltville into Glenside Park?

Architects Penelope Watson and Michael Henry identify the original style of the cottages/housing built by David Felt for his workers as “vernacular Greek Revival style.”²³ The conversion of these rather plain cottages to resort cottages entailed addition of “Adirondack-style embellishments,” particularly broad Adirondack-style porches, with cedar flooring and rustic cedar porch supports. “Queen Anne” dormer windows were added to the second story of many cottages. The addition of Adirondack style porches conveyed a sense of being in the country, of being in nature, as at Adirondack resorts. These porches and other changes seem to tie directly into Ella’s affinity for nature.

In terms of changes to individual buildings, David Felt’s original Church/Store building was subdivided during the resort period into two units, which could be rented separately, and a two story cedar belfry was added.²⁴ Contrariwise, many other cottages in the village, once themselves divided into two or more separate apartments for David Felt’s workers, were now converted into single family resort cottages, with center walls and other dividers removed.

The resort added one totally new building, “an eight-bay-by-four-bay carriage and horse barn,”²⁵ which later acquired the name, “Masker’s Barn.” The building had a porte-cochere to shelter those getting into or out of carriages. I have always wondered how people got to their cottages from there without getting wet—perhaps they were dropped off or picked up at individual cottages by coachmen. Thomas Molloy had spent time as a carriage driver for Philip Kearny’s second wife, Agnes, and so, could have provided carriage service, within the village and to and from the train.

One of the cottages was enlarged and renovated to become a dining facility; residents did not cook their own meals in their own cottages, but instead ate at the facility, called either the “Inn” or the “Hotel.” This gave employment to one or more of the staff hired to make the guests feel at leisure.

Feltville Archaeologist Matt Tomaso indicates that additions of Adirondack style porches and other improvements such as the second story dormers did not extend to the three “workers’ cottages” nearest to Masker’s Barn, which “maintained the simple design of Felt’s time.”²⁶ Tomaso also indicates that two of the three workers’ cottages remained internally divided into two apartments, suggesting that they may have been continuing to house two staff families during the Glenside Park period. 

The original Felt schoolhouse, now disappeared, was renovated for use as a gate house, gaining a porch and a southern entrance.²⁷ Adjacent to the newly renovated gate house was an Adirondack style gate announcing “Glenside Park” over the gate.

The schoolhouse renovation dovetailed with changes to the roads into and through the newly designed resort. Entry into the village was rerouted from the Scotch Plains (or “Valley”) Road which had been the main access point during David Felt’s time. Now visitors were brought into Glenside Park from its northern edge, at the intersection of Cataract Hollow Road, which is the road through the village, and New Providence Road. This allowed the first-time visitor’s first impression to be of a lovely rustic gate house, not the somewhat decrepit factory at the southern end of the village.²⁸ Moreover, this new entrance was close to the relatively new train station at Murray Hill, from which Glenside Park guests could request carriage transport to the resort.

I include a photo from the biographical section on Warren Ackerman in Ricord:²⁹ In it, one of the Glenside Park cottages is flanked by an almost smothering amount of landscaping, including extensive flower beds—which to me suggests Warren’s influence, since it is similar to what the 1893 article cited above had called Warren’s “abundant beds of flowers, arranged with rare good taste” observed at his estate at Lyde Park.

Ella wanted to be in a natural setting, but probably wanted (and knew her friends wanted) some modern amenities. Ella’s cottage, and the Glenside cottages renovated for vacationers were congregated in and around the village’s Commons area. Anna’s recollections tell us that there were no bathrooms in the cottages in 1884, at the time Ella and Warren began transforming the village. Tomaso has not found any privies which obviously served this area. At some point, a cistern and septic system was installed below the houses, down the gorge, and served all these cottages. It is likely that indoor bathrooms are an amenity that Ella would have wanted as soon as possible.

But the cottages not meant for vacationers may not have initially received the same indoor plumbing advantages. “Privy artifacts” unearthed during archaeological work at the village indicate that the privy behind the workers’ cottages was in use until sometime between 1899 and 1906.³⁰ The privy behind House 1 was in use even later, until 1916, “based upon the presence of a rolled up 1916 newspaper in a coffee can in its termination deposit.”³¹ Archaeologist Matt Tomaso speculates that this privy was a much nicer one than one excavated behind the workers’ cottages.

The whole site appears to have obtained electrical service around the same time as the discontinuance of the privies, probably sometime later than the indoor plumbing system for the guest cottages.³²

What were the “innocent pleasures” the newly redesigned resort offered? The resort offered both tennis (“lawn tennis”) and croquet. Lawn tennis was the developing trend, away from croquet, although the latter was not viewed so tamely as we may view it. A golf course would only come later, after both Ella and Warren were no longer associated with the resort (Warren because of death, Ella having moved on), and would be the innovation of Thomas Molloy, finally allowed to come into his own in style-making.

One of the most fun activities that I found evidence of taking place at Glenside Park during Ella and Warren’s joint years there was in 1889, the final year Ella spent at the village. The Plainfield Evening News for September 7, 1889, reported the following about “Miss Adams,” most likely Ella’s older daughter Constance, who would have been 16 at the time:

A masquerade sociable was held at the residence of Miss Adams at Glenside Park last evening. Several Plainfielders were present. Prof. Guttman furnished the music.³³

CREATING A “COLONY”

At the peak of the resort’s life, the following article appeared in the New York Herald:

UNION COUNTY’S ARCADIA.

Glenside Park and “the Deserted Village” Now the Home of a Delightful Summer Colony.

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AS delightful a place as any in the State of New Jersey is what was once known as “The Deserted Village.” Originally it was put down on the maps as Feltville, but it fell into neglect, and when every one moved away it became “the deserted village.” Now it is a summer resort and glories in the name of Glenside Park. It is tenanted by a small colony of Newarkers, but those who follow only the well known drives of Essex county have little idea of the beautiful scenery along the road which leads to Glenside in Union county.

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It is a delightful little place, situated on a plateau between two ridges of the Watchung Mountains. On the east and west are magnificent views of the mountains, and to the south is a winding valley, through which a brook babbles.

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The story of the place is an interesting one. A quarter of a century ago Feltville was a thriving, industrial village, with a mill where hats were made. The proprietor of that mill erected a dozen cottages for his employees, and there they led an Arcadian sort of life. But one day the mill shut down, and when operations ceased the employees moved away. The houses fell into decay. Thus it became one of the many places in New Jersey of interest to curiosity seekers.

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Warren Ackerman, a wealthy resident of Scotch Plains, purchased the deserted village and a lot of the surrounding country about five years ago. He at once began the work of transformation and when he had finished it was a veritable Eden, with long, winding drives over smooth roads; wide, sweeping lawns; picturesque bits of rockery with flowers, vines and palms; rustic observatories, fences and bridges and beautiful pieces of landscape gardening.

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The colony now there is composed of the following Newarkers and their families:—Judge David A. Depue, Major General Joseph W. Plume, Ernest F. Munn, Uzal McCarter, John C. Downey, William H. Peck, Alfred Ayers, William Osborn. Sydney Ogden and John A. Miller. The only one in the colony who is not a Newarker is William Pinto, of Brooklyn. The families occupy the ten little one and a half story cottages, which have been repainted and beautified, but not enlarged, so that such prosaic things as cooking, eating or clothes washing never take place in them. A large community dining room has been erected, and here the families of these modern Arcadians meet every day to take their meals. A big barn and stable is also used in common for the storage of vehicles and stabling of horses. Thus all the annoyances of housekeeping are avoided.³⁴

None of the Adams family members is listed as being at the village the summer of this article, since by this time, the family had moved on to living in the country full time, first on a farm and then in Summit, which was more rural than East Orange. However, I feel confident that the “summer colony” characteristic of the resort was part of Ella’s original plan, continuing on even after she stopped being part of it.

As we will see in next month’s post, many visitors were from Newark, where Ella and her husband Frederic had many friends and acquaintances. The little resort was close enough to Newark to allow commutation—important, for any member of the family who had weekday obligations in town. Those individuals without such obligations—typically the wife and children—could escape the city for the entire summer, joined by the husband or any other family member who needed to remain in the city every weekend and any other free time. A colony of people who knew each other could easily be created. Maybe Ella could even wear some more casual clothes with her friends.

NEXT MONTH

I think you know by now that next month’s post will introduce Thomas and Annie Molloy, and their daughter Anna Molloy Walsh. That post will bring us into contact with a Civil War soldier, the mid nineteenth century situation of Irish immigrants, and how malaria brought the village one of its most important families–and more.

Until then.