Westbrook (Bayard Cutting Arboretum)

The land on the Connetquot River at Great River had been part of the holdings of Robert L. Maitland, who belonged to the circle around the nearby South Side Sportsmen's Club. In 1873 the tobacco heirs George and Pierre Lorillard bought four tracts, 635 acres in all, from Maitland's widow for $42,500. George L. Lorillard kept racehorses there, and his Westbrook Farm produced Iroquois, the first American horse to win the English Derby, in 1881.

William Bayard Cutting (1850 to 1912) was a New York lawyer and businessman. He became president of the St. Louis, Alton and Terre Haute Railroad in 1878, developed the South Brooklyn waterfront, organized the Improved Dwellings Association in 1880 and, with his brother Robert Fulton Cutting, started a sugar beet business in 1888. According to the 1973 National Register nomination, he acquired the Lorillard estate in 1886 and the same year hired the New York architect Charles Haight (1841 to 1917), known for the General Theological Seminary and buildings at Yale and Hobart, to design a summer house.

Haight's house is a long two-and-a-half-story frame building made of four blocks, three of them set at angles so that the rooms face the river and Nicoll Bay. It is covered mostly in shingles, with half-timbering in the gables, clustered brick chimneys and a two-story round tower. A marker at the house describes it as primarily Tudor with some Queen Anne features and gives it 68 rooms. Inside, the entrance hall, stair, library, dining room and the billiard room in the Annex have dark carved paneling in an English Jacobean manner. Louis Comfort Tiffany made stained-glass windows and the breakfast room fireplace. Cutting is believed to have spent $150,000 on the house and $40,000 on the carriage house and barn.

Cutting, an amateur student of trees, hired Frederick Law Olmsted to lay out the grounds and gathered a large collection of trees and shrubs. The arboretum's own pages date the start of this work to 1886 and the hiring of Olmsted to 1887. Cutting also laid out a golf course and built a farm group northeast of the house, including a brick Cow Barn of 1889 by T. J. Green of Sayville and a horse stable of 1892. A fire in 1895 destroyed several farm buildings, and local papers reported in 1896 that the farm and dairy building would be rebuilt.

Cutting died in 1912. His widow, Olivia Peyton Murray Cutting, kept the house until her death there on November 15, 1949, at 94. The 1973 nomination says the estate was donated in trust to the State of New York in 1936 and endowed by Mrs. Cutting. The arboretum says their daughter, Olivia Bayard Cutting James, completed the arrangements in 1951 and handed the key to Robert Moses, and that the property then opened to the public as the Bayard Cutting Arboretum. The estate was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.

Today Westbrook is the Manor House of Bayard Cutting Arboretum State Park, 691 acres run by the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation. The grounds are open Tuesday through Sunday, from 9 am to 5 pm in summer and 9 am to 4 pm in winter, with an $8 vehicle fee in season. Guided tours of the first and second floors cost $15, are generally given Thursday through Sunday at 11 am, and are best booked in advance. The state's page says the Manor House closes during February.