Shortly after his marriage to Alice Morton (1879–1917) in February 1902, Winthrop Rutherfurd (1862–1944) commissioned his close friend, renowned New York architect Whitney Warren, to design a summer cottage, Rutherfurd House. The result was an 18,000-square-foot Tudor-style mansion, a distinguished example of the Country Place era (1890–1930).
For its formal landscape design, the Rutherfurds enlisted the premier landscape architects of the time, the Olmsted brothers. These country retreats, set in areas of great natural beauty, provided prominent Americans an escape from the noise and pollution of urban centers. The Rutherfurds built their summer estate on land of exceptional beauty that had been in their family for generations.
The Rutherfurd presence in this part of New Jersey dates to the mid-18th century, beginning with Walter Rutherfurd, a Scottish officer who arrived to fight in the French and Indian War and, in 1758, married Catherine Alexander Parker. Over generations, the family expanded its country estate.
By 1906, Winthrop Rutherfurd’s Allamuchy Farms and his brother Rutherfurd Stuyvesant’s neighboring Tranquillity Farms spanned more than 6,000 acres across Sussex and Warren counties. The estates hosted titans of industry, a U.S. president, a former vice president, and European royalty.
Following Winthrop Rutherfurd’s death in 1944 and that of his second wife, Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, in 1948, the remaining estate was sold in 1950 to the Congregation of the Daughters of Divine Charity, which maintained the property until 2005.
Today, it is owned by the Allamuchy Township Board of Education and is listed on both the National Register of Historic Places and the New Jersey Register of Historic Places.
