Next Event
June 9, 2013, 1:00 PM
In warm wet weather mushrooms pop up overnight in our yards in a fascinating array of colors and shapes. What are they, really? A member of the NJ Mycological Association will demystify these amazing living things which are part of the Kingdom of Fungi.
To celebrate Arbor Day 2013 on April 26, the Durand-Hedden House, Maplewood’s Historic House Museum, is looking for volunteers to help with planting dozens of young trees throughout historic Grasmere Park. J. Todd Lamm, the New Jersey Certified Tree Expert who cares for the trees and shrubs on the grounds, said that the saplings, red oaks and white pines, will be donated by the New Jersey Tree Foundation, a statewide non-profit organization dedicated to developing community forestry activities and providing trees to public lands in New Jersey.
The extensive exhibit After The Hickories: Roosevelt Park that graced the Durand-Hedden House for most of 2012 traces the transformation of one hundred bucolic acres in the foothills of Orange Mountain from pre-Revolutionary farmland to their days as a grand 19th century country retreat to their new life as a fashionable early-20th century neighborhood still thriving today.
Walter Clinton Pettee, an artist and illustrator who had moved to Maplewood with his new wife, Alice Tanner Brown, in 1901, renovated the Old Roosevelt Barn into a house, now numbered 104 Durand, in 1909, according to real estate records of that year.
The Ackerson Company offered prospective buyers at least six pre-designed house models, as seen by these renderings from their brochure. Three were actually built on Curtiss Place and further research may uncover variants of others.