Manor listed for $1.385M steeped in history
A red brick Colonial Revival in northern Newark’s Forest Hill community might be the Kevin Bacon of North Jersey homes.
The three-story manor boasts a family tree begging to play six degrees of separation. Listed this month for $1.385 million by Frances Egan of Weichert Realtors, 480 Parker St. has ties to early French Huguenot settlers who became some of the area’s largest landowners, New York City trade merchants who were close with one of the Founding Fathers, and a British officer who was taken prisoner during the American Revolution.
The home was built circa 1920 for Mary Amelia Wilde Campbell, a philanthropist and sister of Jennie Wilde Pilch, a state legislator in the late 1930s. A Bloomfield High School graduate who studied violin with New York Symphony Orchestra veteran Otto K. Schill, Pilch was the first woman to be appointed to the Legislature’s Special Joint Conference Committee and the first chair of the Committee on Housing.
The sisters were the daughters of Samuel Wilde Jr., a singer, choir master and Civil War soldier born in England and taken prisoner at the Battle of Fredericksburg, and Harriet Amelia Cadmus, who helped organize Christ Episcopal Church in Bloomfield and St. Paul’s Church in East Orange. Cadmus was a descendant of Thomas Fredericksen De Cuyper Cadmus, the Hollandborn magistrate of Bergen County in the 1670s, and Henry Cadmus, a private in the Essex County militia during the American Revolution.
At one point, the sisters’ ancestors owned modern-day Nutley, Bloomfield and Belleville.
“[Their] maternal ancestors were among the earliest settlers of Manhattan Island, Albany, New England and Long Island, most of them arriving between the years 1623 and 1649; many of them holding high positions in the Dutch settlements,” according to 1945’s “Prominent Families of New Jersey,” edited by William Starr Myers. “Several became early patentees of New Jersey, where they later settled and became … deeply interested in the first Dutch Churches at Bergen, Belleville, Passaic and Hackensack.”
While Mary Amelia Wilde Campbell’s ancestors battled under Gen. George Washington, her husband, Thomas Pearsall Campbell, was among the last descendants of Major Patrick Campbell. Descended from the builders of Barcaldine Castle in Scotland, Campbell came to North America to participate in a series of British campaigns from 1776 to 1779. That November, he was captured aboard a sloop sailing to New York and held prisoner in Rhode Island, according to an account kept by the National Archives.
From there, Campbell wrote to Washington, claiming he was bound for New York from Georgia to recuperate from his “valetudinary state of health” and requesting his “immediate exchange.” Washington replied from Morristown saying he would be happy to trade and ultimately exchanged Campbell for an American officer in 1780, according to records kept by the National Archives. Rather than return to the British Isles, Campbell on Jan. 1, 1781, married Sarah Pearsall, the descendent of Loyalist Quakers from New York City.
The Campbell and Pearsall families were tied through marriage and Loyalist views with a third family, the Bayards. Also related to the Schuyler and Van Cortlandt families, the Bayards in the early 1700s were among the region’s largest landholders. Though disrupted if not displaced during the Revolution, many members of the family returned following the war.
Thomas Pearsall Campbell’s other grandfather, New York City banker William Bayard Jr., never left the area. After the war, Bayard helped found Bayard, LeRoy and McEvers. An importer and exporter based in New York City, the firm shifted goods among New York City, England, the Caribbean and South America, managed farmland and traded in property. Eventually becoming a member of The Society of the New York Hospital and a close friend of Alexander Hamilton’s, Bayard brought Hamilton to his Greenwich Village boarding house after the ultimately fatal duel with Aaron Burr in a failed attempt to secure lifesaving aide.
Hamilton was buried in the churchyard outside of Trinity Church on Wall Street in Manhattan, according to church records. The churchyard also holds Bayard’s grave and the old Bayard family vault where Thomas Pearsall Campbell was interred in 1906, a year after he paid off the mortgage for St. Paul’s Church. His wife, a regular donor to St. Barnabas Hospital, lived for nearly 49 more years. Roughly 35 were spent at 480 Parker St.
The custom 15-room home she had built more than a decade after her husband’s death covers about 5,700 square feet. It sits less than two blocks from Branch Brook Park amid the neighborhood with the most tree cover in the city, aptly named Forest Hill. Inside are eight bedrooms, five bathrooms and plenty of history.
Included on the National Register of Historic Places as part of the Forest Hill Historic District, 480 Parker St. features Tiffany light fixtures, a veranda overlooking its landscaped grounds and a large butler’s pantry off the kitchen. There is original woodwork and hardwood floors, limestone sills and keystones and marble fireplace surrounds.
Maintained by only two families since its construction, according to Egan, the home was also once the residence of Maria Theresa Braga, the former assistant director of the Newark Public Library, and her husband Antonio S. Braga, the former assistant director of the Portuguese Trade Commission in New York City.