Melrose Hall -- Brooklyn History

Read Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 of this story.

“Vlacktebos” or Flatbush, as it’s called in English, was settled by the Dutch back in the mid-1600s. As any good student of New York City history will tell you, the Dutch lost Vlacktebos and the rest of New Amsterdam to the British after a sea war ending in 1664.

The commander of the British naval forces was the Duke of York, and that’s why we are now in New York. Flatbush continued to be an agrarian Dutch community well into the 1850s, but by the mid-1700s, English settlers had begun to establish farms and estates, as well.

One of them was a man named Lane, an Englishman who established his manor house and farm on fifty acres of what is now the area around Bedford Avenue, between Winthrop Street and Clarkson Avenue.

He built a three story house at the end of a long road, isolated and secluded from the rest of the farms that were slowly growing around him. There he had slaves to tend the farm and take care of the house.

The house was a rambling affair, with lots of extensions with gables and varying rooflines, and additions that had no rhyme or reason. There, he lived in luxury, in an English-style manor with a ballroom, library and other spacious rooms, with oak paneling, gilded cornices, and a long elegant foyer that led to a massive center hall.

The fireplace in the hall was said to have been big enough to roast an ox, with a large mahogany stairway in the middle and a wing with a banqueting hall and the ballroom to the right. Outside of the house were formal gardens and terraces. But unbeknownst to most of his guests, the house was also riddled with secret passages, stairs and rooms. It was called Melrose Hall.

Legend had it that Lane had been banished from England because of his wild partying and degenerate ways, and had come here, where he took up where he left off. Melrose Hall was the scene of some wild times, so they say.

But it all caught up with him, and Lane sickened, and so sold Melrose Hall right before he died. The buyer was another party animal, a Jamaican-born Englishman, the second son of a lord, a man named William Axtell.

The two probably met at some of the same bawdy functions, as Axtell was known about town for the adventures of his misspent youth, and was called “William the Gay.” He was especially known to be a rollicking partier and strong drinker. One of his other nicknames was the “3 bottle man.” We probably don’t really want to know.

He was also William the Smart. He cleaned himself up enough and married extremely well, taking to wife Margaret De Peyster, the daughter of a very prominent and wealthy New York merchant, Abraham De Peyster, Junior.

Her mother was a Van Cortlandt, making Margaret a member of two of the wealthiest families in New York City. The Axtell’s had a mansion on Broadway in Manhattan, where they usually lived, and their summer home at Melrose Hall, which at the time, was quite out in the country. This country home would come in quite handy.

When the stirrings of liberty and revolution began, William Axtell at first sided with the rebelling colonists, but soon became William the Pragmatist. The De Peyster and Van Cortlandt families were staunchly Loyalist, and William didn’t see the colonists winning the upcoming war.

He didn’t declare until right before 1776, when he went to the Loyalist side, and became a colonel and commander of a Loyalist regiment called the “Nassau Blues,” comprised of men mostly from Nassau County and the rest of Long Island, which included Brooklyn and Queens. The British had charged him with finding 500 men, but he was only able to recruit about 30 or so.

But what a bunch he recruited. After the Battle of Brooklyn, the British occupied Brooklyn and New York City until the end of the war. Many of their Loyalist allies became the secret police and enforcers of the occupiers, eager to show the British they were worthy, and probably more than a few counting on position, riches and land after the British wiped out the rebellion. Axtell’s Nassau Blues got the nickname “Nasty Blues” for their cruelty and sadism.

Rumors soon followed that Colonel Axtell had Patriot prisoners down in special dungeons below Melrose Hall, where they they were tortured and held in the worst of conditions. After the war, Melrose Hall was on an official short list of estates that would be confiscated, due to the nature of what had gone on there during the war.

And here is where the legends begin. Colonel Axtell and his wife did not have any children of their own, but had adopted a niece named Eliza Shipton. In the early days of 1776, before the war started, and before the “Nasty Blues,” the Axtell’s were having parties and balls at Melrose, as if the rumblings and foments of war were not happening at all.

A handsome young man named Aquila Giles showed up at one of these parties, where he met Eliza Shipton. It was love at first sight. The couple strolled in the gardens on the estate, and got to know each other, and by the end of the night, young Giles was ready to announce his intentions.

He expressed to Axtell both his love for Eliza and his sympathies toward the Patriot cause. Neither was well received, to say the least, and Giles was banned from the property, and from seeing Eliza ever again.

He left, and a few days later, a cannonball ripped through a wing of Melrose Hall, as the Battle of Brooklyn began in the Prospect and Greenwood Heights, and Gowanus. The Revolutionary War had begun. Giles had joined the Continental Army, and rose up through the ranks to colonel, the same rank achieved by William Axtell.

The British were firmly ensconced in Brooklyn during the war. Officers took over the homes of wealthy colonists, and the common soldiers bivouacked along what is now Franklin Avenue, from what is now Clinton Hill, all the way down to Eastern Parkway.

The soldiers were a common presence in Flatbush town, as well as throughout Brooklyn. Axtell’s men remained the “Nasty Blues” for only a year before the regiment was disbanded in 1779; and the men were folded into the Loyalist New York Volunteers.

But that was enough time for their reputation to be solidified. Everyone knew about, but no one had ever escaped, from William Axtell’s secret prison. While parties and balls went on in the ballroom and banquet hall, slaves tended the fields and served in the manor, and whispered in whatever private corners they could, about the cries and misery that went on somewhere in the secret confines below Melrose Hall.

Some of them may have disappeared there as well. Their lips were sealed. This is why the legend of Melrose Hall has another chapter, as the location for one of the greatest ghost stories in New York history, and the final end of a star-crossed love story. Don’t you love a cliffhanger? The legend of Melrose Hall, and the history of Melrose Park continue next time.


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  1. The later, history of Melrose Park, in the 1830s and 1840s is equally interesting.

    See for example:

    The Brooklyn Magazine, October, 1885, III:1, 33 “Editor’s
    Table”

    “The gathering of the literati of America which
    assembled in Brooklyn, and a the historic “Melrose Hall” of Mrs. Anna Cora Mowatt, at Flatbush, from 1836 to 1841, attracted universal attention, andadmiration, for their brilliancy and the distinction of their guests. It was atthese assemblies that Irving, Fenimore Cooper, Fitz-Green Hallock, N. P. Willis, Bryant, Dr. William Ellery, Channing, Poe, Dr. George Ripley, Charles
    Fenno Hoffman, Dr. John W. Francis, Mrs. Sigourney, Fanny Osgood, Mrs. Whitmanand other eminent literateurs were the central figures. Brooklyn was then, and later on, rich in the association of Emma C. Embury, Elizabeth Oakes Smith,
    Catherine Esther Beecher, Anna Estelle Lewis, Dr. George W. Bethune, Seba Smith (Major Jack Downing), John G. Saxe, William Pitt Palmer, “lovely Lucy Hopper,”and kindred spirits.”