Stony Brook Manor was the model for what a suburb should be
The exact moment in history when Pennington went from an agricultural town to a commuter suburb is easy to spot. And sometimes, historical records are of stone and brick and wood, not paper and ink.
David and Mary Clare Garber are selling the towering, turreted 1895 Queen Anne house they have called home for the last 12 years. They are only the seventh owners of Stony Brook Manor, the Delaware Avenue home built by Col. John Kunkel, Pennington’s first developer.
The house is more than just a fancy building. The construction of Kunkel’s home marked the point in history when Pennington went from a rural community to a suburban one, said Hopewell Valley Historical Society member David Blackwell.
Kunkel served in the Civil War and, legend has it, was a member of Abe Lincoln’s bodyguard as he traveled to his first inauguration. He moved to New York City after the war, where he became a successful food merchant. At one point, he supplied the Big Apple with $ 5 million one year in eggs alone, Blackwell said. When Kunkel moved to Pennington in 1894, he found the town a sleepy rural backwater. Most people had fenced-in yards with barns and farm animals. But Kunkel had a different vision for the town, Blackwell said. With the rail line, it was possible to live in Pennington and earn money by working in New York City like Kunkel was. Pennington could be a community of suburban homes rather than a farming village.
Blackwell said Kunkel bought two large farms and became one of the biggest landowners in town. He built his home, Stony Brook Lodge, in the fashionable Queen Anne style. Instantly the grandest building in town when it was constructed, the home was and continues to be a center for social events. Garber said the house appears to have been built with that purpose in mind. On the ground floor, visitors are welcomed by a grand foyer with its own fireplace. The four large rooms on the ground floor can each be sealed off by heavy pocket doors. The second floor holds the home’s five bedrooms. The third floor, Garber said, encompasses a spacious open room that once held potbellied stoves and which the Garbers used as a rec room for their two sons, with a karaoke machine and pool table.
“Col. Kunkel entertained his guests there after dinner,” she said. “They would dance and have a good time up there. There was a dumbwaiter all the way up from the basement, where coal was kept, to fuel the potbellied stoves.”
According to Garber and Blackwell, Kunkel would sit on the porch every Christmas and hand out clementines to all the local children who came by.
David, 52 and Mary Clare, 51, who own the company Princeton Legal Search, a legal headhunting firm, also have entertained extensively. Garber said that in 2012, they hosted 300 people for an Obama fundraiser. They also regularly host parties for Congressman Rush Holt, an annual staff appreciation dinner for Toll Gate Grammar School and bonfires for their son’s swim team. Garber said the wraparound porch is the headquarters for a group of men called the “book club” that plays basketball at next-door St. James Catholic Church and retires afterwards to discuss “books” (drink beer and have a laugh.)
“Everything about the house is conductive to living a wonderful lifestyle,” she said.
The interesting architecture and historic past of the house led to the home being featured as the Wall Street Journal’s “house of the day” in February.
Stony Brook Lodge was not the only house that Kunkel built in Pennington. Years later, he built the Victorian home next door for his niece. He also had homes built on Eglantine Avenue, Park Avenue and King George Road. He re-named his farms “Empire” and “Keystone” after his two home states, developed half of one of them and used the rest of the land for farming, including some experimental agriculture.
His effect on the town reached beyond his own property. Huge changes swept over Pennington in Kunkel’s day.
“Pennington was a town of tradesmen and retired farmers,” Blackwell said. “Everybody had a barn behind their building. The properties in town were used for small-scale agriculture. Kunkel’s vision was that this place was going to be an important suburb. He did cause a lot of the old ratty board fences to come down, and had the town’s colonial-era hotel torn down. He worked to improve the town according to what his vision was. He participated in getting the first paved road into the town. All the modern amenities came at that time: electricity, telephones, etc.”
Stately Victorian homes went up all over town, many of which stand to this day.
“My feeling is that Stony Brook Lodge was as much a developer’s model house as anything,” Blackwell said.
The town’s second major developer, William Howe, arrived in 1910. Kunkel died in 1920. The house was passed along to a series of owners, twice being sold to relatives for $1. In 2001, Garber jumped at the chance to buy the house. Though she was born in New York City, Garber has lived in Pennington for 18 years and had been in the home twice before. Now, she said, her youngest son has been accepted to Christian Brothers Academy in Red Bank, so the whole family is moving to that area. She said she will miss living in her historic mansion.
“It’s been heaven,” she said. “If you enjoy history and architecture and storytelling and beauty, it is just a gift to have been able to live there as long as we did.”
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