Mendham Township was yet to be delineated in the early 18th century. Explorers visited and liked what they saw. There were expansive fields that the Native Americans had been farming for thousands of years. Chestnut trees were abundant, along with many other native species. The forests and streams promised abundant hunting and fishing. Iron rocks containing an ore well suited to blacksmithing littered the ground. These rocks were called Succasunna or black rocks by the Native Americans. Henry Axtell and his wife, Jemima Leonard, were married in 1737 at Bristol in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Jemima was soon pregnant. Henry born in 1715 and his father-in-law, Benjamin Leornard, were blacksmiths. The family probably chafed under Puritan rule, even though Henry’s father was a church deacon. They thought about moving. People moved at this period from colony to colony hoping for better social and economic opportunity. Deacon Axtell himself had moved from North Carolina to the Bay Colony after marrying into a prominent Bay family, the Pratts.
The proprietors of New Jersey needed settlers and promised freedom of religion, which would have been quite a change for the Axtell family. In 1738 Henry and father-in-law traveled to the Morristown area in Jersey, which was still called New Hanover, Hunterdon County, (Morris County would be carved from Hunterdon in 1739). The Native Americans had mostly moved out of the area on their own to the Pennsylvania Proprietorship.
Henry and Benjamin found suitable land by following an ancient Native American trail (later Washington Turnpike and much later Mendham Road) to the west of Morristown. They acquired thirty seven acres in future Mendham. This land stretched from this trail to another trail (later Mountain Road in 1910 and later Main Street) which followed the course of the Whippany River. The two men moved onto the property and spent 1738-39 building a home for Henry’s family.
The 1,800 square foot home was built closer to the Whippany River and were among the first New England families to settle in Mendham. The Drake family were their neighbors and mentioned the Axtell property in a mortgage document. They next built a blacksmith on the Indian trail. When the house was done, Jemima arrived with their new baby, Henry.
The original home structure was a small cottage on a knoll at right angle to another Native American path (now called Cherry Lane). It faced south toward the sun in order to capture maximum solar heat during the winter, a typical practice of the period. While this structure is cited, architecturally, as an East Jersey Cottage, the Axtell’s knowledge of construction came from their experiences in the Bay Colony.
The house was sided with locally hewn chestnut clapboard. The original clapboard is still on the house. The roof shingles were locally split chestnut shingles. Early East Jersey cottages had no exterior decoration. Doors and multi-pane windows were relatively small in relation to wall areas, reflecting the builder’s emphasis on utility and heat conservation in the winter. Few settlers could afford paint, so the exterior walls were typically weathered gray. The foundation was built from stones collected from a nearby creek.
Local chestnut wood was used in the construction. Chestnut logs were fashioned into timbers to be joined with pegs and laid out in the ground marking the ends with matching Roman numerals to aid in assembly.
The interior walls would have been lathe and plaster with available materials used for insulation. During this period, carpenters who assisted Axtell and his father-in-law would have been paid based on the amount of material used and stuffed many of the walls with chestnut planks. In other walls, they used a more typical homemade insulation called noggin, which was a mixture of bricks, small stones, straw, and mud packed into the walls. The original wood beams, floors and doors of wide plank have remained unchanged.
The first floor was the keeping room, dominated by a large brick and stone fireplace on one side which tied into the stone foundation and a massive root cellar in the basement. Both side walls of the fireplace had a notch so that a long pole could be set between them to hang pots for cooking (note that the swing arm was invented in 1740 which replaced this earlier design, making it easier to swing the pot away from the fire). Within the fireplace there was a separate bread oven. This extended to outside the house, within a beehive, or dome-shaped, structure.
The second floor was used for sleeping. The family hung privacy sheets to separate sleeping areas, which were added as the family increased in size. The attic space may have also been used for bedrooms.
Henry had nine children with Jemina. He died in 1754 at thirty-eight. Ebenezer Byram was one of his executors.
Henry and Jemima’s first son, Henry, was born in 1738 shortly before the family moved to Mendham. He grew to be a large man for his time, with a booming voice. He continued to farm the property. With an engaging personality, he was known for his sense of humor. When his marriage to Mary Beach in 1760 ended tragically, leaving him with three small children, he asked Phebe Condit Day to marry him and be a mother to them. She admitted to loving him, but told Henry that she could not take on the responsibility of being the stepmother to his children. Henry is reported to have responded as he rose to go. “Well, if that is all your objection I will go right home and kill the young ones.” Phebe relented. They were well matched and married in 1767, having two children together. They spent the next fifty years in Mendham, until his death in 1818.
He was well respected by his neighbors and joined the local Minute Men. He rose through ranks until he was the Major during the Revolution. He was friends with Colonel Jacob Ford, his commanding Officer. Major Henry Axtell spent time with George Washington during the General’s frequent stays in Morristown. Surely Washington dined at Major Axtell’s home on his mother Jemima’s cooking. She would live to be eighty-nine, dying in 1807. Washington probably leveraged the Major’s popularity as he cajoled local pacifist farmers to sell food to his troops.
This part of New Jersey was critical, owing to the Revolutionary War effort because of its location behind the Watchung Mountains (Blue Hills), which were a natural barrier to any British incursions from New York City. The location is the reason that Morristown became Washington’s most reliable military capital. The Minute Men from this strong position were ready to respond to British movements, as they did at Springfield.
Major Axtell also enforced the seizure of Tory lands in the area. His youngest brother, Silas, would purchase an additional one hundred ten acres during this time which were added to the Axtell farm. Silas was a successful carpenter and farmer and built a second home, which eventually became the Woodhull Farm until it was lost due to a tax sale during the 1930’s Depression to the Pitney Family.
Major Axtell’s son, Henry, was born in 1773. He attended Princeton College, earning a Doctorate in Theology, and opened the first school in Mendham near the Hilltop Presbyterian Church. He would later move to Geneva in New York State, founding Hobart College. All three of Dr. Axtell’s sons, Daniel, Henry and Charles, became Presbyterian ministers.
Samuel Loree Axtell sold the family home and forty-one acres to J. C. Corwin in 1810 for $600. The family would have moved to the second residence. It was sold again in 1814 for $1,100. At this time, or later, a member of the Axtell Family repurchased the property.
1853 Map shows C. Thompson as the owner
During the middle of the 19th Century, the Axtell family excavated and built a secret room in the basement lined with brick and a false wall of stone, for the purpose of hiding runaway slaves. The family were strong abolitionists and Dr. Axtell wrote about their commitment to the cause.
About the same time another neighbor on Mountain Road (later West Main Street in Brookside) built an unground room lined with brick and an arched ceiling off his basement. The Mountain Road hiding room still existed into the 1990’s, until it became part of a septic upgrade. That secret room may have been designed as a root cellar for storage and later repurposed for hiding runaway slaves. It was rumored that the two secret rooms were even part of an actual tunnel between the houses, but the distance between the two and the intervening stream makes this unlikely.
The Axtell hiding room existed until 1987 when it became a part of an expansion project to the house. The owner of the property at that time rescued the bricks from the collapsed Underground Railroad room and used them to create a courtyard.
Overtime, the Axtells added a lean-to for the cooking area to be moved from the original “keeping room,” or hearth, to a more convenient place, another typical practice of the period. Exterior buildings such as sheds and barns to support the farming and blacksmithing would been constructed as well. The Axtells constructed a carriage house nearby and had a number of farm-related utility buildings throughout the farm.
Axtell house, early 20th c., evidence of electrical box
The Axtell family prospered in Mendham Township and the surrounding communities in Morris County, growing to over 220 relatives by 1900. In each generation, the family patriarch Henry (the custom of the period was to name the firstborn son after the father) was heavily involved in community affairs.
At the start of the 20th Century, Mendham Township was still isolated because of poorly maintained roads, but was served by a narrow-gauge rail line called the Rockaway Valley Railroad, commonly called the Rock-A-Bye Railroad, which connected Mendham to Morristown with several stations. The railroad would fail within the next ten years. The Model T, the farmer’s car, was in development and would begin to revolutionize travel and transportation in the first quarter of the 20th Century.
The non-farm residents of Mendham Township were mostly clustered in the central part of the Township. These residents had experienced two major fires and had been complaining that their wells were drying up. A plan was developed for Mendham to build a reservoir to catch, hold, and release water as needed. They secured the commitment of the Pitney family to donate land in the northern part of Mendham for this project. The Mendham farmers, with their large fields, had no issue with water and objected to any project that would need their funding. Henry Axtell was among the objecting farmers. Under existing New Jersey law building a reservoir would require Mendham to issue bonds, which would be repaid from taxing the entire community.
After several years of heated argument, the leaders in Mendham finally agreed to split the township between Mendham Township for the farmers and the new Mendham Borough for the centrally located non-farmers. This occurred on May 15, 1906. Of course, the eventual reservoir was built in the Township hills which surrounded the Borough to the northwest.
Henry Axtell remained unsettled by this spilt and the rancor of the debate pitting neighbor against neighbor. He felt that he and his family had lost their connection to the community due to his Solomon-like victory as head of the farmers which ended with the Township split. Bitterness to and from other residents remained.
He convinced many of his relatives to move with him west to build a new life near Shaker Heights, Ohio around 1907. By this time, the Axtell family was already spread across America. The extended family prospered in many different regions, with commercial, educational, and political success. One of Silas Axtell’s grandsons, Samuel Beach Axtell, was twice a member of Congress, served as Territorial Governor of both Utah and New Mexico, and Chief Superior Court Judge for the New Mexico Territory. Another of Silas’s grandsons, Charles F. Axtell was twice member of the New Jersey Legislature.
When he moved in 1907, Henry Axtell sold his property to William A. Ward who owned a wagon repair shop in Brookside. Eventually, Benjamin Natkins, a local businessman and entrepreneur, and his wife, Leonora bought the property. Natkins, who grew up in the Brookside section of the Township, had a vision to remake industrial Brookside into a New England village. He made a substantial impact on the community as he removed dilapidated commercial structures, such as mills, and also by remodeling and even building new homes. His death in 1929 at the start of the Depression ended his plan.
The Axtell property was one of his renovation projects. Natkins eventually sold the property to members of the Hazard family, Margaret Kellogg Hazard, Abigail Kellogg Hazard, and Sallie Radon Hazard, in 1926. Since Morristown Memorial Hospital at this time valued goat’s milk for their patients, the Hazards converted the property into a goat farm to supply that need. Since that time the farmhouse on the hill has been known as “Goat Hill.” They operated the goat farm until 1955, when the remaining sisters, Margaret and Abigail were in their eighties. They sold the property in 1960.
By the 1960s most of the 149 acres were gone, leaving a large building lot on the corner of Cherry Lane and Butternut Drive. The property underwent numerous changes and expansions overtime, but the original 1,800 square foot farmhouse still remains. It serves as a physical reminder of Colonial New Jersey.
Contemporary view, Coldwell Banker photo, courtesy of Sam & Linda Fairchild
Sam Tolley September 2024
References:
Sam Fairchild
Thomas Timpson
Mendham Township Historic Preservation Committee
Wikipedia
Wikitree
National Register of Historic Places, Brookside, NJ
https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/GetAsset/78d1e543-4bb2-4b7a-8870-40b7fa96bdb4
Axtell, S. B., “Mendham Township,” The History of Morris County. New Jersey.
1739-1882. New York, NY: W. W. Munsell & Co., 1882.
Morris County Online Property Records Search
http://mcclerksng.co.morris.nj.us/publicsearch/
Map of Morris County New Jersey from Original Surveys by J. Lightfoot and Sam Geil,
J. B. Shields Publisher, 1853.
Tours of Historic Morris County, compiled by Morris County Historical Society, 1977