The Martin Mansion, also known as the Haunted House of Wantage, about 1989. (Photo courtesy of Ron Dupont)
We’re pleased to have this from guest writer Ron Dupont, esteemed historian from Vernon:
The Psycho House. The Addams Family House. The Haunted House.
If you traveled Route 23 through southern Wantage prior to the ’90s, you knew the decaying old mansion on the hill and probably called it one of those names.
In its day, it was called the Martin Mansion. Built in 1868, it has been gone for some 35 years. It may or may not have contained ghosts, but few old places have so haunted local memory.
It stood on a hill near the intersection of routes 23 and 565.
Nathaniel Martin, a Revolutionary War vet, was the first of his line to settle in Wantage, in the late 1700s. His son Humphrey and his grandson Lebeus bought land here in the early 1800s and established a farm, one of several they owned.
In August 1868, they sold this farm to their son/grandson, James Frazee (J.F.) Martin.
He wasn’t originally a farmer. In 1858, the 21-year-old had left Sussex County and headed to the then-growing and prosperous city of Newark. There he entered the feed and flour business.
He was so successful that within a decade, he was wealthy. In 1868, he chose to return to the county of his birth and start farming.
Buying the property from his father and grandfather, he knocked down whatever old house had been there and “at once erected a commanding family mansion,” his obituary later recalled.
In the Second Empire style, then very much the rage, it was two stories with a three-story front tower and handsome Mansard roofs. It was designed to impress, and for the next 120 or so years, it did.
J.F. Martin was described by one 19th-century history as “one of the growing young agriculturalists of Wantage.” By 1870, he had a net worth, adjusted to current value, of $1.9 million.
He and his wife, Mary, had six children and three servants to wait on them.
Besides being a respected and wealthy farmer, J.F. Martin had family connections: his father, Lebeus, had been a state Assemblyman; his uncle James J. had been county clerk; and his cousin Lewis J. was a judge in Deckertown (Sussex).
He was a deacon in the Baptist Church, on the board of the Farmer’s National Bank and manager of the nearby Deckertown Union Cemetery.
He played an important role in getting the New Jersey Midland Railroad run through Wantage (and through his farm) in 1871, and in return, the railroad named the nearby depot Martin’s Station.
His only son, Arthur, attended Yale. In short, an important man with much to enjoy in life.
But J.F. Martin did not get to enjoy old age. In December 1891, he got the flu; the flu became pneumonia, and he died at age 56.
His son, Arthur, became a lawyer, and while he remained a “weekend” farmer in Wantage, his main business was his law practice in Jersey City.
By 1900, the family lived “down below” and evidently used the Wantage mansion as a weekend and summer place or perhaps in later years rented it out.
The Martins finally sold their Wantage farm and mansion in 1950. J.F.’s grandson, Arthur J. Jr., sold it to local farmer Owen Aukema, who lived on the next farm south (now demolished, where Dunkin’ is located).
Dutch immigrants
Aukema was a member of Sussex County’s large community with origins in the Netherlands. More specifically, from Friesland, a northern province with its unique language and culture (and lots of names ending in “a”!) He used the old mansion as a tenant house.
The Netherlands had been devastated during World War II, and many there sought to emigrate to the New York-New Jersey region, which had a Dutch community since the 1600s.
Aukema sponsored a number of immigrant families and boarded them in the old mansion. Among the first were Walter and Hilda Valkema, who arrived in 1952, and soon became the founders of that nearby Sussex County institution, the Holland American Bakery.
The steady stream of large families with lots of babies living in the old mansion gave rise to its first nickname. Clotheslines loaded with telltale laundry provided it: “Diaper Hill.” Many a local family has had friends or relatives who lived and grew up there.
In 1971, Aukema sold the property to Leon Charney. A long decline had already begun. With age and decay, what had once been a showplace now became a creepy landmark. This was abetted by pop culture’s universal depiction of such old Victorian mansions as “haunted.”
In recent decades, the grand and gloomy house found itself in the pages of Weird New Jersey, partly because of the caretaker’s bungalow behind it. This came to be called “the collage house”: it contained (disturbingly) entire walls pasted with magazine cutouts of babies, girls and young women.
Often vacant, the object of teenage midnight fascination, the old mansion became a magnet for trouble. Some interested parties considered restoring it for it still showed the grandness and beauty of its early days.
But the building had seen years of hard use and neglect. I worked for an architect who was hired to check it out as a candidate for restoration. He said the sill beams were rotten, and the whole house would have had to be jacked up and the sills and foundation rebuilt.
In any event, fate dealt the final blow. A fire about 1989 - allegedly started by trespassing party animals - left the mansion a roofless, burned-out shell. The overgrown ruins stood for a few years, then were bulldozed.
In 2008, the spot where the house stood was sold for development. The hill was leveled, and now QuickChek stands there.
J.F. Martin and family rest in nearby Deckertown Union Cemetery.
Where once you could get a view of a beautiful building that was the town’s pride, you can now get a fill-up and a banana mango smoothie.
“Sic Transit Gloria Mundi” - thus passes the glory of the world.
Bill Truran, Sussex County’s historian, may be contacted at billt1425@gmail.com