"Sketches of Mother at Peacock Point" 1964

Details

Description

[59] pp.

Privately Printed Locust Valley, N.Y.

1964

9 1/4" x 5 1/2"

Paintings by Simon Elwes & Ogden M. … Read more [59] pp.

Privately Printed Locust Valley, N.Y.

1964

9 1/4" x 5 1/2"

Paintings by Simon Elwes & Ogden M. Pleissner

The historic country house estate at Peacock Point rests on a promontory overlooking the Long Island Sound. It is situated on the traditional land of the Matinecock, an Algonquian people whose territory stretched from Flushing Bay to the Nissequogue River, including settlements at present-day Glen Cove and Oyster Bay. The point was first mapped in the 1860s as farmland for the Peacock family. It later became the estate of Charles Otis Gates, President of the Royal Baking Powder Company and Professor of English Literature at Adelphi College. Gates commissioned architectural firm Lamb & Rich to design a Dutch-Jacobean country house and service buildings on the grounds in 1902.

Following Gates’s death, Peacock Point was acquired by Henry Pomeroy Davison Sr. in 1910. He purchased the property using his first bonus check from J.P. Morgan & Company, where he had recently started as a senior partner. Henry, his wife Kate Trubee, and their four children, Frederick (known as Trubee), Henry Jr., Alice, and Frances, spent their summers at Peacock Point and were known to host large gatherings for friends and local families. After the original house burned down in 1913, Henry Sr. initiated an ambitious construction project, hiring the firm of Walker & Gillette to design a new main house and outbuildings in the Georgian Revival-style and commissioning the Olmsted Brothers to reimagine the landscape.

Peacock Point has now served as the home of the Davison family for five generations. While the original main house and its replacement no longer survive, the estate’s remaining buildings preserve the stories of the Davisons and many others who lived and worked there over the course of the last century. See less