The Kearney House
Information on this page current as of April 22, 2008
At the Alpine Picnic Area (directions)
Self-Guiding Tour
"Cornwallis Headquarters"?
Hours / Rules
Outreach
Staff / Contact InformationThe Kearney House Brochure
(2 pages, .pdf file, reduced to fit on letter-size paper—set print preference to "landscape" for best result)
Above: The Kearney House, looking pretty during "Punch & Pie at Mrs. Kearney's Tavern," a recreation of a nineteenth-century Hudson River tavern. (Click here to see more "tavern" pictures.)
Above: Click on the play arrow to view our 45-second video, "Stoking the Kearney House Hearth." ("Madison's Whim" courtesy of Hesperus. Video: R.J. Bogumil.) Below: Click on the play arrow to view our new 5-minute video, "A Traditional Kearney House Thanksgiving with Thaddeus MacGregor." (Video: R.J. Bogumil. Note that broadband access and a fairly up-to-date computer/software package will probably be needed to properly view these videos.)
Newly added! Click on the play arrow to view our 5-½-minute video, "Kearney House Recreation." (Video: R.J. Bogumil.)
Our video, A New Deal for the Palisades, featuring rare footage of the Palisades from the 1930s and 40s, is now also available on DVD—click here for details.
Some of our favorite articles from cliff*notes, the bimonthly visitor's letter edited by the staff of the Kearney House since 1998, are available here.
...click here to find out about our popular lecture programs...
Listed in the National and State Historic Registers as the “Blackledge-Kearney House”—but known more familiarly as the “Kearney House” or the “Cornwallis Headquarters”—this house is the oldest building in the New Jersey Section of the Palisades Interstate Park.
The southern half of the house, built of native stone and timbers, probably dates to the 1760s. The smaller, wood-frame northern addition was probably built in the 1840s, the large porch added in 1909.
The house has been a Hudson River homestead, a riverfront tavern, a Park police station, and a “historic shrine.”
Today it helps bring to life two centuries in the story of the Hudson River and those who depended upon it for their lives and livelihoods.
See also "Some Paint, Some Mortar, a Couple of Mops and a Bucket of Water,"
Click on a number to go to a room.
You can begin your tour at the large boulder just south of the house. Find the inscription: STONE FELL 18 OF APRIL 1896. More than any other artifact, perhaps, this stone brings to mind the hardships of life at this place, which was known throughout most of the nineteenth century as the Closter Dock or Closter Landing. Besides the threat of rockslides, most of the area was not well suited to farming, the ground rocky, the sun lost behind the cliffs early in the day. Winters can be bitterly cold along the river; during storms, the river can rise several feet over its banks to flood the lower floor of this house. Still, a small but hearty settlement thrived here for more than a century. The life of this community was centered on a pair of substantial, deep-water docks (these have been incorporated into the present-day boat basin) and a steep mountain pass, the Closter Dock Road (now a hiking trail), that linked these docks to the farmlands in the valley west of the cliffs. The original Closter Dock Road was laid out by colonists in 1761. It is probable that the Kearney House was built then or shortly after, perhaps to serve as a dock master’s house, from which the operations of the dock at harvest time could be supervised, and fees for its use could be collected for the owner of the dock, a farmer named Cornelius Tallman, whose property extended for two miles along the Dock Road, from present-day Closter to the dock on the river.
By the time of the Civil War, the settlement extending from the docks and along the road to the summit had grown to around two hundred men, women, and children. Also around that time, a large gristmill was built north of the house (where the picnic pavilion now stands), and here grains and even coffee beans were milled. A dozen or more stone quarries, where building stone was mined, were in operation to the south of the house (where the parking area is). Most Closter Dock men relied on the Hudson for their livelihoods, as the captains or crews of sailing vessels, or as fishermen, dockworkers, and the like. Others made their livings as laborers, mill workers, quarrymen, or tradesmen. Most women were occupied full-time keeping house, though some also added to their families’ incomes by working as seamstresses or in other crafts. Most children at Closter Landing received at least some formal schooling at a schoolhouse on the summit of the mountain.
2 Kitchen Garden
The kitchen (herb) garden maintained by the family was an important part of a nineteenth-century homestead. Besides adding flavor to what might otherwise become a bland diet of mostly preserved meats, vegetables, and fish, the kitchen garden was the family’s pharmacy. Within this garden grew home cures for ailments ranging from headaches and burns to insect bites, fevers, and worms. Other plants could be used to repel flies, or simply to add color and fragrance to the home.
From an early age, children would have been taught the uses of these plants.
3 Tavern
Enter the house from the “new” addition. This room shows how the house may have appeared in the mid-1800s, when Rachel Kearney, a widow who also raised her family in the house, ran a tavern here. Taverns played an important social role in the nineteenth century. Here at Closter Landing, Rachel Kearney’s tavern would have served as a meeting place for the crews of the sailing vessels that arrived and departed daily and for the local workforce of quarrymen, boatmen, and others. Gossip, strongly argued political opinions, the latest joke—all would have been spoken within these walls over the years.
4 Kitchen
Step back half a century or more. You are in the oldest part of the house, probably built in the 1760s (note the hand-hewn beams in this room, and compare them with the sawmill beams of the “new” section). The kitchen, with its wide hearth, was the heart of the Early American homestead. Most work that could be done indoors was done here, by the light and the heat of the fire. (The low ceiling had more to do with heat conservation than with the height of the occupants.)
The first known written mention of the house did not appear until 1802, in a property deed that recorded “a certain house and cellar” here. The deed noted that the house was owned by Daniel Van Sciven. Van Sciven was a Revolutionary War veteran, having served with the Bergen County Militia throughout the conflict. Other records reveal that he had been a fisherman. He was married to Maria Blacklidge; the couple had four children—and were expecting a fifth—when that deed was written in 1802. Six years later, in 1808, another deed listed Rynier Dubois as living here.
Who first built the house? We simply do not know. The house was most likely already almost half a century old in 1802, when it first showed up in writing. (Our ongoing research may one day solve this most perplexing of the house’s mysteries.)
Come upstairs—carefully! Around the time of their marriage in 1817, James and Rachel Kearney rented this house and an adjoining eleven acres from Jacob Powles, the father of Rachel’s first husband, Abraham Powles. Abraham Powles had died two years before, leaving Rachel with three young children, two girls and a boy, to bring up. In 1823 James Kearney was able to buy the property outright from Jacob Powles. Rachel would have five more children with James before his death in 1831, and she also adopted a daughter. In other words, Rachel brought up at least nine children in this two-room house! (Certainly, the attic was lived in as well—you may take a look up the attic stairs if you wish.)
Most of Rachel’s sons pursued work as boatmen; as her children married, some stayed at Closter Landing. Others moved to New York City or elsewhere. Rachel’s widowed daughter Ellen Conklin and her sons would remain at the house with Rachel, helping her to run the tavern, until Rachel’s death in 1870—at the age of ninety. Soon after, Ellen Conklin moved to a house at the summit of the Palisades.
For twenty years after Rachel’s death, the house was sometimes used by fishermen during the springtime shad run; at other times it was left derelict. Some of the Kearneys rented the eleven-acre property out as a picnic grove for “excursionists” from the city. The house was sold at public auction in 1891. A year later, a ferry company bought the house and rented it to tenants.
A glimpse into the attic from the bedroom.
Step into the early twentieth century… By the late 1890s, as the Palisades stone quarries grew ever larger—using dynamite to blast the cliff face itself, rather than mining the natural “talus” that had fallen from the cliffs over the millennia—a public outcry rose against the defacement. Through the efforts of the New Jersey State Federation of Women’s Clubs and others, a twelve-mile section of the Palisades was turned into a unique Interstate Park. The Palisades Interstate Park Commission began acquiring lands here after its creation in 1900; the house was acquired in 1907.
As the Commission set out to create a huge public “playground,” with bathing beaches, picnic areas, campgrounds, marinas, and other facilities, most of the houses along the Palisades, including those at Closter Landing, were torn down. This one was spared because the new park needed it for its police patrol force. The house served in this role, as a police station, until the late 1920s, when a new administration center was built on top of the Palisades.
The house once more escaped the fate of its neighbors, however, this time to become a museum, “The Cornwallis Headquarters” (see side panel). This room reflects the exciting time in the house’s story when it was used as a police station. It also serves as a gallery and as a screening room for our video, A New Deal for the Palisades, featuring restored 16-mm film footage from the 1930s and 40s (please ask your docent for a screening, or if you wish to purchase a copy).
If you wish, you may exit the house from the porch.
7 Porch & North End of HouseThe large porch was built to serve as a grandstand in 1909, when a dedication ceremony attended by the governors of New York and New Jersey was held here, honoring the new Park as part of that year’s “Hudson-Fulton” celebration (the 300th anniversary of Hudson’s journey in 1609 and the centennial, roughly, of Robert Fulton’s steamboat Clermont). The “rusticated” timbers date to the 1930s and were probably added by one of the “New Deal” agencies then working in the Park.
The base of the waterfall just north of the house.
In the early hours of 20 November 1776
1, a British force led by Lieutenant General Lord Charles, Earl of Cornwallis, crossed the Hudson to New Jersey for a surprise attack on the Continental Army at Fort Lee. Between three and five thousand men crossed the river in flatboats to climb the Palisades on a primitive farm road. Washington got word of the invasion before the British reached Fort Lee; the Continental Army then began its famous “Retreat to Victory” across New Jersey.At the time of the Park’s creation, it was widely accepted that Cornwallis had landed his army here at the Closter Dock, and that he had used this house as his “headquarters” during the crossing. More recent research, however, has shown that his forces landed a mile-and-a-half to the south, at what was then called the “New Dock” (later, “Huyler’s Landing”). This research has in turn cast serious doubt on the “headquarters” claim. The “Cornwallis Headquarters” was renamed the “Blackledge-Kearney House,” in the belief that Benjamin Blackledge, an important Bergen County figure in the years after the Revolution, had once lived here.
2Why keep the plaque if it’s wrong?
The plaque remains a vital part of the story of the house. Whether fact or, more likely, folklore, the belief that this house served as Cornwallis’s headquarters was responsible for its preservation in the 1920s, when rather than being razed, it was instead raised—to the curious height of what was claimed to be the nation’s only “historic shrine” dedicated to an enemy general…
1 The date on the plaque on the house is incorrect.
2 This belief, however, has also been called into question by subsequent research: His daughter Maria probably lived here at one point with Daniel Van Sciven; it seems unlikely, however, that Benjamin Blackledge (just as often spelled “Blacklidge” in historic records) ever did.
See also: "On His Lordship's Mysterious Ascent"
May through October
- Weekends
and Holidays, 12 – 5
pm
or by appointment: 201 768-1360 ext. 208
November through April
- Closed
(Kearney House office at Park Headquarters open year-round)
- Closed
Except for the attic, this historic Hudson River
house is yours to explore—nothing is “roped off.” To keep this policy in effect, we must ask the cooperation of all our
visitors:
-
No pets, bicycles, or strollers in the house.
-
No food, drinking, or smoking.
-
Children must be attended by an adult at all times.
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Except where specifically permitted, please do not touch, handle, sit upon, or disturb any artifacts or furniture, and do not open closets or drawers.
- Shoes and shirts must be worn.
Just as the lives of the families who lived in the Kearney House went on beyond its walls, so today the life of this "little" museum includes much more than what you will see in its four small rooms.Museum staff and volunteers also...
Conduct an ongoing inquiry into the rich history of the NJ Palisades, and prepare publications about this ongoing work, including a bimonthly visitor's letter and the NJ Section’s website, njpalisades.org.
Lead tours and innovative educational programs for school and scout groups, both onsite and off.
Develop and present unique off-site lecture programs.
Maintain the NJ Section’s archives—archives that include literally thousands of unique photographic images, charts, maps, and documents.
Develop and maintain the kitchen garden and other onsite educational aids.
Kearney House staff is responsible for the Park's Trail Crew, combining maintenance of our trail system with interpretive programming about the Palisades and their natural and human history.
To find out how you can become a part—or to arrange for a tour or other program for your school or scout group—please ask your docent or call: 201 768-1360 ext. 108.
Kearney House
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