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As you drive through Wayne, with its residential neighborhoods, corporate headquarters, and shopping malls, it’s difficult to imagine life at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the area mainly consisted of working farms and country estates.
For the people of Paterson, the hills above the city offered peace and quiet, a mountain retreat with forests of towering pines, long sweeping meadows, running brooks, and views of the distant New York City skyline.
Since 1951, William Paterson University has been situated on one such estate. Called Ailsa Farms, the property was owned by the family of Garret Hobart, the twenty-fourth vice president of the United States who served under William McKinley. Its stately 40-room mansion, nestled in a hollow at the southeastern end of the estate, served as the setting for numerous holiday parties and important social events, a place where dignitaries and prominent business people of the time gathered. (Full story>)
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Haunted legends, ghostly sightings, and unexplained events have been associated with Hobart Manor for many decades.
Who are the ghosts? Some speculate one spirit is Mary, a servant or cleaning person who once occupied the castle-like mansion. Others say they have seen the ghost of an old woman resembling its former owner, Jennie, wife of Vice President Garret A. Hobart. Over the years, many have reported hearing footsteps, the sounds of a baby crying, or actually seeing an old woman in a long dress or a mysterious cloaked man in a top hat and cape. (Full story>)
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For the children of the Hobart family, life at Ailsa Farms in the early years of this century must have been near idyllic. From the first Christmas in 1902, shortly after Jennie Hobart, the family matriarch and widow of Garret A. Hobart, 24th vice president of the United States, purchased the property, the house worked its magic on the family.
The house on the hill in the country was a weekend retreat from their spacious, elegant city residence, Carroll Hall. It was to Ailsa Farms that the young children in the family were taken to escape the heat of the city during the summer. Loaded into horse-drawn carriages and accompanied by their nurses, these young children, by the end of World War I, had a wonderful house to explore and spacious grounds on which to play. (Full story>) |
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