Elda: Ossining's Scottish Castle

Since the days of the Dutch to more recent times, Ossining and its neighboring areas has been the site of magnificent homes, estates and other properties that are or once were owned by prominent New Yorkers. Many of these people were attracted to Ossining for the relatively inexpensive cost of land, the commanding views of the Hudson River and the easy commute to nearby to New York City. However, because of reduced personal circumstances, as well as changing tastes and life styles, many of these homes and estates are just memories.

Most have been demolished and replaced by newly built condominiums or other types of housing developments and several are now abandoned ruins. One of the more interesting in the latter category is “Elda”. It was once the home of David Thomas Abercrombie, the founder of the Abercrombie &amp- Fitch Company, and his wife, Lucy Abbott Cate. They married in 1896 and had four children. Elda is actually in the Town of New Castle but, for reasons best known to the US Postal Service, it has an Ossining address

Elda, the name they gave to the estate, is derived from the first letter of the names of each of their four children, in birth order: Elizabeth, Lucy, David and Abbott.

After he retired from business Mr. and Mrs. Abercrombie decided to design and build Elda and ultimately created a massive, multi-level castle-like edifice with a steel skeleton and granite and fieldstone facade. It is not known if they used an architect but the drawings have the name of a company called “Land Clearing Associates” on them. However, there is no doubt that Abercrombie’s experience as an engineer and land surveyor came into play in the placement and construction of Elda. In any event, the house evolved from their ideas, the natural materials on hand, and the steel that came from Mrs. Abercrombie’s father’s iron works in Baltimore. Horace Abbott (July 29, 1806 – August 8, 1887) was an iron manufacturer and banker. His work included the armor plating for the USS Monitor, several other naval ships, and the great iron tension band around the base of the dome of the U.S. Capitol that is still in place.

Work on Elda began in 1925 and was completed two years later. It was first occupied in late January 1928. The house, built on a rocky promontory still stands in the middle of what is now a 22-acre property. The house is principally constructed from the abundant granite and other natural stone found on this land. At that time, the house had some twenty-five rooms including servant’s quarters. There were four sections with intersecting gables as well as a section with a hipped roof. Some areas were not covered at all. The interior walls were made of cement that laid over a rough course of natural stone. The floors are also cement over steel beams and rebar covered by wood flooring and, in some cases, by tiles. Some of the roofs are slate while others are asphalt shingles.

The house has a number of arched and squared doorways and windows, curved stone and iron circular staircases, exposed stone chimneys, and vaulted spaced masonry porches. The arched, squared and rectangular windows are steel casement and are set deeply in the walls in rows or singly. In addition, there are two off-center, clear-glass, oeil-de-bouf (bull’s eye) windows about 18 inches in diameter on the exterior wall of the southern end of the formal living or “great room.” This large space, with exposed wood beams, hanging tapestries, green tile floor and big fireplace, hearkens back to the romanticized ideal of great halls in medieval castles. Two of the larger arched windows in this room open out to small, step-out balconies with elaborate wrought iron balustrades with gates that swing out. The room is 35’ L x 20’ W and the peak of the ceiling is 24’. The floor, built directly on bedrock, was covered with pale grey and black marble ties.

The layout of Elda consists of two stories of living space with three rectangles. There is one with a gabled roof running east-west, with a square tower sitting behind it, rising above the gable roof. Another rectangular wing extends to the north with a north-south gable roof and another rectangular wing extends south with a north-south gable roof. There is an open court yard or patio area that was intended, in part, to look like a ruin and in that section the windows are cut into the wall but not glazed. Other features include an open patio with a fireplace and cast iron spiral staircases leading to the upper reaches of the tower.

There is some speculation that the now-open area where the dining room was resulted from an explosion at the building in the early 1940s but as yet no documentation for this event has been found. There is a covered patio with a hipped roof with supporting stone arches reminiscent of the other gothic architectural elements of the building. Tiles with whimsical heraldic and other images decorate its walls, fireplace chimney, and several small cast iron ducks line the metal railing of granite steps leading up to the southeast entrance to the house. Intentionally or not, the building seems to reflect Abercrombie’s ancestral Scottish roots since Elda in many respects appears to be a typical tower house of medieval Scotland. For instance, Elda has an overhanging, wall-mounted battlement structure projecting from one corner of the building. These “guerites” or “bartizans” were common features on the walls of medieval fortifications from the early 14th century up to the 16th century.

The main entrance of the house is on the west side and is accessed by a flight of curving stone steps that lead into a glass-enclosed vestibule that also served as a conservatory for Mrs. Abercrombie’s plants. Beyond this vestibule is the “great hall” alluded to earlier. It once had bookcases with leaded glass doors and other furnishings that came from Abbottston, Lucy Abbott Cate’s ancestral home in Baltimore. The first floor included an office, kitchen, a now-gone dining room with a fire place, a butler’s pantry, two small bathrooms, and five bedrooms for the servants. Below the house at ground level was a basement that was entered by a doorway on the east side of the house. It contained the boiler room, a laundry room and a three-car garage. Upstairs on the second floor were four family bedrooms, an enclosed sleeping porch, a small living room with a dumbwaiter, four guest rooms and four bathrooms.

There were some additional rooms in the tower section of the building. One of these was the Gun Room where Mr. Abercrombie kept his fabulous collection of antique and special hunting rifles. A door in this room led outside to a set of iron steps that took one to the top of the tower with views of the Hudson River and the Maryknoll Seminary. The tower also held a ten thousand gallon water tank with a pump in the basement that lifted water from springs on the property and distributed it to the rest of the house by gravity.

On August 29, 1937, David Thomas Abercrombie died after a long bout with rheumatic fever at age 64. He was buried at Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore, MD. A simple U.S. government-issued headstone marks his grave. Also inscribed on this tombstone is his wife, Lucy Abbott Cate Abercrombie, who is buried with him. She died on June 3, 1955.

After Mr. Abercrombie died, Elda was unoccupied for several years until it was sold in the early 1940s to a firm doing research on paints. After WWII the building remained empty for more than a decade and became the target of vandals. In 1964, James Harrick, President of Harrick Scientific Company based in the Village of Ossining, purchased Elda for $15,000 and began to rehabilitate it. Mr. Harrick’s ultimately failed attempt to restore the house to its former glory was a costly and frustrating experience and after he died in the late 1990s, his estate sold the property to Corliss Lamont, Ph.D. and his wife, Beth, for $1.510 million in 2001. Dr. Lamont was the scion of J. P. Morgan chair, Thomas W. Lamont, but the young man rejected his capitalist origins and began an academic career as a socialist philosopher and radical dissenter. After he died in 1995, Mrs. Lamont became the owner and she tried to make a go of it by turning the place into a conference and retreat center called “Half Moon Foundation Castle.” This was not a financial success and late in 2011 she sold it to an investment group called the Morgan Immovable Trust for a reported $3.75 million. As of January 2012, Elda remains empty. It is not known what the new owners intend to do with it.