A New Threat to Hudson River View Sheds

Preserving the Phelps-James House

With the reduced threat from industrial impacts comes a new threat—developers and their paid lobbyists. When communities are presented with renewed opportunities to regain Hudson River access and greenspace preservation, the opportunity is often lost to the designs of developers—for-profit and not-for-profit. Over-zealous elected officials may be tempted to overstate the benefits to their municipality in order to push these projects through.

The Story of the Phelps-James House

by Henry Steiner

In the study of history, some sources can be both extremely helpful and very misleading. This is particularly true in local history. Take an interesting monograph in the files of our historical society concerning the Phelps family. It is a valuable three-page compilation written in 1959, but it tangles certain Phelps family relations. The innocent error later seeped into other local literature, fogging the correct identity of the first owner of the Phelps-James House. The house is a historic landmark standing between Phelps Hospital and Kendal-on-Hudson.

I noted the identity problem when I wrote, The Place Names of Historic Sleepy Hollow and Tarrytown, in 1998. This month I had some time to work it out, and here is what I found—The Phelps-James House was constructed for Anson Greene Phelps, Jr. (1818-1858) and his wife, Jane A. Gibson (1820-1908). Anson was the only son of Anson Greene Phelps, Sr., and, contrary to the Phelps monograph, the elder Phelps never had a son named William, or a grandson named Anson Greene Phelps II.

Anson Greene Phelps, Sr. (1781-1853) started out as a saddle maker’s apprentice, and he rose to become one of the mercantile princes of New York. He and his partners dominated the nineteenth century brass and copper trade in America. Among his partners were three sons-in-law and his son Anson. Although a partner in his father’s firm, Anson, Jr. does not appear to have been as involved in the running of the firm as his brother-in-law, William E. Dodge. Dodge gave his name to the firm of Phelps-Dodge and became its managing partner. His Tarrytown home, Cedar Cliff, subsequently belonged to Standard Oil magnate, John Archbold, and was later home to Saint Vincent De Paul School.

Like the senior Phelps, Anson Greene Phelps, Jr. was a very active supporter of the Presbyterian Church. We learn from one source that, at the age of twenty-two, he took a European cruise—the custom of young, wealthy gentlemen in that age—and chanced to meet another young traveler, the writer Hans Christian Andersen.

On November 5, 1845, Phelps married Jane Gibson. They had their Hudson River summer home built, in 1851, on land bought from the Beekman Farm in 1849. A map of 1891 shows the estate as being much larger than the sixty-eight acres of today’s Phelps Hospital grounds. The Phelps-James House was designed by architect John Butler Snook of Trench and Snook who designed the First Grand Central Terminal. According to one authority, the house is a “centrally massed villa” in the Palladian tradition, built of “cut granite blocks… and brownstone trim,” adding that it sits “somewhat awkwardly in its rural setting.”

Anson G. Phelps, Jr. died on May 18, 1858 at his New York home at Broadway and Fiftieth Street. He had been suffering from varioloid—a mild form of small pox. Phelps died unexpectedly of heart failure as he moved from his chair to his bed. His funeral service was held at the Mercer Street Church in New York. The Reverend Abel Stewart—the fly-fishing pastor of the Old Dutch Church of Sleepy Hollow and local hero of the 1863 draft riots—spoke at the service. He presented the mourners with a eulogy that celebrated Phelps as one of the few rich men who could, indeed, pass into heaven.

Phelps was thirty-nine when he died, and the New York Times attested that, “no man of his age could be more missed from mercantile, religious, and philanthropic circles of our City than Mr. Phelps.” His widow was to survive him by fifty years. Except for about $85,000 left to religious institutions, Jane Gibson Phelps inherited nearly all of her husband’s very substantial wealth, much of it in New York real estate, and stock in railroad and insurance companies. The widow divided her time between New York and Sleepy Hollow, attending the First Reformed Church when in the country. Mrs. Phelps also served for a time as vice president of the Tarrytown Historical Society.

One of thirteen children, Jane Phelps lived with an unmarried sister named Helen Louise Gibson. In December of 1890, we find her on a list of twenty-six “managers” of the Society for the Relief of Half Orphans, which ran an asylum on Tenth Street in Manhattan.

Jane Phelps succumbed to myocarditis at the age of eighty-eight on December 31, 1908: she died at her 51 East 34^th Street home. Jane, like her husband, left legacies to churches and missions. Of her $800,000 estate, $40,000 went to churches and hospitals. She did not forget the people of Sleepy Hollow and Tarrytown; $10,000 went to the First Reformed Church and $5,000 went to Tarrytown Hospital. Jane’s remains were interred in tomb at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery; it is not clear when Anson’s remains were moved to the tomb, or from where.

There were legacies to other family members, but the Phelps-James House, its contents, and its lands were left to Jane’s sister, Helen Louise Gibson, along with a substantial amount of stock. Upon Helen’s death, in 1918, roughly half of her $200,000 estate was left to Presbyterian Institutions.

At that point, another member of the Phelps family, Arthur Curtiss James, stepped in, paying the charitable legacies and claiming the house. He and his wife, Harriet Eddy Parsons, owned the Phelps-James property until their deaths in 1941. They reportedly used the house occasionally on summer weekends. With two other fabulous dwellings—one in New York and one in Newport—it does not appear that they had much time for their Hudson River villa. According to his New York Times obituary, Arthur James was one of the twelve richest men in America and the largest owner of railroad securities in the world. He was an avid yachtsman, and he spent a large part of his free time on his yacht, Aloha.

As with Anson and Jane Phelps, Arthur and Harriet James did not have children. Except for caretakers, the house stood uninhabited for a time until it was donated to the Phelps Memorial Hospital Association. Over the years the house has been used for hospital fundraising activities managed by the hospital auxiliary.

In 1996, the Village of Sleepy Hollow adopted its Local Waterfront Revitalization Program (LWRP). In the adopted program, the Phelps-James House was declared significant in Sleepy Hollow history, architecture, and culture, and the LWRP called for the protection of the house and the surrounding area. This carried little weight when the village approved the Kendal assisted living project a few years later. Today, for the first time in one hundred and fifty years, something other than trees obstructs the natural Hudson River views of the Phelps-James House.

Henry John Steiner is the village historian of Sleepy Hollow

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