“It Is an Old House” by Jon Lellenberg and David Galerstein published originally in the Baker Street Journal, Spring 2004 Co-authored with my friend the late David Galerstein (“Bert Stephens,” BSI) of northern New Jersey (the region covered in it). One evening in 1936, a 42-year-old businessman sat down at home at 638 Prospect Street, Maplewood, New Jersey, for some leisure reading. The book made a great impression upon the busy executive, husband, and father of four. It was The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes by Vincent Starrett, and the reader was Edgar W. Smith, a vice-president of the General Motors Export Company. Smith’s Maplewood house Smith wrote enthusiastically to its author. Starrett was then on the other side of the world, but returned in 1937 and sent Smith a reply that began a cordial correspondence lasting twenty-three years. He told Smith about the BSI, and put him in touch with Christopher Morley, though it was two years before Morley called another BSI dinner that Smith could attend. The 1940 dinner was prompted by publication of the first BSI anthology of Writings About the Writings: 221B: Studies in Sherlock Holmes, edited by Starrett. So far had Smith come that it contained his biographical dictionary of the Canon, Appointment in Baker Street, published the year before by Smith’s own “Pamphlet House” imprint. Later that year, Smith wrote Morley on October 28th that he had “acquired a country hang-out . . . which I have named, of course, Thorneycroft.” Thorney-croft Huxtable was Smith’s nom de canon in The Five Orange Pips, the club he had joined in 1938. Thorneycroft was in Basking Ridge, twenty-one miles from Maplewood. Smith did not neglect Sherlock Holmes on weekends; for example, it was from there that Smith wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt on July 27, 1942, offering him membership honoris causa in the BSI (which FDR accepted). The Pips held their annual dinners at members’ homes, but Smith’s plan to host the 1941 Pips dinner at Thorneycroft on December 12th was aborted by Pearl Harbor. In his notice, Smith had given the location as “Madisonville Road, corner North Maple Avenue” in Basking Ridge, with explicit directions: “turn off at Morristown center (around square) into Route 32 (Bernardsville). Drive on Route 32 six miles to Old Mill Inn; bear left 200 feet past Inn on road leading to Basking Ridge: ‘Thorneycroft’ is exactly one mile from this turning.” Route 32 of the ’40s is today’s Route 202. The Old Mill Inn is still a landmark. Of the three houses at the corner of Madisonville and Maple today, planning board records indicate that Thorneycroft is 173 Madisonville Road, a “Second Empire” house built around 1885. The photograph shows it during the 40-year occupancy of the original owner, the secretary-treasurer of the Childs Restaurant chain. It is large for a “country hang-out,” but the Smiths were numerous, with a son from Mrs. Smith’s first marriage — she was a young French war widow when they met around 1919 — and three of their own. Thorneycroft The Smiths had a year or so weekending at Thorneycroft, but wartime gasoline rationing made it difficult, Smith told Starrett in September 1942, and in May 1944 he sold it. By then, he was living at 49 Prospect Hill Avenue, Summit, atop a small hill. The house has been torn down, but a photo survives: Smith’s Summit house Smith created “Pamphlet House” for other purposes originally, but had turned it to Writings About the Writings.1 In Summit he purchased a printing-press as well for his hobby — heralded in an April 16, 1945, letter to Morley, on Pamphlet House letterhead “hand-printed, in the fullness of ink and sweat, by the Thorneycroft Press, as recently acquired and established.” In years to come, the Thorneycroft Press, located in one Smith home after another, would receive a share of the credit for his self-published Sherlock Holmes literature. Most of Smith’s Irregular business, though, was transacted at his office in the General Motors Building at 1775 Broadway, New York. There he had the secretarial resources to be the BSI’s Buttons and to edit works like Profile by Gaslight and, beginning in late 1945, the Baker Street Journal. His secretary “Dee” Alexander, who worked for him from 1946 through 1948, reported that Smith dictated most of his BSI correspondence to her, while occasionally bring-ing handwritten drafts from home to be typed. Highcroft Cottage This changed when Smith retired in 1954 at age 60. He had started to look for a retirement site after the war, and in 1950 had bought sixteen acres of wooded land a couple of miles west of pleasant and historic Morristown. He dubbed the spot Windy Tor. In 1953 he built his retirement home with a swimming pool there, but this was preceded on the property in 1951 by Highcroft Cottage. Baker Street sign and drive Highcroft Cottage had one large room, 15x21, with a flagstone floor, four windows on two sides (one nearly nine feet in length), and a fireplace at one end. At the other was a bathroom and a kitchen. In the latter’s closet Smith later installed his printing press. The cottage, and the house that followed (dubbed Holmcroft), were the only dwellings on the private quarter-mile drive Smith cut from the county’s Lake Road bordering the property. As the drive ran entirely inside his property, he persuaded Morris Township’s supervisors to let him name it Baker Street, with a street sign at his expense. When Smith built Holmcroft, the post office agreed to his request to number the house 221. And the cottage became 221B. 221B Baker Street, Morristown, until Smith’s death in 1960, was the headquarters of the BSI. There were Smith’s Irregular papers, his Sherlock Holmes collection, and, in the kitchen turned into a storeroom, his stock of BSJ back issues and other BSI publications. The post office cooperated by delivering mail addressed to “Mr. Sherlock Holmes, 221B Baker Street, Morristown.” Holmcroft Local newspapers provide glimpses of it.2 Smith lined its walls with bookcases. The papers mention “quasi-Victorian” chairs and a sofa, and a portrait of Sherlock Holmes by Smith’s son Edgar P. over the fireplace. Smith had created a sanctum to be greatly envied. How many visitors there were in its six years of Irregular occupancy is unknown, but the 1958 dinner of The Five Orange Pips took place there, and other pilgrimages as well. In the June 1961 BSJ, Colin Prestige of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London recalled a visit: We walked down to the garden to that little wooden cabin, in size not unlike Black Peter’s, which was veritably the 221B of Edgar’s dreams. Here we looked over the wonderful library, the editions of the Canon, the variant illustrations, the Beeton’s, the volumes of higher criticism, the collections of essays, the correspondence with President Roosevelt, and all those other gems of Sherlockian learning that made Edgar W. Smith so preeminent as a scholar. We went into the little side room, where he kept the stocks of back numbers and rich incunabula which, in the Morristown format, brought the rare branches of Holmesian scholarship within the reach of many who would otherwise have been denied such fruits.3 Despite his being retired, the 1950s were busy years for Smith. He remained active as a management and international trade consultant, and traveled a good deal, for pleasure as well as business: to Europe repeatedly, to Egypt once, to Hawaii, and no doubt elsewhere — usually by ocean liner, in that final decade of elegant travel. “I’m enjoying retirement,” he told Starrett on Highcroft Cottage stationery reproduced here, “because I’m busier than I’ve ever been.” His BSI responsibilities also grew as Morley was laid low by a series of strokes, finally dying in 1957. Smith continued the New Series BSJ launched in 1951. Also in the works were red-covered incunabula reprinted by the BSI, Inc., and collections like Introducing Mr. Sherlock Holmes (1959). Scion societies also grew in number, with letters (as Morley had once complained) that had to be answered. Smith’s 221B Baker Street was a beehive of activity, at a time when he could no longer draw upon the secretarial support he had enjoyed at GM. Smith’s letterhead Smith was supposed to go to Europe on business in September 1960 when he died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage, a few days after Prestige’s visit. It was a blow for both his family and the BSI. The property was sold to an elderly couple whose heirs soon resold it to Herbert Epstein, the owner of the local independent department store, who lived there until his recent death. For some time he continued to receive mail addressed to 221B Baker Street, which he forwarded to Edgar W.’s son Edgar P. Smith. In September 1963, Edgar P. paid a visit to his parents’ former home, and installed a bronze plaque on the cottage commem-orating its role as headquarters of the BSI in the 1950s. “I didn’t want to see all the memories in that house lost,” he said: “The society meant a great deal to my father; he devoted so much of his life to it. I think he’s better remembered for his work with the Irregulars than as a vice president of General Motors Overseas Corp.”4 In 2000, Epstein permitted Irregulars Henry Boote, Ted Friedman, Irving Kamil, Warren Randall, George Sturm, and David Galerstein to visit the property. They inspected the cottage (then used to store swimming-pool equipment), and were permitted to remove the plaque placed there 40 years before. It is now one of the BSI’s artifacts. “When I bought the property,” Epstein remarked, “I did not know it was a shrine.” Kamil also noticed that a switchplate inside the kitchen closet was a silhouette of Sherlock Holmes, with deerstalker and a pipe — perhaps the work of Edgar W. Smith himself, or of Edgar P., who did several paintings and statuettes of Holmes. It too is now in the BSI’s hands. Switchplate at Highcroft Cottage Epstein sold off eight acres in 1961, and the remainder will be developed now, for it lies in a very desirable part of Morristown. New owners may have no use for the cottage. Remembering William Gillette’s concern for his Connecticut castle, the idea has been floated to move it to some local park and preserve it, as “The Knothole,” Morley’s writing shack from the grounds of his Roslyn, Long Island, home, has been. But the resources for this are not in sight. Even if Edgar W. Smith’s cottage is demolished, the plaque commemorating its role will remain in our hands. Edgar Smith may continue to putter in some celestial 221B cottage of his own, while the BSI revisits what Starrett might have called “a romantic chamber of our hearts where it is always 1955.” NOTES 1 See Glen Miranker’s chapter, “Prolegomenon to a History of The Pamphlet House,” in Irregular Records of the Early ’Forties. 2 “London’s Mythical 221B Baker St. Has Actual Counterpart in Morris,” Newark Sunday News, October 3, 1954; “Sherlock Holmes Center Here: Morris Township Man High Official in ‘Baker St.’ Group,” Morristown Daily Record, August 29, 1955; and “Sherlockian Irregulars,” Newark Sunday News, May 5, 1957, all with photographs of the cottage’s exterior and interior, and Smith at play. 3 Colin Prestige, “It Is Always a Joy,” Baker Street Journal, June 1961, pp. 84–88. 4 “Plaque for ‘Sherlock Holmes’ to Mark Erstwhile Headquarters of His Devotee,” Newark Evening News, September 8, 1963. Return to Essays Return to the Welcome page

“It Is an Old House”

by Jon Lellenberg and David Galerstein

published originally in the Baker Street Journal, Spring 2004

Co-authored with my friend the late David Galerstein (“Bert Stephens,” BSI) of northern New Jersey (the region covered in it).

One evening in 1936, a 42-year-old businessman sat down at home at 638 Prospect Street, Maplewood, New Jersey, for some leisure reading. The book made a great impression upon the busy executive, husband, and father of four. It was The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes by Vincent Starrett, and the reader was Edgar W. Smith, a vice-president of the General Motors Export Company.

Smith’s Maplewood house

Smith wrote enthusiastically to its author. Starrett was then on the other side of the world, but returned in 1937 and sent Smith a reply that began a cordial correspondence lasting twenty-three years. He told Smith about the BSI, and put him in touch with Christopher Morley, though it was two years before Morley called another BSI dinner that Smith could attend. The 1940 dinner was prompted by publication of the first BSI anthology of Writings About the Writings: 221B: Studies in Sherlock Holmes, edited by Starrett. So far had Smith come that it contained his biographical dictionary of the Canon, Appointment in Baker Street, published the year before by Smith’s own “Pamphlet House” imprint.

Later that year, Smith wrote Morley on October 28th that he had “acquired a country hang-out . . . which I have named, of course, Thorneycroft.” Thorney-croft Huxtable was Smith’s nom de canon in The Five Orange Pips, the club he had joined in 1938. Thorneycroft was in Basking Ridge, twenty-one miles from Maplewood. Smith did not neglect Sherlock Holmes on weekends; for example, it was from there that Smith wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt on July 27, 1942, offering him membership honoris causa in the BSI (which FDR accepted).

The Pips held their annual dinners at members’ homes, but Smith’s plan to host the 1941 Pips dinner at Thorneycroft on December 12th was aborted by Pearl Harbor. In his notice, Smith had given the location as “Madisonville Road, corner North Maple Avenue” in Basking Ridge, with explicit directions: “turn off at Morristown center (around square) into Route 32 (Bernardsville). Drive on Route 32 six miles to Old Mill Inn; bear left 200 feet past Inn on road leading to Basking Ridge: ‘Thorneycroft’ is exactly one mile from this turning.”

Route 32 of the ’40s is today’s Route 202. The Old Mill Inn is still a landmark. Of the three houses at the corner of Madisonville and Maple today, planning board records indicate that Thorneycroft is 173 Madisonville Road, a “Second Empire” house built around 1885. The photograph shows it during the 40-year occupancy of the original owner, the secretary-treasurer of the Childs Restaurant chain. It is large for a “country hang-out,” but the Smiths were numerous, with a son from Mrs. Smith’s first marriage — she was a young French war widow when they met around 1919 — and three of their own.

Thorneycroft

The Smiths had a year or so weekending at Thorneycroft, but wartime gasoline rationing made it difficult, Smith told Starrett in September 1942, and in May 1944 he sold it. By then, he was living at 49 Prospect Hill Avenue, Summit, atop a small hill. The house has been torn down, but a photo survives:

Smith’s Summit house

Smith created “Pamphlet House” for other purposes originally, but had turned it to Writings About the Writings.1 In Summit he purchased a printing-press as well for his hobby — heralded in an April 16, 1945, letter to Morley, on Pamphlet House letterhead “hand-printed, in the fullness of ink and sweat, by the Thorneycroft Press, as recently acquired and established.” In years to come, the Thorneycroft Press, located in one Smith home after another, would receive a share of the credit for his self-published Sherlock Holmes literature.

Most of Smith’s Irregular business, though, was transacted at his office in the General Motors Building at 1775 Broadway, New York. There he had the secretarial resources to be the BSI’s Buttons and to edit works like Profile by Gaslight and, beginning in late 1945, the Baker Street Journal. His secretary “Dee” Alexander, who worked for him from 1946 through 1948, reported that Smith dictated most of his BSI correspondence to her, while occasionally bring-ing handwritten drafts from home to be typed.

Highcroft Cottage

This changed when Smith retired in 1954 at age 60. He had started to look for a retirement site after the war, and in 1950 had bought sixteen acres of wooded land a couple of miles west of pleasant and historic Morristown. He dubbed the spot Windy Tor. In 1953 he built his retirement home with a swimming pool there, but this was preceded on the property in 1951 by Highcroft Cottage.

Baker Street sign and drive

Highcroft Cottage had one large room, 15x21, with a flagstone floor, four windows on two sides (one nearly nine feet in length), and a fireplace at one end. At the other was a bathroom and a kitchen. In the latter’s closet Smith later installed his printing press. The cottage, and the house that followed (dubbed Holmcroft), were the only dwellings on the private quarter-mile drive Smith cut from the county’s Lake Road bordering the property. As the drive ran entirely inside his property, he persuaded Morris Township’s supervisors to let him name it Baker Street, with a street sign at his expense.

When Smith built Holmcroft, the post office agreed to his request to number the house 221. And the cottage became 221B. 221B Baker Street, Morristown, until Smith’s death in 1960, was the headquarters of the BSI. There were Smith’s Irregular papers, his Sherlock Holmes collection, and, in the kitchen turned into a storeroom, his stock of BSJ back issues and other BSI publications. The post office cooperated by delivering mail addressed to “Mr. Sherlock Holmes, 221B Baker Street, Morristown.”

Holmcroft

Local newspapers provide glimpses of it.2 Smith lined its walls with bookcases. The papers mention “quasi-Victorian” chairs and a sofa, and a portrait of Sherlock Holmes by Smith’s son Edgar P. over the fireplace. Smith had created a sanctum to be greatly envied. How many visitors there were in its six years of Irregular occupancy is unknown, but the 1958 dinner of The Five Orange Pips took place there, and other pilgrimages as well. In the June 1961 BSJ, Colin Prestige of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London recalled a visit:

We walked down to the garden to that little wooden cabin, in size not unlike Black Peter’s, which was veritably the 221B of Edgar’s dreams. Here we looked over the wonderful library, the editions of the Canon, the variant illustrations, the Beeton’s, the volumes of higher criticism, the collections of essays, the correspondence with President Roosevelt, and all those other gems of Sherlockian learning that made Edgar W. Smith so preeminent as a scholar. We went into the little side room, where he kept the stocks of back numbers and rich incunabula which, in the Morristown format, brought the rare branches of Holmesian scholarship within the reach of many who would otherwise have been denied such fruits.3

Despite his being retired, the 1950s were busy years for Smith. He remained active as a management and international trade consultant, and traveled a good deal, for pleasure as well as business: to Europe repeatedly, to Egypt once, to Hawaii, and no doubt elsewhere — usually by ocean liner, in that final decade of elegant travel. “I’m enjoying retirement,” he told Starrett on Highcroft Cottage stationery reproduced here, “because I’m busier than I’ve ever been.” His BSI responsibilities also grew as Morley was laid low by a series of strokes, finally dying in 1957. Smith continued the New Series BSJ launched in 1951. Also in the works were red-covered incunabula reprinted by the BSI, Inc., and collections like Introducing Mr. Sherlock Holmes (1959). Scion societies also grew in number, with letters (as Morley had once complained) that had to be answered. Smith’s 221B Baker Street was a beehive of activity, at a time when he could no longer draw upon the secretarial support he had enjoyed at GM.

Smith’s letterhead

Smith was supposed to go to Europe on business in September 1960 when he died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage, a few days after Prestige’s visit. It was a blow for both his family and the BSI. The property was sold to an elderly couple whose heirs soon resold it to Herbert Epstein, the owner of the local independent department store, who lived there until his recent death. For some time he continued to receive mail addressed to 221B Baker Street, which he forwarded to Edgar W.’s son Edgar P. Smith. In September 1963, Edgar P. paid a visit to his parents’ former home, and installed a bronze plaque on the cottage commem-orating its role as headquarters of the BSI in the 1950s. “I didn’t want to see all the memories in that house lost,” he said: “The society meant a great deal to my father; he devoted so much of his life to it. I think he’s better remembered for his work with the Irregulars than as a vice president of General Motors Overseas Corp.”4

In 2000, Epstein permitted Irregulars Henry Boote, Ted Friedman, Irving Kamil, Warren Randall, George Sturm, and David Galerstein to visit the property. They inspected the cottage (then used to store swimming-pool equipment), and were permitted to remove the plaque placed there 40 years before. It is now one of the BSI’s artifacts. “When I bought the property,” Epstein remarked, “I did not know it was a shrine.” Kamil also noticed that a switchplate inside the kitchen closet was a silhouette of Sherlock Holmes, with deerstalker and a pipe — perhaps the work of Edgar W. Smith himself, or of Edgar P., who did several paintings and statuettes of Holmes. It too is now in the BSI’s hands.

Switchplate at Highcroft Cottage

Epstein sold off eight acres in 1961, and the remainder will be developed now, for it lies in a very desirable part of Morristown. New owners may have no use for the cottage. Remembering William Gillette’s concern for his Connecticut castle, the idea has been floated to move it to some local park and preserve it, as “The Knothole,” Morley’s writing shack from the grounds of his Roslyn, Long Island, home, has been. But the resources for this are not in sight.

Even if Edgar W. Smith’s cottage is demolished, the plaque commemorating its role will remain in our hands. Edgar Smith may continue to putter in some celestial 221B cottage of his own, while the BSI revisits what Starrett might have called “a romantic chamber of our hearts where it is always 1955.”

NOTES

1 See Glen Miranker’s chapter, “Prolegomenon to a History of The Pamphlet House,” in Irregular Records of the Early ’Forties.

2 “London’s Mythical 221B Baker St. Has Actual Counterpart in Morris,” Newark Sunday News, October 3, 1954; “Sherlock Holmes Center Here: Morris Township Man High Official in ‘Baker St.’ Group,” Morristown Daily Record, August 29, 1955; and “Sherlockian Irregulars,” Newark Sunday News, May 5, 1957, all with photographs of the cottage’s exterior and interior, and Smith at play.

3 Colin Prestige, “It Is Always a Joy,” Baker Street Journal, June 1961, pp. 84–88.

4 “Plaque for ‘Sherlock Holmes’ to Mark Erstwhile Headquarters of His Devotee,” Newark Evening News, September 8, 1963.

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