Florham is a former Vanderbilt estate that is located in Madison and Florham Park, New Jersey. It was built during the 1890s for Hamilton McKown Twombly and his wife, Florence Adele Vanderbilt, a member of the Vanderbilt family. Now part of the Florham Campus of Fairleigh Dickinson University, the mansion is one of the ten largest houses in the United States.
Early history
Florham's history can be divided into two parts: the establishment of the estate by the family during the Gilded Age, and the 'consecration' of the estate from a temporal use to an intellectual use as the home of Fairleigh Dickinson University.
Building Florham
Florham was built between 1893 and 1899 by Florence Adele Vanderbilt and her husband, Hamilton McKown Twombly, to be the couple's country estate. Florence, the youngest and favorite grandchild of the transportation tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt, married Twombly in 1877 after meeting him at the two families' summering spots in Newport, Rhode Island.
In 1893, the couple commissioned the famous firm of McKim, Mead & White (the architects of the Old Penn Station and Rhode Island State House) to build Florham as the country setting to raise their family. The architects' instructions were to build "a house on the order of an English country gentleman ... a thoroughly comfortable house, without the stiffness of the modern city house." Beginning in 1891, some 1,200 acres were acquired in 37 purchases to assemble a property on Madison's "millionaire's row", a neighborhood that was home to several other Gilded Age estates belonging to the Rockefellers, Dodges and Mellons.
With 110 rooms, McKim, Mead & White designed what remains today as one of the ten largest houses in the United States. Florham's design was principally inspired by Sir Christopher Wren's late 17th-century expansion of Hampton Court Palace under King William III and Queen Mary II, evident especially in the house's lay-out, pillars, and contrasting stone and red brick. The furnishing of the house's interior, overseen mainly by Stanford White, included several Barberini tapestries, a Louis XV ballroom and several Renaissance fireplaces purchased from noble Italian homes. Another famous New Jerseyian, Thomas Edison, whose initial electrical projects were supported by the joint effort of Twombly and J.P. Morgan, personally designed the mansion's heating system and boiler in a tunnel system beneath the house.
The estate also included vast greenhouses, including an orangery which still stands today as part of Fairleigh Dickinson's library, a dairy farm, stables, gatehouse and carriage house. The celebrated architect of New York's Central Park, Frederick Law Olmsted, was commissioned as the 'landscape architect' of the estate, designing the Italianate gardens that survive today. Olmsted also designed other Vanderbilt estates, including Biltmore. Setting the site of the mansion on a hill overlooking the Passaic Valley and Black Brook meadows, Olmsted told Twombly "You have a sweep of landscape to an infinitely remote and perspectively obscure background ... as much so as if you owned the state of New Jersey."
Between the purchase of the land, the construction of the mansion, greenhouses, stables, and farm, and the furnishing of the mansion, the cost of the entire estate came to about $5,000,000 (a cost of about $146,000,000 in 2017 dollars). McKim Mead and White also brought over 600 laborers and families from Italy to build and later work on the estate — especially as rose cultivators. This community founded the base for Madison's large Italian community.
The family, though often in New York or Newport, spent a majority of its time at Florham and developed a relationship with the local community. The family were all members of Grace Episcopal Church in Madison, which was restored in Florence's memory in 1952. The Grace Episcopal Church Boychoir, well known and admired in the area, sang annually at the estate, when it was treated to a lavish Christmas feast with full wait-staff. Grace Church's Tiffany stained-glass windows, one a memorial to Alice Twombly, a daughter who died in 1896 at age 16, can all be seen today in the lively parish.