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On January 29, 2003, the Board of Chosen Freeholders of Somerset County announced that the county will acquire the nearly 500-acre Natirar estate in Peapack-Gladstone, Far Hills and Bedminster from the Estate of His Majesty, Hassan II, the late King of Morocco under an agreement signed last November. The $22 million transaction is scheduled to close in March 2003. The Freeholders also announced that the private, non-profit Natirar Association would become the operating entity for the property.
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The beautiful and environmentally important Natirar estate is rich in historical and architectural significance. The property’s many features include some of the earliest permanent European settlement in the Somerset Hills. One of the region’s first “improved” roads, known as the Peapack Path, crossed the property in the early 1730’s following the course of an ancient Indian trail; and the area above the confluence of the North Branch of the Raritan River and the Peapack Brook has been the site of both residential and rural industrial activity since the early 1740’s, as well as a pre-Revolutionary War engineering feat that once connected the two waterways (see the article beginning at page 40 of the Holiday / Early Winter 2002/2003 issue of The Black River Journal). However, the property is perhaps best known today as the grand estate created by Kate and Walter Ladd beginning in 1905.
Having first rented a home in Morristown and, later, two estates in the Somerset Hills – the Haley Fiske property on Bernardsville “Mountain” in 1903 and the John Dillon estate in Far Hills in 1904 -- Walter Graeme Ladd (1857-1933) and his wife, Catherine (“Kate”) Everit Macy Ladd (1863-1945), began to acquire land in what are now Peapack-Gladstone, Far Hills and Bedminster in April 1905. That year they purchased about 560 acres, including the 200-acre “Sunnybranch Farm” from Zachariah Belcher, 150 acres from William Stone Post (son of the prominent architect and Bernardsville resident, George Browne Post), 95 acres from Alletta V.D. and John G. DeBaun, and 75 acres from Evander H. Schley.
Eventually, the Ladds created one of the largest estates in the area, encompassing nearly 1,000 acres stretching to Route 206 and Hillside Avenue in Bedminster on the west, Route 202 on the south, the North Branch of the Raritan River on the east, and Highland Avenue in Peapack on the north. They named their estate “Natirar,” an anagram for the Raritan River that meanders for some two miles across the property.
Building
“Natirar”
The
Architecture of Guy Lowell
And
Henry Janeway Hardenbergh
The Ladds’ 30,000 square foot brick Tudor-style mansion with limestone trim and slate roof, and featuring extensive oak paneling, teak floors and molded plaster ceilings, was completed in 1912, following about two years of construction. From 1905 until 1912, the Ladds resided in the former residence of the Zachariah Belcher family, which was located near the present greenhouse on the estate (the Belcher house was demolished upon completion of the Ladds’ new residence).
The main residence, several of the principal outbuildings, and the overall lay-out and landscape of the estate were principally designed by Guy Lowell (1870-1927), a Boston-born architect who was descended from a very old and prominent New England family (his close relatives included, among others, A. Lawrence Lowell, a president of Harvard University, and the poets James Russell Lowell and Amy Lowell; and he was also related, through his wife, to the artist, John Singer Sargent).
It is assumed that Lowell received the commission to design “Natirar” because he had previously designed (1907-08) the Ladds’ summer residence, “Eegonos” (the reverse spelling of Sonogee Point, where the house was located) at Bar Harbor, Maine.
Guy Lowell was educated at Harvard University (1892) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1894). After receiving his degree in architecture from MIT, he studied landscape and horticulture at Kew Gardens in England and architectural history and design and landscape architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, receiving his diplome in 1899. His strong interest in integrating architecture and landscape design was no doubt influenced by his father-in-law, Charles Sprague Sargent, the first director of the Arnold Arboretum near Boston.
Upon returning to the United States in 1899, Lowell opened his own architectural practice in Boston. In 1900, he helped found the short-lived (1900-1910), but very influential, landscape architecture program at MIT where he taught a pioneering group of American landscape architects (including many of the first generation of trained women architects) who rose to prominence in the 1920’s and 1930’s, including Mabel Babcock, George Elberton Burnap, Marian Cruger Coffin, and Martha Brookes (Brown) Hutcheson. (Of local interest, Hutcheson (1871-1959) and her husband, William, purchased “Merchiston Farm” on Longview Road near Gladstone, New Jersey, in 1911 and developed it in accordance with Mrs. Hutcheson’s design philosophy. Their property is now Morris County’s Bamboo Brook Outdoor Education Center and the headquarters for the New Jersey Conservation Foundation.)
Lowell was a successful architect from the beginning of his practice, helped in part by his many social connections. A skilled and versatile designer, his work was broad in scope, comprising large public, academic and commercial buildings, and many distinctive residences, country estates and formal gardens. He also published several books, including American Gardens (1902), one of the first books to be written by an American architect on landscape gardening in this country, and two illustrated volumes on buildings, Smaller Italian Villas and Farmhouses (1916) and More Small Italian Villas and Farmhouses (1920). He also wrote for and edited American Gardens, a photo publication that dealt with landscape design.
Lowell is perhaps most famous for his design of two public buildings, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (1906-09, plus later additions) and the New York County Courthouse on Foley Square in Manhattan (1912-14 and 1919-27). His urban and country residential work, however, comprised the bulk of his practice. In light of his training in landscape architecture, very often his residential commissions involved the design of both houses and gardens.
While the bulk of his commissions were in Massachusetts and elsewhere in New England, Lowell also had a significant number of commissions in New York and on Long Island (he opened a separate office in New York as early as 1906 and, in later years, customarily spent half of each week in New York and half in Boston). Other than “Natirar,” Lowell’s only known commission in New Jersey was the Harden L. Crawford residence in Sea Bright (circa 1905).
Lowell was assisted in the design of “Natirar” by Henry Janeway Hardenbergh (1847-1918), who was born in New Brunswick and, as an adult, lived in the Bernardsville “Mountain” colony. Hardenbergh was descended from an old and prominent New Jersey family; his great-great-grandfather, Jacob Rutsen Hardenbergh, was the first president of Rutgers College. Henry Hardenbergh’s connection to the Ladds appears to have been personal; in Mrs. Ladd’s privately printed memoirs, she refers to the fact that she and her husband had attended a Hardenbergh family wedding as well as Henry Hardenbergh’s funeral in 1918.
After Hardenbergh established his own architectural practice, in 1871, family connections helped him gain commissions to design Kirkpatrick Chapel and a library and geology building at Rutgers College. Wider success came after 1879 when he designed the Vancorlear, an early and important example of an apartment block in New York City. That project brought Hardenbergh to the attention of Edward S. Clark of the Singer Sewing Machine Company, who, in 1880, commissioned him to design a housing development between west 72nd and 73rd streets and what are now Central Park West and Columbus Avenue in New York. The development comprised row houses (some of which have been demolished), lower-middle-class apartments, and a then-daring foray into luxury apartments, the famous building now known as the Dakota Apartments. In the 1890’s, Hardenbergh received commissions from the Astor Estate to design the Waldorf and Astoria hotels (both since demolished), projects that established him as a leading architect of luxurious Edwardian hotels, which would later come to include the Plaza in New York (1905-1907), the Willard in Washington, D.C., and the Copley Plaza in Boston.
According to records in the Wurts Brothers photographic collection at the Museum of the City of New York, the decorators of the residence were the New York firm of Moran & Jones.
Kate
Macy Ladd and Walter Graeme Ladd
Catherine Everit Macy – known throughout her life as Kate -- was born in New York in 1863, the younger daughter and second of three children of Josiah Macy Jr. and Caroline Louise Everit Macy. She was a direct descendant of Thomas and Sarah Macy who came to America about 1635 from the Parish of Chilmark near Salisbury, England, becoming the original settlers of Salisbury, Massachusetts. In 1659, Thomas Macy and his family moved to Nantucket Island where he engaged in the whaling industry. He prospered in that thriving business and was one of several men who later purchased the island (the Thomas Macy home still stands in Nantucket town).
In the early 19th century, Kate Macy’s great grandfather, Captain Josiah Macy, moved from Nantucket to New York, where he founded the very successful shipping and commission house of Josiah Macy & Son. Kate’s father, a member of the eighth generation of the family in America, became a close friend and business associate of John D. Rockefeller, whose Standard Oil Company had acquired the Macy family’s New York oil refining operation. As a result of his association with Rockefeller, Josiah Macy Jr. significantly added to the family’s already sizeable fortune before his untimely death of typhoid fever at age 37, when Kate was only 13.
Kate Macy married Walter Graeme Ladd in 1883. Walter Ladd, born in 1856, was a son of William Whitehead Ladd and Sarah Hannah Phillips Ladd and grew up in what appears to have been an upper middle class home in Brooklyn, New York. Contrary to many published reports, Walter Ladd was neither an attorney nor involved in railroads. In the couple’s marriage license, he reported his occupation as that of “merchant” (and based on the recollection of one of Mrs. Ladd’s nurses, it appears that around the time of the Ladds’ marriage Mr. Ladd was engaged in the dried fruit business and, later, the insurance business). Sometime following their marriage, Mr. Ladd apparently gave up his outside business pursuits and focused his energies on caring for his often bed-ridden wife, managing their investments and estates in New Jersey and Maine, and yachting.
Mrs. Ladd wrote in her memoirs that she suffered from recurring illnesses and was an invalid for much of her married life, although she also recalled that the first eight years she lived at “Natirar” were “the best days of my life in many ways – really the first time in my life that I had known what it was to be really well.” Although the physical bases for Mrs. Ladd’s illnesses were later disputed by her physicians, nurses and others, she spent many years in bed or in a wheelchair and, as a result of muscle atrophy, eventually became unable to walk.
Although reared in a somewhat austere Quaker household, Mrs. Ladd is said to have been strongly influenced by that religion’s spirit of humanitarianism and by her family’s history of philanthropic activities. From all accounts, throughout her life she revealed virtues of a generous and loving disposition and unusual concern for the welfare of others. And, not surprisingly, the close bonds she developed with her physicians and other caregivers throughout her many illnesses had a profound influence on the direction of her philanthropic endeavors.
Mrs. Ladd made substantial contributions -- virtually always anonymously or in memory of friends and family -- to many charitable and educational organizations, including the Henry Street Settlement in New York; the Maine Seacoast Missionary Society; the Y.W.C.A.; the Berry Schools in Rome, Georgia; the Hospital Council of New York City; the United Hospital Fund; Teachers College of Columbia University; the Infirmary of the New Jersey College for Women (later, Douglass College of Rutgers University); and to several local organizations, including the Visiting Nurse Association of Somerset Hills, the Bernardsville Library and what is now the Somerset Medical Center in Somerville.
The most significant of Mrs. Ladd’s philanthropic contributions, however, was the creation, in 1930, of the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, named in honor of her beloved father. By the time of her death, in 1945, Mrs. Ladd had given the Foundation some $19 million, the equivalent of more than $150 million in 2002 dollars.
Until 1945, the Foundation focused its grantmaking on medical research in such fields as traumatic shock and war-related psychiatric disorders, aging and arteriosclerosis, genetics and human development, and psychosomatic medicine. Since the 1960’s, the Foundation has focused its resources specifically on improving the education of health professionals, particularly physicians.
Walter Ladd’s most important philanthropic endeavor was the establishment, under the terms of his will, of The Kate Macy Ladd Fund, to ensure the continuation of what Mrs. Ladd considered to be her most important work. Beginning in 1908, Mrs. Ladd had provided a convalescent facility on the “Natirar” estate (originally at “Maple Cottage,” a large residence that once stood along Peapack Road – the site is now 44 Peapack Road) where “deserving gentlewomen who are compelled to depend upon their own exertions for support shall be entertained, without charge, for periods of time while convalescing from illness, recuperating from impaired health, or otherwise in need of rest.”
Following Mrs. Ladd’s
death, title to the “Natirar” estate was conveyed to the Fund and the
convalescent facility was relocated from “Maple Cottage” to the renovated main
residence, where it operated from 1949 until 1983, the fiftieth anniversary of
her husband’s death. That year, in
accordance with the provisions of Mr. Ladd’s will, the property (then
comprising nearly 500 acres, the balance of the original acreage having been
sold in the late 1940’s to add assets to the Fund) was sold to His Majesty
Hassan II, the late King of Morocco, for $7.5 million, and the entire principal
of the Kate Macy Ladd Fund was distributed equally among five organizations: New York University, Johns Hopkins Hospital,
Tuskegee College in Alabama, Hampton Institute in Virginia, and The Berry
Schools in Georgia. King Hassan died in
1999. In November 2002, Somerset County
and the Estate of His Majesty Hassan II signed an agreement under which the
County is to acquire Natirar for $22 million.
W. Barry Thomson
The Natirar Association, Inc.
January 2003