Cedarmere

The house at Cedarmere began as a farmhouse built in 1787 by Richard Kirk, a Quaker farmer, who also ran a water-powered fulling mill near the present mill. The property later passed to William Hicks, the Hempstead Harbor postmaster, and then to Joseph Moulton, who added a colonnade on three sides. The Friends of Cedarmere date Moulton's purchase to 1836; the Roslyn Landmark Society dates it to September 1834.

William Cullen Bryant (1794 to 1878), the poet of Thanatopsis and the longtime editor of the New York Evening Post, bought the house and about 40 acres in 1843 as a country retreat from the city. He named it Cedarmere for the cedars around its pond, the mere. Over the next three decades he bought more land and enlarged the house. The Roslyn Landmark Society records a remodeled kitchen wing in 1856 and, between 1860 and 1867, a third story and attic, verandas on three sides, bay windows, hot-air heating and gambrel roofs. In 1862 he built a Gothic Revival mill and summer cottage beside the pond, and in 1874 he brought in the architect Thomas Wisedell to modernize the plumbing. Bryant laid out a boxwood parterre garden in the 1860s. The 1986 National Register nomination names Calvert Vaux, Andrew Jackson Downing and Frederick Law Olmsted among the friends who helped him shape the grounds, and credits Olmsted with the waterside landscape.

In 1875 Bryant sold Cedarmere to his daughter Julia while keeping the right to use it for life. He died in Manhattan in 1878 and was buried in Roslyn Cemetery. Julia sold the house in 1891 to her nephew Harold Godwin, Bryant's grandson, who in 1899 sold a large upland portion to Lloyd Stephens Bryce; that land became the Clayton estate. On November 15, 1902, while a tenant was living there, a fire destroyed the kitchen wing and everything above the first floor. The first-floor rooms survived, including woodwork from the 1787 house. Godwin rebuilt in 1903 on a similar plan, adding a Federal-style entry, a glass conservatory and a Great Room, with stucco walls and slate roofs. In 1916 he laid out a sunken garden.

Godwin died in 1931. The property passed to his widow and then to their daughter, Elizabeth Love Godwin, who died on July 6, 1975, and left Cedarmere to Nassau County with a $100,000 trust fund, according to the county; the Friends of Cedarmere give the year of the bequest as 1976. The county opened a museum there in 1994 for the 200th anniversary of Bryant's birth. It closed in 2008, and the exterior was restored in 2013 and the interior in 2014. The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1986, together with Clayton, as the Cedarmere-Clayton Estates.

Today Cedarmere is a seven-acre Nassau County property at 225 Bryant Avenue. The grounds are open to the public from dawn to dusk. The Friends of Cedarmere say the house is shown only by guided tour on Thursdays at 2 pm and 3 pm, covering the first floor, because nonprofit offices lease the upper floors. The county's museum listing says the buildings are under renovation, so a visitor should confirm before going. The mill has been closed for interior restoration.