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Community Corner

Mansion in May Joins Historic Line

Castle is being readied for this year's Mansion in May

As the annual Mansion in May fundraiser approaches, the rooms are being prepared and members of the Women’s Association of Morristown Medical Center are busy getting the word out.

Glynallyn, an historic castle in Convent Station, built between 1913 and 1917 joins a distinguished list of former show houses.

The castle was named to the National Register of Historic Places in 1987. It is 32,000 square feet. There are 575 stained or painted glass windows reflecting many eras of history and some quite whimsical subjects. There are 16 chimneys, no two of which are identical.

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Glynallyn joins a long list of historic houses that were transformed by interior designers into the Mansion in May.

One of the oldest was the 18th Century farmhouse on the 61–acre Ross Family Farm. Bilt on Elias Boudinot, it was bought by Henry Southard in 1785 and by Edmund Ross in 1952 and is now part of the Somerset County Park Commission. It was the 2006 Mansion.

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One of the newer houses is Knox Hill, the 1999 Mansion, built in 1932 by Frank H. Spencer and named for Gen. Henry Knox. It is still privately owned.

More familiar than most of the mansions was the 1994 choice, the former Bayley-Ellard High School.

Part of the George Danforth Estate, it was built in the romantic Gothic revival style between 1872 and 1873. It was sold to Hamilton McKay Twombly. In 1897, Twombly sold it to Frederick Bell who expanded the house and built the familiar wall along Madison Avenue. In 1906, the estate was purchased by Adolphe deBary. Only six years later the original house burned and Leland Ross bought the property and built the existing house in 1921. The mansion has 35 rooms and 11 baths. It became Bayley-Ellard in 1948. The school closed in 2005 and the property is now St. Paul’s Inside the Walls, a religious education center.

The WAMMC is always looking for volunteers to help with the Mansion in May. For more information, go to www.mansioninmay.org.

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