Making Sense of Glenside Park’s People and Their Actions

MAKING SENSE OF GLENSIDE PARK’S PEOPLE AND THEIR ACTIONS

GLENSIDE PARK REFLECTS BOTH HISTORIC TRENDS AND ITS OWN INDIVIDUAL CHARACTER

When I first started researching the history of the Deserted Village of Feltville, I admit that I had trouble wrapping my head around the notion of a resort in the middle of what seemed to me one great sprawl of northern New Jersey development. I knew that even in the late nineteenth century, this part of New Jersey was becoming rather suburban. I was associating resorts with someplace distant and exotic, not someplace nestled into suburban New Jersey. I couldn’t see the allure of a tiny resort so close to the city homes of would be vacationers.

Twenty-five posts later, I have quite a different view. While the resort was, indeed, in an area already beginning to experience suburbanization, it flourished, consistently reporting complete or nearly complete occupation of its cottages by guests. The guests did not come for just a night or a weekend, but usually for the whole summer, and even into the fall. The guests were prominent professionals, primarily from Newark, but also New York.

This post, then, is a compilation of the twenty-five resort posts, a summary of both my findings on the cultural trends which made the resort a success, and on the individuals and activities which make it unique among resorts of the time. I write this post for myself—as a means of integrating all the individual posts into a coherent picture of who and what and how things happened during this period. I write this post also for you, the inquiring reader, as a road map allowing you to go back to and consider selected individual posts giving more detail about Glenside Park and the history it illuminates.

This compilation has been an intensely valuable one for me, allowing me to integrate the material in a way impossible in simply a sequence of focused individual posts. I will largely skip footnoting material found in the individual posts again here; please look at the related post for information on most sources.

I will start by summarizing my research on some of the contextual trends identified by past historians to help explain the move to vacations and resorts. The reader must make his/her own decision about the accuracy of these reflections, and their relevance to Glenside Park. I will go on to summarize what I have learned and what I have concluded about the individual people and events which make up the history of this small resort. I will end with thoughts on why the resort was shuttered.

WORKING AT PLAY

One of the reasons that the resort period turned out to be so fascinating is that cultural mores of the time made Americans see vacationing as something frivolous, and possibly of the devil. They had to be actively convinced that it was okay—or even healthy—to engage in the type of leisure which vacations represented.

One of the authors who has examined this American resistance to vacations in the nineteenth century and beyond, and the efforts which were required to overcome it, is Cindy S. Aron, in her wonderful book, Working at Play. Aron’s book is called Working at Play precisely because even as vacation opportunities became more widespread, accessible, and within the economic means of a growing segment of the population, it still ran afoul of a deeply seated American work ethic, which grew out of both Puritan moral standards and the celebration of work as the centerpiece of the developing American national exceptionalist identify. These deeply held cultural standards could make leisure seem downright immoral or unpatriotic.

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE . . .

If it seems fantastical from the vantage of the twenty-first century to think that Americans had to be taught to vacation, consider the issues Americans still evidence when it comes to getting away. Aron notes that even down to the present, Americans still feel guilt and anxiety about vacations and treat the right to vacation differently from how it is treated nearly everywhere else in the world. She notes that, unlike most European nations, America does not have any legal requirement on the national level requiring employers to provide paid vacation.

This is underscored in a 2023 NPR podcast¹ exploring the fact that America is practically alone among both richer and not so rich nations in not having enacted a national requirement that employers provide their employees a specific amount of vacation time each year. Not only are Americans not guaranteed vacation, we generally only accrue vacation offered by an employer incrementally by virtue of having worked a certain amount of time. Worse, we routinely forfeit even the vacation given to us—NPR’s podcast documented that in 2018, Americans left 768 million earned vacation days unused.

That same NPR podcast provides a great illustration of how academics—e.g. historians—can look at the same periods of time and data and reach different conclusions, mostly about cause and effect with regard to any historic event or trend, but even as to what is/was going on in the first place.

In the podcast, one researcher postulates that in the fights for worker rights at their height in the 1930s, when unions had more power than businesses, vacationing was not one of the rights being fought for. He suggests that unions thought if they fought for everything, workers would deem the unions to no longer be necessary, so they stopped short of asking for legal protections for vacation time, leaving something to fight for later. An alternate suggestion by this same researcher is that the European tradition of shutting daily life down for multiday festivals naturally made vacations seem acceptable in Europe, but that America rejected these festivals from day one of our history. Another researcher suggests that the fact that we pay less in income tax but concomitantly have to pay for things like health care and pensions which other nations fund out of their higher taxes might be a motivating fact for Americans being workaholics. Still another suggests we are more led by the nose by companies which are selling consumer goods, making us want to buy all the things presented so alluringly—again, promoting workaholism to earn the means to spend.

The podcast doesn’t favor any of these possible explanations as being more compelling than the others. One thing that does seem to be universally agreed on by all the experts consulted for the NPR piece is that Americans do suffer considerably more anxiety than people elsewhere about being on vacation; here Aron appears spot on about this anxiety manifesting continuously throughout our history.

BACK TO VACATIONS AND THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

The nineteenth century saw several simultaneous “revolutions” in American society. The two most obvious were the industrial revolution, in which new technology shifted the making of goods largely away from the home into factories, and the concomitant urban revolution, with more people migrating into the city or towns, and away from rural farms and other rural settings. These revolutions naturally gave rise to a larger middle class, a class developing new consumer and leisure desires. In an admittedly stereotypical middle-class household of the time, the man of the house was engaged in a business enterprise or a profession such as law or medicine. Simultaneously, a larger working class developed, distinguished from the middle class generally both by domestic or factory work and the lower income that provided. Members of both classes began to want more leisure (and more stuff).

Working at Play does not contain extensive discussion of the major factors, religion and national identity, which spawned a cultural aversion to leisure. In my mind, there seem to be a host of factors evolving from new nationhood involved—the idea of empire contained in “manifest destiny,” a sense of republicanism based on work, not inherited status, and the religious “great awakenings” which swept much of America. But it will take more than the time I have had to really understand all of these factors, so I will turn instead to discussion by Aron and others of the various forces and trends which allowed Americans to overcome their aversion to leisure.

Some of these factors can be seen as logistical—this includes improved transportation networks and increasing amounts of disposable wealth among larger segments of the population, including a growing middle class (not just the upper class, which had always been able to take leisure). In order to want to vacation, people had to have financial resources and the means of getting there.

At the same time, something which has sometimes been called the “gospel of leisure” was arising. People who were already becoming aware of the increased ease of reaching vacation destinations, and who were seeing themselves with the wealth to pursue them, were being given messages that it was not only acceptable but advisable to take vacations, since doing so would allow them to better pursue their normal work on return. Thus, religious leaders and health practitioners were conveying messages about the value of vacations and tacitly giving people permission to engage in them.

This was not unproblematic for middle and upper class women, for whom the nineteenth century was increasingly cementing views which sequestered them mainly in the home, where they were supposedly at leisure, raising children and managing the household, perhaps with the assistance of one or more servants. Indeed, such sequestration was a badge of class status—perhaps as much for a husband as the wife, since a wife at home was a marker of class and a means of distinction from the lower classes, where many women had to work outside the home.

RAILROADS AND THE GUIDEBOOKS THEY SPAWNED

The development of quicker and more convenient transportation, particularly railroads, was absolutely essential to the rise of vacations and to the resorts at which people could enjoy them. See https://feltvillefeatures.com/transportation-helps-make-new-jersey-resorts/. Trains were what made it possible for people from all walks of life, not just the rich, to get to vacation spots near and far.

The railroad companies quickly recognized this and created very detailed and engaging guidebooks which made people want to ride the rails to visit the places thus made accessible. One of the most engaging examples of a railroad-based guidebook covering New Jersey destinations is Gustav Kobbé’s The Central Railroad of New Jersey. Kobbé’s guide demonstrates that the railroads were used by people from all classes to get to resorts. His description of one day vacationers—excursionists—at the Lake Hopatcong resort is priceless:

. . . the excursionists enjoy themselves so thoroughly—sometimes unmistakably concentrating a whole year’s holiday into their one day at the lake—that there is, in some instances, almost a touch of pathos in their unbounded delight.²

Lest any of his more affluent readers get anxious about having to rub elbows with these excursionists, Kobbé notes that there is adequate space and separation between visitor areas at the lake so that no one is ever forced to endure crowds; moreover, he suggests that the excursionists know they need to behave themselves:

But it was not until the Central Railroad of New Jersey purchased and laid out the excursion grounds at Nolan’s Point and the Hotel Breslin was built at Chincopee Cove that this lovely sheet of water began to enjoy the measure of popularity it deserved; for, through those enterprises it was able to afford accommodations respectively to people of moderate and ample means; so that now, with the other hotels on the Lake and the opportunities for camping out, Hopatcong attracts people from many and varied walks of life. . . . the excursions [sic] at Nolan’s Point, though they have no end of fun during their day’s outing, are notably quiet and orderly.

I must confess that I find Kobbé fascinating in his own right, not just as an author of railroad guidebooks. He was also an expert on opera, with one of his biggest works (in all senses of the word) being The Complete Opera Book. The book had to be published posthumously, because Kobbé was killed in a freak accident at age 61. He was sailing alone on the south shore Long Island bay, when a naval seaplane lifting off the water hit him and fractured his skull, killing him instantly.

Kobbé’s The Central Railroad was one of the first primary sources I found in my research about the Deserted Village. It contains two references to the village in its Glenside Park period, one describing the village as a “pretty place of residence called Glenside,” and citing Fanwood as the nearest station on the Central Railroad, and another which mentions: “Feltville or Glenside” as a possible point of interest along a drive which could be taken on macadamized roads from Netherwood. Neither mention suggests that Glenside Park’s paying resort guests are getting to the resort from the Central Railroad, which runs south of the village. Instead, a roughly parallel railroad route and a particular station to the north of the village are what the resort’s surviving brochure suggests guests should utilize to reach the resort. The Murray Hill station of the D. L.&.W.R.R. is described in the brochure as “giving easy accessibility to New York, 24 miles away,” and guests can arrange with Glenside’s proprietor to “be met by carriage on arrival of any train” at this station.

As a historical aside, the Central Railroad did show up as a recommended route to the village in one of my favorite primary sources from the village’s earlier Feltville era, 1845 to 1860. Feltville’s first full-time minister, Austin Craig, sent his friend Robert Wright a letter in1850, urging Robert to come visit:

Do come, Bob, and spend a few days with me here. Come to Elizabeth town; thence by the Central Railroad to Scotch Plains; thence here.

The D. L.&.W.R.R. railroad published guidebooks annually for a number of years, compared to the Central Railroad of New Jersey, which seems to have published only once, with Kobbé’s 1890 book. In spite of the fact that Glenside’s guests used the more northern railroad, not the Central Railroad, in all the D. L.&.W.R.R. guidebooks I have found, Glenside Park is only mentioned once as a destination for any of the railroad’s stations. An 1899 entry for Murray Hill indicates that the resort has become popular in the last three years. See https://feltvillefeatures.com/instruction-for-fashionable-travel/.

RAILROAD GUIDEBOOKS BUILT ON THE SUCCESS OF EARLIER TRAVEL GUIDEBOOKS

In the same post at https://feltvillefeatures.com/instruction-for-fashionable-travel/, I traced how guidebooks like Kobbé’s followed on a history of success of earlier guidebooks which were not tied to one particular railroad route. In Richard H. Gassan’s book, The Birth of American Tourism: New York, the Hudson Valley, and American Culture, 1790-1830 the author argues that tourist guidebooks were a big factor in teaching Americans how and where to vacation. He identifies a book published in 1822, The Fashionable Tour, or, a trip to the Springs, Niagara, Quebeck, and Boston, in the Summer of 1821, by Gideon Minor Davison, as the first tourist guidebook ever published in America.³

The use of the words “fashionable tour” in the book’s title and content were, as Gassan recognizes in his book, inspired. Already, young folk from wealthy American families, mostly young men, had, as part of their coming of age, made “fashionable tours” across Europe. Revolutions and unrest across Europe were making these trips abroad less popular. This may have been a contributing factor in the rise of young Southern gentlemen traveling to resorts in New England as part of their coming of age. Davison’s guidebook presents these tours, already tried and true, as tours the reader could emulate and engage in. Gassan sees Davison as something of a social climber, and his book as chiefly meant to give other status seeking individuals instructions on tours which might allow them to hobnob with those in a class above them and thus gain status themselves.

America became increasingly class conscious as more individuals began acquiring sufficient wealth to become part of the middle class, and to enjoy some of the privileges, like vacations, previously reserved for the most affluent. The guidebooks of the time reflect this class consciousness, revealing that people wanted not only the experience of vacationing, but to use it to acquire some status of the wealthy. This lead the authors of the guidebooks to provide people with specific information which could enable them to avoid the impression of being cultural rubes—i.e. to give off a sense of already being in the know and socially advanced.

MORAL JUSTIFICATIONS FOR VACATIONING

The guidebooks helped feed the desires of those seeking to elevate their class statuis. But this alone couldn’t have overcome a fearful approach to vacations among a population with relatively strict religious underpinnings, and a growing sense of national exceptionalism, the latter including hard work as an essential element.

Critical to prompting people to take vacations were messages from pastors or other religious figures telling them that vacationing was not immoral or against God’s strictures. Two of my favorite primary sources in support of this are an 1869 book, Adventures in the Wilderness; or, Camp-Life in the Adirondacks, by William H. H. Murray, minister of the prestigious Park Street Church in Boston, and the front page newspaper article entitled “Where the Ministers will Go,” which I quoted from in my first resort post, https://feltvillefeatures.com/feltville-becomes-glenside-park-an-introduction/.

As I outlined in my post at https://feltvillefeatures.com/religion-and-the-move-to-resorts/ Murray extolled the pleasures of wilderness camping—a somewhat extreme form of vacationing—to American readers. His book on the subject became a bestseller, and travel to the area he described in the book, the Adirondacks, in particular, increased greatly following its publication.

The Saturday, June 14, 1884, issue of the Newark Evening News carried a front-page article entitled “WHERE THE MINISTERS WILL GO,” under a subject heading of “REST AND RECREATION.” The sub-headline for the article was “Clergymen Arranging for Their Summer Vacations—Objective Points of the Prominent Preachers of Newark, To the Mountains and Seashore.”

I love that both Murray and an unnamed pastor in the Newark newspaper indicate that their vacations are essential, as a break from a difficult job. Apparently both pastors were feeling stressed out by overly needy church members. Murray says:

Yet it is in the ministry that you find the very men who would be the most benefited by this trip. . . . In the wilderness they would find that perfect relaxation which all jaded minds require. In its vast solitude is a total absence of sights and sounds and duties, which keep the clergyman’s brain and heart strung up, the long year through, to an intense, unnatural, and often fatal tension. There, from a thousand sources of invigoration, flow into the exhausted mind and enfeebled body currents of strength and life.⁴

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The Newark newspaper’s anonymous pastor states:

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“We do not neglect our charges by taking our vacations,” said a popular preacher this morning. “During the vacation season a great many of those who are regular attendants at the churches go to the mountains and seashore, and the majority of those who stay at home will not attend during the heat of summer. Besides this we will have an opportunity to recuperate, which some of us need badly, and come back to our work in the fall better able to perform our labors.”

Notably, with a few exceptions, all the ministers cited in the article were leaving New Jersey for resorts elsewhere.

It is easy to see that readers (at least male readers, see below) of either Murray’s book or articles like the front page one in the Newark Evening News would see a vacation as a justifiable break from hard work.

HEALTH JUSTIFICATIONS FOR VACATIONING

Indeed, just such an explicit justification for embarking on a vacation were exhortations by nineteenth-century medical experts who were advocating rest and recreation as a means of being able to undertake one’s work—again, for men at least, as Aron points out:

By 1850s, taking a vacation would make the businessman not only healthier, but more fit for his daily tribulations—mental and spiritual renewal becoming as important as physical regeneration. But the message at this point was addressed specifically to men—middle class women were, in theory, permanently at leisure, with no work from which they needed a vacation⁵

I will return to the different treatment of women below, but for the moment let’s re-examine what my research suggested about what I am calling the “pasty weakling” issue, which I discuss in https://feltvillefeatures.com/the-early-days-of-golf-in-the-u-s-and-glenside-park/.

In A History of Recreation: America Learns to Play, author Foster Rhea Dulles charts the rise of “athletic crazes” across the eastern part of the United States in the latter half of the nineteenth century. He cites to concerns expressed in the nation’s leading magazines concerning the country’s youths, likely male youths, turning into pasty weaklings. For example, he notes that Oliver Wendell Holmes “declared himself satisfied ‘that such a set of black-coated, stiff-jointed, soft-muscled, paste-complexioned youth as we can boast in our Atlantic cities never before sprang from the loins of Anglo-Saxon lineage.’”⁶

In her book, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917, Gail Bederman confirms the crisis words being used about the nineteenth century decline of a suitably strong and healthy generation of men, and she discusses the invention, as it were, of a new disease:

White middle-class men now learned that they were threatened by a newly discovered disease, “neurasthenia.” According to doctors, neurasthenia was spreading throughout the middle class, due to the excessive brain work and nervous strain which professionals and businessmen endured as they struggled for success in an increasingly challenging economy. This discovery of neurasthenia led many to fear that middle-class men as a sex had grown decadent.⁷

Clearly an active vacation such as that envisioned by Murray, paddling a boat through the wilderness, could put muscles on the participant and counter the condition of being a pasty weakling. Future president Teddy Roosevelt, himself afflicted with being something of a pasty weakling, transformed himself and his image by spending an extended and arduous time on the Western frontier.

But, most males who might fear a loss of masculinity did not have the means or the desire for such a rough experience in a far away location. For these people, closer and more established resorts often provided tennis or golf or similar sports. Thomas Molloy, managing the resort along with his wife under a lease recognized the draw of golf when put in a golf course of some kind using his own funds. See https://feltvillefeatures.com/the-early-days-of-golf-in-the-u-s-and-glenside-park/.

CURATED NATURE

In a somewhat related matter, it bears noting that many resorts provided access to nature, or at least a curated version of nature. An Ecological History of New Jersey by Charles A. Stansfield, Jr., notes that, contrary to sometimes prevailing views, cities and rural areas in New Jersey had been developed simultaneously by colonists, not sequentially, as was often thought. As the nineteenth century advanced, the urban areas progressively grew and the rural areas shrank. Stansfield notes that only two percent of New Jersey’s population lived in towns and cities in 1800, but a century later, about 80% lived in the towns, cities, and the adjacent developing suburbs. Along with the population shift came severe ecological changes—as noted in https://feltvillefeatures.com/the-deserted-village-and-some-ecological-history-introduction/, New Jersey had essentially no deer and its forests were almost equally non-existent. And what nature remained in no way compared to Teddy Roosevelt’s wild west or even Murray’s Adirondack wilderness. Places like Glenside Park could represent a sort of curated nature for vacation goers, reflecting the taming wrought over two centuries of resource extraction and urbanization.

As another historical aside, some resorts in originally natural settings were being overwhelmed with tourists but continued to present themselves as more natural than they actually were. In my post on Thomas Moran at https://feltvillefeatures.com/the-persistence-of-the-deserted-village-part-3/, I detailed how he and other nineteenth century Hudson River artists portrayed Niagara Falls and the area surrounding it without the ticky-tacky tourist businesses which had grown up around it, and the crowds frequenting those businesses. Even in his Yellowstone series, Moran neglected to include the less-than-picturesque shanties which were in the area. Art, too, could be promotional, reflecting a growing regard for nature.

FLEEING THE UNHEALTHY CITY

The discussion above focuses on health as an explicitly expressed aim or concern, but there was an underlying unspoken health danger for which a summer resort represented the best remedy—the summer city. In the summer, the combination of heat and disease worsened already existing unhealthy conditions. Indeed, it was these threats to health which I identified earlier than the admonitions of doctors or others regarding healthy activity for overworked individuals. This topic is explored in Stuart Galishoff’ book, Newark, the Nation’s Unhealthiest City. In cities of the time and especially in Newark, disease came from polluted water, polluted air, and the potential for contact with human waste or trash, both imperfectly handled. See Introducing Ella, at https://feltvillefeatures.com/introducing-ella/.

An 1890 article in the Elizabeth Daily Journal cited in my post on malaria https://feltvillefeatures.com/malaria-in-newark-brings-a-family-to-glenside-park/ bemoans the fact that the courts are continuing to allow the discharge of sewage into the very rivers used for drinking water; the article does not mention the other industrial discharges into the same rivers. Diseases rampant in the city could include, but were not limited to, malaria, cholera, tuberculosis, pneumonia and diarrheal diseases; almost two of ten children in Newark of the time would not live to see their first birthday. While Newark represented, as the book suggests, the unhealthiest conditions of the late nineteenth century, an escape from New Jersey’s other urban areas to someplace with a cleaner environment such as Glenside Park could be a lifesaving action in the summer.

WOMEN AND THE JUSTIFICATIONS FOR VACATIONING

As suggested by Aron, over the course of the nineteenth century, women, or at least middle-class and upper-class women, were increasingly viewed as being at leisure all the time. Thus, the admonitions of the time to engage in healthful rest from work were not seen as applying to women in the same way as to their menfolk. Women faced a different set of admonitions, to be models of “true womanhood” or “domesticity.”

As I discuss in my post “The Cult of True Womenhood,” at https://feltvillefeatures.com/the-cult-of-true-womanhood/, historian Barbara Welter coined this phrase in a 1966 article to describe a trend she had discovered as a result of an exhaustive study of “almost all of the women’s magazines published for more than three years during the period 1820-1860 and a sampling of those published for less than three years; all the gift books cited in Ralph Thompson, American Literary Annuals and gift Books, 1825-1865 (New York, 1936) . . . hundreds of religious tracts and sermons . . . and [a] large collection of nineteenth century cookbooks.” Diaries, letters, and even novels of the time provided additional support for her finding.

Notably, Welter only added the word “Cult” to the description of the cultural trend she was describing; the exhortations for women to pursue either “true womanhood” and/or “domesticity” were common in nineteenth century literature, including in the title of a book called The Mirror of True Womanhood: A Book of Instruction for Women in the World, written by Catholic priest Bernard O’Reilly and first published in 1877. The book seems to have been successively republished over a number of years.

The eighteenth-century model of women and men largely working in home enterprises and both contributing to the home economy had largely disappeared into a nineteenth century ideal where the man went out from the home to be the wage earner, and the woman, his wife, stayed in the home to take care of children and all things domestic. I will repeat Welter’s words, from in my original post:

The Nineteenth-Century American man was a busy builder of bridges and railroads, at work long hours in a materialistic society. The religious values of his forebears were neglected in practice if not in intent, and he occasionally felt some guilt that he had turned this new land, this temple of the chosen people, into one vast countinghouse. But he could salve his conscience by reflecting that he had left behind a hostage, not only to fortune, but to all the values which he held so dear and treated so lightly. Woman, in the cult of True Womanhood presented by the women’s magazines, gift annuals and religious literature of the nineteenth century, was the hostage in the home. In a society where values changed frequently, where fortunes rose and fell with frightening rapidity, where social and economic mobility provided instability as well as hope, one thing at least remained the same—a true woman was a true woman wherever she was found.⁸

The four virtues of a “true woman” were piety, purity, domesticity and submissiveness. The true woman made up for any lack of religiosity or purity that her man, out in the world, exhibited.

The Cult of True Womanhood was a construct of class, of course, since only those women whose husbands earned enough to be the sole earner for the household could engage in being at home as true women, where any work they did was both invisible and unpaid. As my study of Annie Molloy and her mother, who came from Ireland and supported themselves as servants in their employers’ household shows (see https://feltvillefeatures.com/irish-immigration-and-the-molloy-family-of-glenside-park/), “true womanhood” would have been only a fantasy for women forced to contribute to the family economy through their own paid labor. The only domesticity these working class women would have seen was that which they helped the woman of the households they served to achieve.

The resort period gave me the opportunity to explore the issues of mid nineteenth century Irish immigration, with Annie Molloy and her second husband Thomas Molloy, both Irish immigrants, see https://feltvillefeatures.com/irish-immigration-and-the-molloy-family-of-glenside-park/. Researching Annie also gave me the opportunity to explore the experience of an immigrant woman who started her working life as a teenager working full time in a Newark household providing childcare help. Annie also provided me with the opportunity to research someone whose (first) husband, a German immigrant, had gone off to fight for his adopted country, returning disabled and eventually leaving his wife a widow, to fight for his “invalid pension.” See https://feltvillefeatures.com/the-mysteries-behind-annies-first-husband/.

Sequestered in the home, the middle class “true woman” would have been one who hired one or more servants, often Irish immigrants such as Annie—also an indicator of class status which her husband’s income enabled. In a letter from Ella King Adams describing her efforts to hire new servants in the wake of some leaving her, she bemoans the fact that many of the best servants want to be able to travel too frequently to see their own families, reflecting the fact that nineteenth century middle class households not only had servants, but they were live in servants, rather at the beck and call of the household. Indeed, it was something of a badge of honor of middle or upper class life to have the wife retreat into the home with the help of one or more servants to do the hardest work, allowing people, particularly men, to conveniently forget that raising children, managing a home, and doing at least some of the tedious housework themselves, represented work.

In addition, there was the business of keeping up appearances with the various changes of clothing which being a woman from either the middle class or higher required. The clothing and behavior of women was constantly under scrutiny. To be seen without a corset or the proper attire was to be seen as déclassé, or worse, a loose woman. Middle-class and upper-class women could not venture out of the home unaccompanied. I loved that my research showed that one of the factors in the rise of department stores was that these stores responded to a need of their chief customers, women, in providing spaces for women out of the house to safely congregate and meet each other.

As the discussion above suggests, as I did my resort era research, I found myself running again and again into what I see as women’s rights issues. Notably, the women’s rights issues exemplified in Glenside’s female characters did not really include the right to vote, the chief fight history emphasizes for women acquiring rights to greater participation in American life. Most of the women I encountered in my research into the resort period were more interested in some economic rights and freedoms than worrying about the vote. Ella Wheeler Wilcox learned early on that her work as a writer could lift her family out of economic insecurity. Lydia Platt Ackerman, who arrived at both of her Ackerman marriages as an heiress, received the respect of Warren Ackerman in according her rights far beyond the limited dower rights of the time, which simply protected a woman from being left destitute by her husband’s children and other legal heirs.

After Warren’s death, Lydia was an active member of various women’s literary groups. See https://feltvillefeatures.com/glenside-park-women-the-first-generation/. Anna Molloy Walsh was not afraid to take on the role of Glenside Park resort manager, even though she considered herself to have transcended the original working class status of both her parents. See especially https://feltvillefeatures.com/anna-and-her-world/. Annie Molloy, one of Anna’s parents, had started work as a teenager, and spent the rest of her life in hard work, a partner to her husband at the resort.

The resort period has provided interesting examples of women exercising rights within social boundaries. Ella King Adams, who was a consummate wife and mother, running a household with multiple servants, found time to first, plan a resort, and then later, work with a male architect to design her new (and unfortunately final) home in Summit, New Jersey. Ella agreed firmly when said architect told her she would have been a good architect herself. Ella reports that she told him if she had my life to live over she thought she should study to be one, noting: “I am sure I think women could be.”

Constance Adams DeMille, the eldest child of the same Ella King Adams (and herself a Glenside Park guest as a child), provided a strange view of true womanhood from the inside of her marriage to Cecil B. DeMille, Hollywood mogul and noted philanderer. Constance was noted for maintaining her cool when interacting with her husband’s mistresses—but also, for helping start a safe house where aspiring actresses could inexpensively and safely escape constant predation by men such as her own husband. See https://feltvillefeatures.com/no-one-has-ever-been-more-fittingly-named/.

In trying to better understand the changes for women during the nineteenth century, I looked into the life of Sarah Josepha Hale, not directly connected to the resort, but a model for women of the nineteenth century as the longest running editor of Godey’s Ladies Book, from 1837 to 1877. See https://feltvillefeatures.com/the-cult-of-true-womanhood/. Hale helped make the magazine the leading women’s magazine of the day, bringing subscriptions up to 150,000. She moved away from European authors towards publication of American authors, including American women. Each issue of the magazine contained a section on employment opportunities for women, the need for which she herself knew all too well from being left a widow and without sufficient funds to support her children and herself—and forced to go to work. She was also a proponent of higher education opportunities for women.

Notably, Hale did not support efforts for women to gain the vote. Moreover, the magazine included fashion pieces and pieces which stressed the importance of proper womanly behavior, which might have been seen as supporting the “true womanhood” ideal, albeit while still subtly promoting expansion of women’s rights.

The “Cult of True Womanhood,” along with the issue of rights due to women seem newly relevant in the era of celebration of the “trad wife” and attacks on the rights women have gained over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

THE RESORT’S HIISTORY IN FIVE PEOPLE

However perfectly or imperfectly past historians or even I have identified factors contributing to the rise of resorts across New Jersey and the nation, the people involved in the making and enjoying Glenside Park were individuals, not stereotypes. Although in the course of my 25 resort posts, I have introduced many people with some connection to the resort period, the resort history can be summarized in five of its people, five of its characters.

Warren Ackerman was the wealthy businessman who bought the entire village for a bargain price at an auction, with people around him already saying it might be a good place for vacationers. Ella King Adams was the woman he lured out to the village soon after its purchase, hoping that she would fall in love with it. She did, and spent the next five years designing the resort, with the comfort of having wealthy Warren go to “considerable expense” to carry out her design vision. Anna Molloy was the child who lived to grow up because Warren brought her family to the village, where Anna’s parents, Irish immigrants, were able to make a comfortable living as the resort’s managers, providing Anna with an idyllic childhood and social opportunities. Uzal McCarter, one of Glenside’s most prominent guests, was a wealthy Newark businessman, primarily in the financial sector, but also involved in a major utility company—and part of a family identified by a leading New Jersey historian as pivotal in Newark’s history. Ella Wheeler Wilcox was one of the most popular writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and a sometime visitor to the cottage of a Glenside summer guest.

Uzal and Ella Wheeler Wilcox will figure also in my discussion of the ending of Glenside Park, the resort.

WARREN AND A LIFE SHADOWED BY TRAGEDY

Warren Ackerman started life as one of nine children in a family with Dutch origins in New Brunswick, New Jersey. As noted in https://feltvillefeatures.com/introducing-warren/, colonists of Dutch origins in New Jersey actually flourished more after the English takeover of New York and New Jersey than they had during the New Netherlands period. This may have reflected the more effective way the English dealt with the natives who had previously threatened the few small Dutch colonies in New Netherlands before the fateful 1664 takeover. This may have also have reflected the English approach to colonization, i.e. colonists building farms and towns on the land gave a greater chance of overall colony success than colonists focused simply on trade and not so focused on permanent settlement.

Warren had a grandfather who had fought “as a Patriot in the Middlesex County unit” during the American Revolution. His father was a businessman who dabbled in a few different kinds of manufacturing businesses, most notably the emerging rubber industry. As I described in https://feltvillefeatures.com/introducing-warren/ many individuals across America and across the world were engaged in working to produce rubber items which did not melt, degrade or become brittle in heat or cold, as early attempts did. The most famous of these was Charles Goodyear, who is credited with inventing vulcanization.

Warren appears to have been something of a business wunderkind, since his family sent him to Newark at age 15 to pursue his business interests, while he lived with his sister Caroline and her new husband, Abraham Coles, a prominent surgeon and writer. Warren’s father presented him with shares of the Newark India Rubber Company, one of the members of the Goodyear Shoe Association; each member was manufacturing rubber goods (not limited to shoes) under a license from Goodyear.

Caroline died about three years later, soon after having her second child. Abraham appears to have gone abroad to forget soon after. Warren, who was about 18 when Caroline died, apparently stayed in Newark, where he quickly became an officer of the Newark India Rubber Company. His biographical sketch in Ricord suggests that his actions saved the rubber company from ruin caused by production of shoddy materials. Warren apparently also had interests in other rubber companies, and during the Civil War, he made his fortune selling rubber goods to the Union Army. Among these goods were the largely forgotten rubberized blankets—generally known as “gum blankets”—with which Union soldiers began to be supplied. My post “Gum Blankets and the Civil War” details how these blankets saved soldiers from excessive exposure both during normal camp life and especially for those suffering from disease or wounds, ultimately saving lives during the war. I like to think that saving lives is something that appealed to Warren as he manufactured and sold these blankets and other protective rubber goods to the army.

And so we circle back to the tragedy touching Warren’s life. In 1874, Warren’s older brother George died, leaving behind his widow Lydia, who was about 40 years of age. Warren married Lydia in 1876 and the marriage apparently prompted him to move out of Newark to Scotch Plains, to a piece of property near the home Abraham Coles, sister Caroline’s widower, had already moved to. Here, Warren built a lovely estate which he named Lyde Park, in honor of his wife.

And then, in succession, Warren saved the village and then one of its most important families, the Molloy family. In 1882, Warren bought the whole village at auction—a blow by blow account of the auction, and the fact that Warren managed to buy the village for a pittance is contained in my post entitled Introducing Warren at https://feltvillefeatures.com/introducing-warren/. I do think the bargain aspect tickled him. Soon after this purchase, even before he had decided quite what he was going to do with the village, he rescued a Newark family whose daughter, Anna, had malaria; the family had been advised by their doctor that they needed to take Anna out of the city to someplace with clean air if they wished to see her grow up. Warren’s actions saved a working class immigrant family; he was perhaps paid back by the fact that Anna’s parents, Thomas and Annie were Glenside Park’s longest running and most capable managers.

ELLA PLANS HER PERFECT RESORT

Warren was the owner of the village and actively worked to have it revamped into a resort, but it was another of my characters, Ella King Adams, who did much of the design conceptualization, and spent five years of her life perfecting her vision of what the resort should be. When Ella “convinced” Warren Ackerman to turn his newly purchased Deserted Village into a resort (I have put the word “convinced” into quotes, because Warren was clearly already contemplating that), there was no real need for her to embark on something which, according to her obituaries, would consume the next five years of her life. There were resorts aplenty, both in New Jersey, and other states. Although New England perhaps had the most fashionable resorts, there were several in New Jersey which could have provided accommodations and amusement for a woman of Ella’s class and her family. See https://feltvillefeatures.com/the-grave-and-the-gay/ and https://feltvillefeatures.com/pleasant-promenades-and-a-touch-of-pathos/ for descriptions of existing New Jersey resorts.

Instead of going to an existing resort, Ella worked with Warren to create a resort which, I think, met the needs of her family much more precisely than any of the existing resorts.

The resort as the two designed it had redesigned cottages with Adirondack style porches and other detailing, in a parklike setting, somewhat secluded from the world around it by fields and the gorge and lake. The resort offered tame family fun—no swimming, according to Anna Molloy Walsh, but goat carts, strolling, carriage rides, croquet, and golf. The resort, separated from the outside world—although there are repeated reports of tourists coming through to gawk, picnic, drive a carriage, or bike—offered a community where each guest would know exactly who else was in the village. The resort would offer complete safety to women, children, and men—no danger of wolf whistles, or other untoward behavior, or potential actual attack. And, concomitantly, there was probably no need to dress as carefully and thoughtfully as in the city, with every piece of clothing probably being scrutinized for messages about class status and moral status.

Just as compelling—many of the most tedious or complicated elements of housekeeping were taken care of at Glenside. No need to do laundry (or have extra servants around to do it for you), just send it out to the village’s modern steam laundry. See https://feltvillefeatures.com/an-escape-from-laundry/. No need to cook, just amble around the corner or down the street to the dining cottage/inn, where a host of professional staff would cook and serve you lovely fresh vegetables, meat and eggs raised at the very resort itself. No need to deal with the heat of the city—the lovely mountain air would come in and cool you to sleep each night.

And the people—it seems like they were mostly all friends or acquaintances or friends of acquaintances. Initially, they were probably invited—i.e. hand picked—by Ella King Adams. Even the first two managers were Ella’s friends, and by the time Thomas and Annie Molloy took over, Ella and the other regular guests knew them quite well. Ella and Warren created the perfect summer haven, with no social whirl, only everyone relaxing without anyone making any judgments.

Okay, there were the two married-but-not-to-each-other people passing amorous notes through the lady’s maid, and the head cook who apparently absconded with money her staff had entrusted her to hold for them (I think I may have forgotten to discuss the possibly thieving cook). But that created no real danger to any guest.

In the end, I don’t have to decide exactly what social class Ella and her friends fitted into, how much each subscribed to having women occupy a cult of domesticity, or even how religious each was. Ella knew that she wanted a haven in a healthy, rural setting, and she jumped at the opportunity to get it. And the whole “colony-style” resort haven she created survived in the same form beyond the five years she spent perfecting it, indicating there was a population of people similarly situated to Ella King Adams who found it attractive.

ANNA GETS TO GROW UP AND FLOURISH

Anna Molloy Walsh was the reason one of the resort’s longest-running families arrived in the village. Anna was the daughter of two Irish immigrants who had been working as servants in wealthy homes. Warren Ackerman responded to the plea of a friend asking him to provide Anna’s family with a job and home, as a means of helping Anna survive the malaria she had contracted in Newark at age four.

Anna is also one of the best sources of primary materials about the resort period of the village, since she has left us numerous letters and notes about the development and management of the resort, and of her life there. This primary material was further extended by recollections passed down orally to two of her grandchildren.

Anna enjoyed an idyllic life at the village, and associations with friends “above her class,” eventual marriage to one of them, and some social recognition, which likely would not have been the case if she remained in Newark, assuming she lived to grow up. Even after she had “made it” socially, Anna was not above spending a summer managing Glenside Park as a resort, just as her parents had. Anna was also one of my first examples of the need to get out of the unhealthy city, to a place like Glenside Park. The resort brochure which Anna supplied a copy of to my grandfather contained a reference to Glenside Park being entirely free of malaria, the disease which had brought Anna to the village.

UZAL EXUDES CLASS

Eminent New Jersey historian Charles Cummings notes that “no other family has so altered events in [Newark’s] history in one generation” as Uzal McCarter and his family. Clearly, Uzal was prominent, and wealthy, and as seen below, fully capable of building his own vacation cottage at any time, even at the time that he and at least one brother chose to vacation at the little vacation colony or haven that Ella King Adams had created.

Uzal, with his social status, is one of what I consider the indicators that the resort was a success. See https://feltvillefeatures.com/what-did-glenside-parks-guests-tell-us-about-its-success/, where I discuss both Uzal and some of the resort’s other prominent guests. But Uzal was also an indicator of why the resort did not survive past 1916. I will return to Uzal below, in the final section of this post.

ELLA WHEELER WILCOX

Ella Wheeler Wilcox, my other Ella, was a prolific author of novels, poetry and memoirs, and was, during her writing lifetime, one of the most widely read writers of the late nineteenth century into the early 20th century. As I detail in https://feltvillefeatures.com/a-summer-of-writers/, she began writing at age 8, and neither rejections by publishers nor the invariable percentage of public criticism deterred her from pursuing and succeeding at her writing life. She was vilified for at least one collection of poetry considered too racy for a woman of her time, and even her future husband interpreted that same poetry to suggest she might entertain an affair with him, rather, perhaps, than the marriage which eventually ensued. She was notable in her support of fellow writers, particularly Theodosia Pickering Garrison, with whom Ella loved to do nothing more than work in the same space on their individual pieces, and read aloud to each other from that developing work.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox had already built two adjoining homes with her husband in the Short Beach section of Branford, Connecticut by 1914, when she intermittently joined her friend Theodosia in a Glenside Park cottage the latter was renting for the summer. The two Short Beach homes included a winter home and a summer one—so this Ella had no need to rent a Glenside Park cottage for any length of time. Indeed, as noted below, with Uzal, this Ella represented the move away from the middle/upper middle class Glenside Park colony style resort by the population for whom the resort had been designed. Ella Wheeler Wilcox and her husband had sufficient space to host “colony” style gatherings or overnight guests at their own homes.

WHAT KILLED GLENSIDE PARK AS A RESORT?

Over the years, our little historical research community for the village has put forth the view that the advent of the Jersey shore, combined with the transportation ease afforded by the automobile killed Glenside Park as a resort.

One of the earliest articles I found in my Feltville research life was one about Uzal McCarter building a house at the shore, near Long Branch, which seemed to reinforce our shared view. But in actuality, Uzal could have defected to the shore much earlier, so the simplistic notion of the lure of the beach does not seem well founded.

I confess the finding of the shore house article made me question whether Uzal had ever been an actual Glenside Park guest—i.e. one staying for a period of time in one of the cottages. Anna Molloy Walsh had included Uzal’s name, along with his brother Robert, on one of the lists of resort guests she provided to either James Hawley or my grandfather. A newspaper article from 1893 confirmed him to be among the little “colony” of guests a reporter found spending the summer at Glenside Park. The colony that year included other Newarkers, most likely friends or acquaintances of Uzal, following the model started by Ella.

I don’t know how many summers Uzal spent at Glenside Park. But, eventually it became clear that the little cottages there and the lure of the colony atmosphere was not enough. Uzal did build a shore house (apparently designed by his wife to mimic their main Newark residence). As described (with diagrams!) in that 1899 article in the Newark Sunday Call, the cottage was significantly larger than anything at Glenside Park.

Glenside Park had afforded its patrons the luxury of having a special cottage reserved for themselves, without the burden of year-round maintenance or expenses. Glenside Park provided a somewhat secluded community atmosphere. Uzal’s new cottage was apparently built near those of other family members, perhaps allowing him to continue the colony style summer living he had enjoyed at Glenside. Significantly, however, his new cottage allowed him and other family members to engage in activities which vacationing at a Glenside cottage, even one seen as reserved for the use of one family over successive seasons, did not allow. As noted in https://feltvillefeatures.com/what-did-glenside-parks-guests-tell-us-about-its-success/, Uzal raised prize chickens and bulls, and showed them in the Red Bank fair. One of his brothers was also raising prize livestock.

I will go now to the second part of the repeated historical assertion my colleagues and I have made—the importance of the automobile in the death of the resort at the village. I have mentioned that one of the most crucial factors in the rise of resorts, and even the rise of Glenside Park, was the development of more railroad lines. With the advent of the automobile, even locations beyond easy reach from a railroad line could become vacation spots. I suspect that at least one automobile was involved in Uzal’s move to the shore as a vacation spot, since the area where his house was built was somewhat removed from the railroad stations which served nearby shore resorts.

A FINAL NOTE

In my post on Ella King Adams and Warren working together to design a resort at https://feltvillefeatures.com/ella-and-warren-design-a-resort/, I compared the sequence of activities which led to the creation of the resort at Glenside Park with an article by Edwin Lawrence Godkin in 1899 in The Nation. Godkin was being something between wry and factual in his outline of the conventional steps in the “evolution of the summer resort.” His steps included some initial informal arrangements between a someone from the city, either a farmer or a “family of small means” and a farmer, to board with the farmer. Once an area is discovered, the next step is expansion and marketing, often by the farmer, in search of income. Eventually, however, says Godkin, some city folk build their own cottages in the area, and those boarding with the farmer or at some other facility which has been created—the “boarders”—find themselves looked down on by the cottagers.

Glenside Park had long avoided this boarder/cottager conflict by providing its guests with an amalgam of both boarding and cottaging. Repeat guests could count on renting the same cottage year after year, but with the comfort and convenience of having meals and various other household services, including laundry service, provided. It was also a secluded haven for its guests—there are repeated reports of picnickers and others who wandered in to gawk being run off the premises. This all seems to have especially appealed to people of some wealth, like Uzal McCarter—but, eventually, they wanted their own places. And automobiles even meant they didn’t have to ride with anyone else to get there.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox who stayed periodically with her friend Theodosia Garrison, aka Mrs. Frederick Faulks, during the summer of 1914 actually had her own summer home already as I detail in A Summer of Writers at https://feltvillefeatures.com/a-summer-of-writers/. She used her summer home (and an adjacent winter one) to host gatherings of writers and artists, some of whom, no doubt, stayed with Ella for awhile. She only joined the Glenside Park colony on occasion as the guest of Theodosia.

Glenside Park ceased operation when it was no longer necessary to the population which had spawned it.