Location: 26 Madison Avenue, Garnerville

Owners: The Masiello Family

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This site is a privately owned home.

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John Suffern and his family left Antrim, Ireland, and eventually settled at the foot of the Ramapo Mountains in 1773. During the American Revolution, his home and tavern, on a dirt road now known as Lafayette Avenue in Suffern, hosted generals and other luminaries who stopped along the region’s two main roads. At the end of the war, Suffern increased his landholdings to encompass several hundred acres, including a large tract in the Cheesecock Patent originally owned by John Jay, August Van Cortland, and John W. Livingston. That tract contained the property on which this house stands.

 

In 1797, John sold 157 acres to his son Andrew. The early Rockland historian David Cole notes that Andrew “exchanged the tract with his brother for land at Ramapo.” On the land, Andrew’s brothers George and John I. Suffern built a rolling mill and a nail factory near the Minisceongo Creek. In the 1870s, tracks for the NJ&NY Railroad were laid between the house and the creek.

The Suffern House appears to be two late eigh-teenth-century houses and a nineteenth-century outbuilding joined together to create a 3,915 square foot dwelling. Evidence in the cellars and attics support this theory, but it is unclear when the physical combination occurred. Each house has a chimney (one with a chalk mark of 1791), and there is evidence of a beehive oven. The large great room and porch were added in the early twentieth century.

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In 1826, the Sufferns sold the 130 acre tract, with two dwellings, a dozen or so outbuildings, a sawmill, and a rolling and slitting mill, to Mr. Fay (an attorney), Jacob Peterson, George Houston of New York, and Robert L. Jennings of Philadelphia for $18,000—$6,000 in cash and the balance by mortgage. With 80 other people, including women and children, they founded a utopian community inspired by the preaching of the Welsh socialist Robert Owen, who had come to America in 1824 to deliver lectures on communism. The group took the name “Haverstraw Community” (although some records indicate that it was named for Benjamin Franklin) and aimed “to better the condition of themselves and their fellow men, which they believed could be done by living in community, having all things in common, [and] giving equal rights to each.” Unfortunately, the community collapsed after only five months, possibly due to dishonesty and bad management.

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The land, which had been mortgaged to John I. Suffern, came back into his possession. It then passed to his son George Washington Suffern. Two generations of the Goodwin family lived in the home in the twentieth century; Robert Masiello purchased the house from the Goodwins in the late 1990s. Since then, he  has been renovating the structure. In this process, he has learned that each of the two dwellings had a chimney with fieldstone packed in mud for the foundation; many of the original beams (now exposed) are hewn by hand from locust trees; the post-and-beam construction includes hand markings of roman numerals, which appear to be a coding method of matching mortises and tenons; and the original insulation between the posts consisted of mud, straw. and horse hair. All of the exterior walls are in place, and the structure is in its original orientation, facing east and overlooking the Hudson River.