Hudson County Facts

From Historic Houses of New Jersey by W. Jay Mills, 1902

During the summer of 1832, the cholera year, when scared New Yorkers were dosing themselves with Dr. De Kay’s famous prescription of port-wine and Dr. Rhinelander’s equally famous one of brandy as preventives, James Gore King, the noted New York banker, and seventeenth president of the Chamber of Commerce, removed his family to his then only partly completed country-seat on the woody crest of the Palisades at Weehawken.

The house, a severely plain two-storied structure, though large and roomy, was surrounded by one hundred and eighty acres of land lying between the Bull’s Ferry Road and the river, and the adjoining Stevens estate on the south. After several years spent in beautifying a naturally fine situation, the place became one of the most noted residences in America, and was always visited by distinguished foreigners when stopping in New York.

James Gore King, was the third son of Rufus King, the eminent statesman. He attended school in London and Paris, and was graduated from Harvard in 1810. In early life he married Sally Gracie, a New York belle, and daughter of the distinguished Archibald Gracie. His brother, Charles King, who became president of Columbia College, also married into the same family, uniting his fortunes with those of another daughter, Eliza Gracie. At one time in his career he virtually controlled the operations of Wall Street, and earned for himself the soubriquet of “The Almighty of Wall Street.”

Instead of improving his large area of land at a great expenditure at one time, Mr. King went about it judiciously, and continued adorning and enlarging his gardens almost up to the time of his death in 1851 His wise plan seems to have attracted considerable notice. In an old number of the Merchant’s Magazine and Commercial Review, Freeman Hunt wrote that Lord Ashburton, when visiting the United States, was greatly charmed with Highwood and the “sensible manner in which Mr. King had laid out his grounds.

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