by Shannon Butler
For those of you who missed our recent program on historic houses of the Hudson Valley: fear not! You can find it on our YouTube page, along with many of our other programs and documentaries. For this week’s local history blog, we will discuss one of the houses from the talk that has been lost to history. When we first came across this unmarked photograph in our collection, we didn’t think that it was from Poughkeepsie at all. It looked like something out of an English countryside. But as it turns out, this house once stood alongside the other great and unique houses that line Academy Street.
This estate started out as the home of New York Supreme Court Justice Joseph F. Barnard. Joseph was born in 1823 on a farm just north of Poughkeepsie. His father had been a whaler in Nantucket, but came to the Hudson Valley in the early 1800s. By 1836, his father sold the farm and moved the family into the City of Poughkeepsie, where they lived at #47 Cannon Street. Joseph prepared for college at the Dutchess County Academy and went on to graduate from Yale in 1841. He was admitted to the bar in 1845. Later, he married Emily Hasbrouck from Kingston, NY. By 1863, he had been elected Justice of the Supreme Court for this District, a job which he would continue until 1893, retiring only because of his age. He died in his home in 1904.
We don’t know much about the original house itself, only that Barnard built a brick mansion in 1861. So what we see in the only photograph of the home is actually the work of architects Jackson and Rosencrans who were hired by the third owner, Mr. Arthur G. Smith. Smith was the President of Smith Brothers Cough Drops here in Poughkeepsie. He must have noticed the work that Jackson and Rosencrans were doing on the new YMCA building on Market Street in 1908. He then hired them in 1909 to do a major overhaul of the old mansion. The addition included a large sun parlor on the second floor, a large billiard room in the basement, eight bathrooms, and a vacuum cleaning system, which meant that each room could be cleaned by merely attaching a hose to an outlet in the wall. All of these renovations ended up costing over $30,000! The Smith family called this place home for over 20 years. They hosted weddings, grand parties, and musical performances here. Mrs. Smith died in the house in 1933 and Mr. Smith died here in 1936.
After the Smiths, the house was purchased by Mr. George Martin and his wife Natalie Martin. But unlike the blissful marriages of the Barnards and the Smiths, this one was not so happy. George Martin, who was the executive of a stuffed poultry firm, had an affair – a very public affair – with a school secretary, Mrs. Leona Leggett. So in 1955, everyone involved in the scandal went over to Reno, NV. Once there, Mrs. Leggett divorced her husband to be with Mr. Martin, and Mrs. Martin divorced her husband and got the lovely house on Academy Street! (Who needs a man when you can have a mansion?) However, as the newspaper reports would show, she also didn’t like the fact that her ex-husband was still hanging around Poughkeepsie. So in 1957, she tried to get the court to deny George the rights to live within the city limits. For obvious reasons, that didn’t work out too well for her. Years later, in 1964, she was found dead in an upstairs bathroom and later, her possessions were auctioned off. The property was purchased by Eden Park nursing home in the early 1970s for $150,000 and the house was quickly torn down.
Today, all that remains is the fence that once stood around the house and memories of those who once saw it, like Antonia Mauro, a commissioner with the City of Poughkeepsie Historic Districts & Landmarks Preservation Commission. Mauro said that, “A Saturday visit to a friend’s family home, a Queen Anne Victorian on Academy Street, resulted in a group of kids exploring this incredible property.” She went on to say, “I was overwhelmed. Mouth open. Eyes wide. It was simply magnificent. I still see the mirrored ballroom and grand staircase.” She concluded that, even after so many years, “I still mourn its demolition. That’s not overly dramatic either. This mansion was a visual delight with the ability to inspire and, had it been spared, it would have augmented our continuous uphill effort to transform the way we treat our architectural heritage in Poughkeepsie. Our historic architecture is not disposable.”
Resources:
Thank you to Antonia Mauro for sharing her memories about this long lost house.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/183192106/joseph-folger-barnard
Poughkeepsie Eagle News: 16 Dec. 1909
Poughkeepsie Journal: 17 Sep. 1943, 26 Aug 1956, 21 Mar. 1957, 13 Jul. 1968
Images:
01 – Beers Map from 1891 showing the location of the Barnard House – LH Collections
02 – Photo of the house after its 1909 alterations – LH Collections
03 – Photo from the Poughkeepsie Journal, 20 Apr. 1947
04 – Clipping from the Poughkeepsie Journal, 21 Mar. 1957
