At a Mansion in a Park, Pelham's History Comes to Life

Living in a highly developed area like southern Westchester County, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the houses, shopping centers and highways are recent additions to a landscape that has been inhabited by humans for thousands of years.

But in a talk Tuesday night at the Bartow-Pell Mansion Museum, Pelham town historian Blake Bell conjured up that lost world, beginning with the native Americans who lived and trekked through the woodlands and wetlands along Long Island Sound.

Bell’s talk was the featured event of the reopening of the museum’s exhibit “From Pells to Parks: All About Us,” which tells the story of the mansion and the surrounding property. The exhibit is a semi-permanent feature of the museum that comes down for special exhibits, according to executive director Ellen Bruzelius.

The site of the museum, in Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx, turns out to be an ideal location to trace the history of the Pelham area. Not only does the property contain many archeological sites that provide clues to what life was like before European settlers arrived, but also some of the key events in local history happened nearby.

Among the archeological sites are burial areas and shell middens, or mounds, indicating that the original inhabitants of the area reaped the bounty of the Sound.

Bell said that the local tribe—which probably did not refer to itself as Siwanoys, as was long thought—most likely wintered around Hell’s Gate, near the present Triborough—sorry, Robert F. Kennedy Bridge, and then moved as far north as Connecticut in the summer.

The Indians sold 9,000 acres of what is now eastern Westchester County and much of the Bronx to Thomas Pell on June 27, 1654. By legend, Pell—an English doctor who lived in Fairfield, Conn.—and the Indian sachems signed the deed of sale beneath a spreading oak tree that became known as the “Treaty Oak,” although Bell noted that the deed was not really a treaty but a business document.

The oak lasted until 1906, when it was destroyed by a fire, but the wrought iron fence that protected it can still be seen from the main drive leading to the mansion.

By 1776, the woodlands had been cleared, and the area was dotted with farms. On October 18th of that momentous year, British and Hessian troops landed not far from the mansion and started to march overland, in an attempt to trap George Washington’s retreating army.

But an enterprising Massachusetts officer, Col. John Glover, intercepted the British at what is now the Split Rock golf course in Pelham Bay Park.

The battle, which, Bell noted, started at the second hole of the golf course, allowed Washington’s army to escape to the safety of White Plains. The sunken road, lined with stone walls behind which the Continentals crouched, can still be seen on the golf course, Bell said.

The present mansion was built between 1836 and 1842 by the Bartows, who made their fortune as publishers and booksellers and had married into the Pell family. It was only one—and not the largest, Bell commented—of a string of mansions that wealthy New Yorkers built nearby as residences or summer retreats.

But the mansions fell into decline after New York City purchased the area to create Pelham Bay Park, and their fate was sealed when legendary planner Robert Moses, who rarely met a historic structure he didn’t want to bulldoze, created Orchard Beach and the present layout of the park in the 1930s. All of the grand mansions were demolished.

All but Bartow-Pell, that is. Fortunately, the International Garden Club had claimed it as its home in 1914, and the mansion managed to survive.

And, Bell noted, history continues to surface in the area. Cannonballs and other ordnance from the Revolutionary War-era still turn up, and not long ago, a man found a large trove of stone scrapers and other early tools left behind by the original Pelhamites. 

“From Pells to Parks: All About Us,” is on display at the Bartow-Pell Mansion Museum, 895 Shore Road, in Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx. Museum hours: Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday, noon to 4 p.m. For more information, go to www.bpmm.org or call 718-885-1461.