Cedar Court

Completed in 1898, for the widower Abraham Wolff (1839-1900). It was designed by the architectural firm Carrère & Hastings in the style of the Villa Medici in Rome to serve as a pair of twin mansions for his two daughters on an estate of 280-acres. One of the twin mansions was occupied by Adelaide and her husband, Otto Kahn, and the other by Clara and her husband Henri P. Wertheim. In 1902, Mrs. Wertheim died at Cedar Court in childbirth, leaving the estate solely to the Kahns. Tragedy struck again in 1905 when a fire destroyed one of the houses so the Kahns built a new single story structure in its place. However, despite all that the famously charitable Kahns had done for the area over the years, in 1911 they were refused entry into the Morris County Country Club on account of their ethnicity - they were Jewish by race, not religion...