Historic Pelham

Presenting the rich history of Pelham, NY in Westchester County: current historical research, descriptions of how to research Pelham history online and genealogy discussions of Pelham families.

Monday, June 22, 2015

Recollections of Manor Circle and Pelham Manor in the Late 19th Century


Until 1886, there had been virtually no development of any of the area east of the Branch Line railroad tracks all the way to Christ Church, Bolton Priory and Shore Road.  Indeed, for much of the nineteenth century, that pristine, undeveloped area was known as a local picnic ground filled with primeval forrest trees including ancient chestnut trees, beech trees, white oaks and more.  

In September, 1886, the very first efforts to develop the area began.  A brief news account published on October 1, 1886 stated:

"Extensive improvements at Pelham Manor, east of the railroad track, are in progress.  Streets are being laid out and graded, and much of the low land is being filled in.  The improvement will be very decided.  The work is being done by the association."

Source:  PELHAM AND CITY ISLAND, The Chronicle [Mount Vernon, NY], Oct. 1, 1886, Vol. XVIII, No. 920,  p. 4, col. 2.  

The first neighborhood to be populated was the area immediately adjacent to the Branch Line railroad tracks known today as Manor Circle.  Real estate interests led by Robert C. Black sold lots to individuals who began to build homes on the circle.  The first five families to build homes and reside on Manor Circle were the Coupier, Rathbone, Heath, Beach, and Wahn families.  Mr. and Mrs. H. G. K. Heath bought a lot on Manor Circle in 1889 and built their home the following year, but the home promptly burned to the ground without local firefighting equipment readily available.  The Heaths rebuilt their home and resided there for many years.

In 1938, Mrs. Heath provided her recollections of Pelham Manor and the Manor Circle neighborhood in the 1890s to a reporter from The Pelham Sun.  The resulting article provides an idealistic description of a simpler time when all local homes had horse teams, open and closed carriages, sleighs with sleigh bells for winter travel, and when it was not unusual to wake up in the morning to discover a stray horse or cow munching on the vegetable garden behind the house.  

Such published recollections and reminiscences have provided a rich source of descriptive narratives of the early days of the Town of Pelham.  Mrs. Heath's recollections are transcribed below followed by a citation and link to its source.  For only two of the many, many examples of such reminiscences that I previously have published, see:

Thu., Feb. 20, 2014:  Pelham Manor in 1883 and in its Early Years - Recollections of An Early Pelham Manor Resident. 

Mon., May 05, 2014:  Reminiscences of Pelham Manor in 1910, Published in 1931.



Detail from 1899 Map Showing Manor Circle Area of
Pelham Manor and Locations of Homes of the Earliest
Residents of the Area Including Mr. and Mrs. H. G. K. Heath.
Source:  Fairchild, John F., Atlas of City of Mount Vernon
(Mt. Vernon, NY:  1899)  NOTE:  Click Image To Enlarge.

"Mrs. Heath Recalls Horses and Cows As Garden Visitors In The Old Manor
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Mrs. H. G. K. Heath Who Came to Manor Circle in 1890 Remembers With Delight More Bucolic Days In Pelham Manor.  Old Resident Recovers After Serious Fall.
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By MARGARET LEARY

A slim blade of a woman, with something if the blade's exquisite pliability and its hidden strength concealed in its suppleness; old as the world reckons such things in un-subtle fashion, but young as humanity knows youth for a clear-eyed view of reality and interest in each passing moment, Mrs. H. G. K. Heath who spent 45 years in the Manor as a resident of Manor Circle takes her place among Pelham's oldest residents, with an easy grace that is characteristic of the woman.

Well on the way to a fine recovery after a serious fall in June 1937 that kept her in the hospital until the following September, Mrs. Heath, now in the 'crutches' stage looks forward from moment to moment to graduation to the more simple support of a cane and those who know her best, would not be surprised to see her navigating gailly, one of these days down Wolf's Lane.  Much of the character of the woman is implicit in that courageous expectation.

Mrs. Heath who makes her home now in Pelham Heights at No. 8 Parkway Drive with her daughter, Mrs. Louis Albert, is easily reckoned among the Manor's oldest residents -- that small group which knew the village when much of it was a pleasant wooded section and when the houses in the neighborhood of Manor Circle could be counted on one's fingers.  'I'm like one of the old chestnut trees,' Mrs. Heath blithely describes herself, referring to the staunch old trees that are mingled with her earliest recollections of the Manor.

Mrs. Heath and her husband, the late Henry G. K. Heath, a prominent lawyer, bought their land for their home on Manor Circle in 1889 from the late Robert C. Black.  On their property of more than an acre, they built their home the following year.  Mrs. Heath recalls her first visit to the Manor.  'We came up and sat on the old stone fence and brought a picnic lunch -- I promptly fell in love with the trees.'  This new home of theirs caught fire and with the inadequate fire apparatus of those long gone days, it burned right down.  They built another home, however, and began their long residence in the Manor on the same site.  Mrs. Heath recalls two other young married women also residents on the Circle in those days, Mrs. Robert Beach, and the late Mrs. Wahn.  The Coupier and Rathbone families were already Circle residents. 

This, the reader must remember was before the days of the late lamented 'Toonerville Trolley' which ended its career in a blaze of glory only last Summer.  Mrs. Heath well remembers when the 'Toonerville' came to the Manor.  She still sighs to think of the beautiful willow trees that had to be sacrificed to make way for 'progress.'  Apparently there was considerable feeling on the subject.

Like other residents of the Manor in those bucolic, non-automotive days, Mrs. Heath had a stunning team of horses and had both a closed and an open carriage.  The reporter from The Pelham Sun had a vivid image of her driving about the county in her open carriage, looking as she said for little travelled roads, carrying what she described as one of those 'mind your own business' little parasols -- which the user could adjust at the desired angle to obstruct any unwanted gaze.  In the Winter, there was a fine sleigh, drawn by the horses, gay with bells.  'I used to drive up to New Rochelle in that and remember the boys throwing snowballs,' Mrs. Heath recalled with a smile.  'We were the last residents on the Circle to give up our horses,' she added.  They hated to part with them.

The first automobile in the family was another red letter day.  Mrs. Heath recalled her early first fear of the horseless carriages.  Her husband called her outside the house one day to 'see something.'  The something was a new Reo which he had just driven up from New York with the automobile salesman.  That afternoon with no more driving experience, Mr. Heath motored his wife up to Mount Kisco and she 'was not really afraid.'

The memories of this real old-timer encompass the steady growth of St. Catherine's Church which she remembers as a tiny structure able to house only about a hundred parishioners.  Before they came to the Manor, at Mr. Black's suggestion, the Heaths joined the Manor Club, an organization of which Mrs. Heath is now an honorary member, after a remarkably long record of active participation and interest in club affairs.  For six years, Mrs. Heath was head of the Choral, for two years chairman of the Literature Section and she served as club vice-president for three years.  During a ten-year period, she missed only three meetings, a record which the late Mrs. Joan E. Secor, the club's first president, told her was not likely to be equalled.

Mrs. Heath's gifts in dramatic way, her aptitude for mimicry illustrated in her clever recitations, is well known not only to the Manor Club group, but to a wider Pelham audience.  Active in the work of the Queen's Daughters, Mrs. Heath became the first president of the Ladies of Charity and is now an honorary president of that charitable group of St. Catherine's Church.  Last March, on her first day 'downstairs,' after her fall in the previous June, Mrs. Heath was greeted by many friends at a party at the home of Mrs. Frederick B. Davies on Eastland avenue and presented some of her popular recitations on that occasion.

A lover of flowers, Mrs. Heath recalls the wealth of lovely ferns and jack-in-the-pulpit and such wild things that were found in the old days in the woods that stood in the Roosevelt avenue section of the Manor.  'It was not a particularly unusual thing to wake up in the morning and find a horse straying into one's garden, in those days,' she said and on one occasion a cow was the unexpected visitor.  A Swedish maid in the Heath household decided firmly, 'I'll milk heem' -- but the cow had already been milked.

The youngest in a family of seven children, Mrs. Heath has gone through life with and continues to display a fine adaptability hat stands any human being in good stead.  Manor Circle she calls her 'universal circle' -- 'everything that could, happened to her there in a full life.  Very fond of people she confessed herself immediately, 'I never yet have seen anyone who was not in some way interesting,' she declares.

As she sits and talks to you, she looks you right in the eye (without glasses too), she laughs eeasily and genuinely, delights in her many friends, in books, in the understanding companionship of her daughter, both the past and the present and the future are her interest -- one leaves her with the feeling that years have no power over such a human being -- that something like this we are all intended to be when we can no longer call ourselves 'young.'  But some of us get jolly well warped along the way."

Source:  Leary, Margaret, Mrs. Heath Recalls Horses and Cows As Garden Visitors In The Old Manor, The Pelham Sun, Jul. 22, 1938, p. 10, cols. 2-3.  


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Wednesday, January 21, 2015

The Tunnel Beneath the Branch Line Train Tracks Adjacent to Manor Circle


New Haven Line railroad commuters in Pelham give little thought to the tunnel they use to move from the east bound tracks to the west bound tracks and vice versa at today's Pelham Train Station in the Village of Pelham.  Few, however, realize that commuters who once used the Pelham Manor Train Station that stood at the eastern end of the Esplanade on land now part of the New England Thruway (I-95) also had a tunnel that permitted them to pass beneath the various commuter tracks safely.

Today's posting to the Historic Pelham Blog includes a detail from a map published in 1908 that provides details regarding the Pelham Manor Station tunnel.  The detail appears immediately below, followed by a few comments on the significance of the map detail.



Detail from 1908 Map Showing Tunnel Leading
from Manor Circle to the Commuter Tracks of
the Pelham Manor Station in Lower Left Quadrant.
Source:  Fairchild, John F., Atlas of the City Of Mount
Vernon and the Town of Pelham Second Edition, Compiled
from Official Records, Personal Surveys, and Other Private
Plans and Surveys, Double Page Plate No. 38 [Map Bounded
by Pelhamdale Ave., Long Island Sound, Pelham Bay Park] (1908).

In the early twentieth century, planners realized that suburban development of the lands extending from the Branch Line tracks to Long Island Sound was a virtual certainty.  The tunnel beneath the Branch Line tracks was intended to permit commuters who lived east of the tracks to proceed safely to any of the three station platforms or to the Pelham Manor Station itself by proceeding beneath the tracks.  

The Branch Line now serves freight and Amtrak trains.  The commuter tunnel long since has been filled and closed.  There seems to be no visible remnants of the tunnel, with one possible exception.  Approximately where the tunnel stairs would have been entered, the curb along Manor Circle is cut away as if to allow easy access.  This cutaway remains today.

For additional information about the early days of the Pelham Manor Depot and the Pelham Manor Post Office, seee.g.:  

Mon., Sep. 15, 2014:  1884 Gunfight in Pelham Manor Pits Local Residents Against Pelham Manor Depot Burglars.

Wed., Aug. 06, 2014:  Important Report of the Opening of the Branch Line Through the Manor of Pelham in November 1873.

Fri., Apr. 25, 2014:  Freight Train Wreck at Pelham Manor Station in 1896.

Tue., Jan. 28, 2014:  The Pelham Manor Post Office.

Wed., Feb. 10, 2010:  Train Station Safe at Pelham Manor Was Blown Open with Dynamite Yet Again on April 24, 1902.  

Tue., Nov. 17, 2009:  1883 Advertisement by Pelham Manor Protective Club Offering Reward for Information About Pelham Manor Depot Burglary.  

Tue., Aug. 11, 2009:  News of Pelham Manor and City Island Published on July 14, 1882.

Fri., Mar. 6, 2009:  Burglars Blow the Safe at the Pelham Manor Post Office in 1894.  

Mon., Jan. 28,, 2008:  1884 Burglary and Gun Fight at the Pelham Manor Depot.  

Fri., Jan. 18, 2008:  Studies Created by Noted Architect Cass Gilbert for the Pelham Manor Station.  

Fri., Jun. 8, 2007:  Photographs of Pelham Manor Station and the City Island Station on the Branch Line Published in 1916.

Tue., May 22,, 2007:  Photograph of Pelham Manor Station on the Branch Line Published in 1908.  

Tue., Mar. 29, 2005:  The Earliest Telephone in Pelham Manor?  


Order a Copy of "Thomas Pell and the Legend of the Pell Treaty Oak." 

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Friday, April 25, 2014

Freight Train Wreck at Pelham Manor Station in 1896


There once stood on the New Haven Branch Line a lovely train station known as "Pelham Manor Depot".  The station stood at the end of today's Esplanade beyond Grant Avenue on the current Amtrak / Freight Line tracks near Manor Circle.  The station was razed in the 1950s in connection with the construction of I-95.

In 1896, a massive freight train wreck at the station smashed eighteen freight cars "into kindling wood".  The article below describes the wreck and is followed by a citation to its source.

"EIGHT CARS IN A WRECK.
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Eighteen of Them on the New Haven Road Smashed Into Kindling Wood.
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TRAFFIC DELAYED SEVERAL HOURS BY THE ACCIDENT.
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Train Hands Were More or Less Bruised, but No One Was Seriously Hurt.
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In a freight wreck at Pelham Manor this morning eighteen cars were reduced to kindling wood and traffic was delayed for several hours.  Fortunately no one was seriously hurt.

A bad freight wreck occurred early this morning at Pelham Manor, on the Harlem branch of the New Haven Railroad.

An extra freight train, known as No. 8 in charge of Conductor William Flannagan, was on its way from New Haven to New York, and while passing the Pelham Manor station at about 12:27 A.M. a king pin in one of the cars became loosened and threw the forward cars off the track.

Eighteen freight cars were smashed into kindling wood, and the freight and wreckage were strewn along the track for many yards.  A portion of the platform in front of the Pelham Manor station was torn away.  Several coal cars on a side track, consigned to Joseph English, were thrown over and partly wrecked. 

The train hands received a lively shaking up, and some of them were more or less bruised, but no one was seriously hurt. 

The Washington express train used the Harlem branch to reach 129th street, where the trains are transferred on Pennsylvania floats to Jersey City.  The Washington express came along at about one A.M., and could not get past Pelham Manor on account of the wreck.  The train had to back up to New Rochelle, where it remained on a side track until eight o'clock this morning, when the track was cleared.  The passengers on the Washington express were in their berths and got up to investigate the cause of the delay.  Many of them walked down to Pelham Manor to view the wreck.

The Washington express from Washington, after leaving the float at 129th street, also had to come to a stop on reaching Pelham Manor and wait until the track was cleared.

The accident caused a serious delay on all the trains running on the local tracks of the New Haven road.  The express trains had to use the local track and this stalled the local trains.  The damage caused by the accident will amount to several thousand dollars."

Source:  Freight Cars in a Wreck, The Evening Telegram - New York, May 7, 1896, p. 3, col. 3.


Scene of the Pelhamville Train Wreck that Occurred on the New Haven
Main Line About a Decade Earlier than the 1896 Freight Train Wreck 
Near the Pelham Manor Depot.  
Source: A Remarkable Railroad Accident, Scientific American, 
Jan. 16, 1886, Vol. LIV, No. 3, cover and pp. 31-32.

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Friday, April 09, 2010

The Closing of the "Eastern Railroad" of the Westchester Model Club, Inc. in the Pelham Manor Depot in 1953

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I have written before about the Westchester Model Club, Inc. that once ran a massive model railroad inside the old Pelham Manor Depot before the demolition of that station on the New Haven Branch Line to make way for I-95 during the 1950s.  See Tue., October 13, 2009:  Film of the Westchester Model Club, Inc.'s Model Railroad in the Pelham Manor Depot before its Demolition.

Today's posting to the Historic Pelham Blog transcribes a brief article published in 1953 about the closing of the Club's facility in the Pelham Manor Depot prior to the station's demolition to make way for I-95.  The transcription is followed by a citation to its source.

"Putting Out A Big Line

At first it looked as if a big railroad were going out of business.  The story led off with the stark fact that the Eastern Railroad and its 65 locomotives, 500 freight and 150 passenger cars had been ordered to liquidate.  The railway had to get out of the way of a new highway. 

But it turned out, the Eastern Railroad presidents' conference reports that the E'astern Railroad' was only a model railroad -- though an extraordinary one.  It was being evicted from its quarters in the old unused station in Pelham Manor.

The station, it seems, was standing smack in the middle of the proposed New England Thruway. 

The 'Eastern Railroad' owns 3,500 feet of track and 12 stations and had been housed in the Pelham Manor station since 1936.  Equipment is scaled at one-fourth inch to the foot."

Source:  Putting Out a Big Line, The Cayuga Chief [Weedsport, NY], Jun. 4, 1953, p. 3, col. 1.

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