Bag of Bones

by J. North Conway

  “Mark you Stewart, your bones will never rest. You’ll get the same treatment!” they reportedly vowed.

  According to Forrest, the two young Irishmen were the ones who stole Stewart’s body. Forrest was adamant about his claim and revealed to Cowen that the two young men were relatives of his, so he knew the story was founded in truth. Forrest said he let the two men bury Stewart’s remains on his farm in Amityville. Cowen reported that he never had the opportunity to verify Forrest’s story.

  George Walling’s story of the return of Stewart’s remains was recounted in a variety of respectable magazines, journals, and newspaper. A November 1888 issue of Chambers’s Journal reported, “The agreed ransom was handed over. The mortal remains of the deceased millionaire were lifted on to the buggy of Mrs. Stewart’s representative, and he started on his homeward journey. Twenty-four hours later, his gruesome burden was transferred at dead of night, and with a privacy in singular contrast to the pomp and circumstance of its first burial, to its permanent resting-place in the crypt of the Cathedral. The wandering bones found rest at last, never, it is hoped, to be again disturbed.”

  Chambers’s Journal also perpetuated the speculation that Stewart’s remains were now watched over by some sophisticated alarm system. According to the Journal,

  “Any such disturbance would indeed be hazardous, for the remains now lie in the silent guardianship of Science. If any modern ghoul should once more attempt to violate their resting-place, an electric current will flash an instant message to the tower above, and the bells will sound a tocsin such as shall rouse the heaviest sleeper from his slumbers, and call every man in Garden City to lay hands upon the rash invader.”

  Robbing Graves for Ransom

  Grave robbing for purposes of mere plunder are not uncommon, and in some States whose citizens have not risen to the realization of the necessities of medical science the colleges carry on a brisk trade in cadavers which keeps the resurrectionists occupied on dark nights. But grave robbery as a means of extorting blackmail is a comparatively new notion. The first successful attempt of the kind was that of the rogues who carried off the body of A.T. Stewart. Whether a ransom has been paid and the body recovered is a mystery which puzzles society. Mrs. Stewart, at all events, was not averse to paying a good round sum to recover it, as the most important feature of the Cathedral at Garden City.

  —Brooklyn Eagle

  January 7, 1882

  In April 1885, regardless of whether anyone believed that A. T. Stewart’s remains had been recovered or not, eighty-three-year-old Cornelia Stewart, the ailing widow of the millionaire merchant, closed the book on the sordid tale of her husband’s grave robbery by officially dedicating the Cathedral of the Incarnation in Garden City. Stewart’s crypt was located in the deepest recesses of the magnificent structure. Nearly one thousand people traveled great distances to take part in the dedication ceremony. Ten train cars of enthusiastic well-wishers, businessmen, politicians, lawyers, judges, and other professionals and their wives and children, many of them Episcopalians, made the trip down on a special train from the Long Island City station. By the time they arrived for the opening service at eleven o’clock that morning, most were unable to get near the cathedral, never mind get inside and take a seat. The police had barred the three entrances to the elaborately constructed house of worship. The cathedral was already surrounded by hundreds of worshippers and curiosity seekers.

  Construction of the cathedral took nine years and cost approximately $3 million. H. C. Harrison, the noted English architect, designed the church. According to Harrison, the building itself was smaller than most cathedrals, but he attempted to overcome the limitation of its size by providing an overabundance of detail. It was, according to Harrison, a stunning example of “pure floriated Gothic.”

  The cathedral erected by his widow will be the only monument to him, and the irony of the fate even here provokes a ghastly smile. The mausoleum which was to contain his body will be the center of popular interest as Mrs. Stewart hoped it would be; but the interest will reside in the doubt whether his remains are really deposited there or not.

  —Brooklyn Eagle

  April 15, 1882

  14

  MEMORIAL TO THE MERCHANT PRINCE

  In which one thousand people travel to Garden City, Long Island, to take part in the April 1885 dedication ceremony of the Gothic-style Cathedral of the Incarnation—the huge, ornate, and costly memorial Cornelia Stewart has built for her husband. Construction of the cathedral takes nine years and costs approximately three million dollars. On May 22, 1885, Cornelia Stewart signs over the deed of the great cathedral and all of its adjacent buildings and schools to the Episcopal church for one dollar.

  In March 1885, a New York Times editorial attempted to calm the nerves of Garden City residents who feared that, with the closing of the A. T. Stewart & Co, business would come an end to the development of their beloved community.

  “At last those who put their trust in the ESTATE are to be rewarded,” the Times editorial proclaimed. The much anticipated Cathedral of the Incarnation, nine years in the making, would finally open in an elaborate ceremony, the editorial promised. “The unbelievers who have mocked at the ESTATE and said that it would never open the cathedral will be put to shame.”

  Despite the long delay in the construction of the magnificent edifice, the Times scolded Garden City doubters for not understanding the intricacies of building a structure the size, scope, and magnitude of the Cathedral of the Incarnation. The nine years it took to construct the ornate building was nothing compared with European cathedrals that sometimes took “five hundred years to build.” The Times added that “even at the end of that time they leave a tower or something else unfinished.”

  Instead of doubting the intention of the governing body of the estate (with Henry Hilton at its head), the people of Garden City should have been “full of admiration and gratitude” that the estate had undertaken to build the cathedral within a mere ten-year span.

  The grand opening of the cathedral was set in stone for April 9, 1885, and the residents of Garden City had only Judge Henry Hilton to thank.

  AT LAST

  For several years thoughtless and wicked persons waited for the completion of the cathedral and professed to believe that ‘in a few weeks’ or ‘next Spring’ the building would be finished or consecrated. When they found that they were wrong they suddenly lost all belief in the ESTATE, and proclaimed that it never meant to finish the cathedral. …

  The result is that to-day Judge HILTON … has completed and opened the Garden City Cathedral.

  —New York Times

  March 20, 1885

  It looked as though Cornelia’s face had been painted on a crumbling slab of alabaster calcite, which might have been all right if, whoever had drawn it on, had done it correctly. They didn’t. One eye was larger than the other. The lips were too big and too red. The mouth was lopsided, teetering between a smile and a frown. There were two big rosy cheeks, each perfectly round and red, but also of a unequal size. The eyebrows were drawn on in bold, black strokes careening upward and out, their ends hidden under the jet-black ringlets of her ill-fitting wig. From where one might suspect her ears were located, hidden beneath the thick fake hair, dangled long, shimmering silver earrings whose ends disappeared into the thick red fox fur collar of her otherwise dark coat.

  Cornelia Stewart seemed oblivious to her clownish appearance and simply pursed her lips into what might have been construed as a wistfully bemused smile, her blue watery eyes looking out over the elaborate church altar with the perplexed stare of someone who might have been watching a circus roll into town. She blinked constantly as if it was too much to take in all at once, her eyes darting back and forth nervously, her head never moving except for a slight palsy shake.

  It was a cold day in April 1885. A slight drizzle was falling ou
tside, and gusts of cloudy breath were visible from the mouths of the hundreds of men, women, and children who had gathered outside one of the church’s three entrances. A cold wind swept across the cathedral lawns, the grass damp and still thin and dark brown with no signs of turning green. The trees were as barren as they had been in the middle of December. Nearly one thousand people had traveled great distances to take part in the dedication ceremony. Ten cars of enthusiastic well-wishers, businessmen, politicians, lawyers, judges, and other professionals and their wives and children, many of them Episcopalians, had made the trip down on a special train from the Long Island City station. By the time they arrived in Garden City for the opening service at 11 o’clock that morning, most were unable to get near the cathedral, never mind get inside and take a seat. The three entrances had been barred by police details, the place already surrounded by hundreds of devout worshippers and curiosity seekers.

  Everything, including the glass used for the windows, was English except the organ and the coat of arms of the late Mr. Stewart. The cathedral was, by all architectural and design standards, built with a “sumptuousness and thoroughness of detail which can only be secured by the lavish use of money.” For Cornelia Stewart, money was no object.

  THE STEWART MEMORIAL

  THE NEW CATHEDRAL AT GARDEN

  CITY

  Bishop Littlejohn To Open The Building

  To-Day—The Two Schools Established

  By Mrs. Stewart

  It has remained for the widow of a New York millionaire, who gained his wealth in the most respectable and prosaic of employments, to revive the chantry on American soil. … The chimes that sound from the tall steeple of the “cathedral” at Garden City, Long Island, came to America in the same year that Mrs. A.T. Stewart caused ground to be broken for a great memorial to the greatest merchant in the “dry goods trade.” … Nine years have passed and now the chantry, or mortuary chapel, has become a good sized church with appointments for the Bishop and clergy of Long Island, a famous organ built by Mr. Hilborne L. Roosevelt. … If anybody wants to know what “pure floriated Gothic” is, according to the most approved views of English architects, a visit to Garden City is all that is necessary to his enlightenment.

  —New York Times

  April 9, 1885

  The church chimes began to peal. Outside, people moved closer and closer toward one of the entrances to try to look inside or just to hear Episcopalian Bishop Abram N. Littlejohn deliver the opening service and blessing of the new cathedral. Littlejohn was a stout, balding man, his hair brushed from the back to front, barely covering his ears in feathery white curls. He had a commanding presence with his back straight and the bulk of his body pushing forward from his steadfast spine like a barrel concealed in a white linen smock and purple robe. He had a booming voice and spoke with conviction and precise elocution. He had been the bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Diocese of Long Island since 1869.

  Mrs. Stewart established two other memorials in Garden City in memory of her husband—the cathedral schools of St. Paul and St. Mary. The three-story St. Paul’s was established in 1877, reportedly on the advice of Henry Hilton. It was a school exclusively for boys. St. Paul’s was made of brick and stone, done in English Gothic design, with ornate porches of carved stone, a clock and bell tower, and a copper spire.

  It combines all the best features of modern collegiate edifices in this country and Europe. … Every part of the building is fireproof; it is thoroughly ventilated and supplied with gas and water in every room … steam heating apparatus furnish a uniform temperature throughout the edifice. … The different stories are connected by an elevator. … The course of instruction in this school is designed to cover six years and to prepare boys for admission to college, scientific schools or other higher institutions of learning.

  —New York Times

  April 9, 1885

  The St. Mary’s School, which formally opened in 1877 as well, was designed to provide young women and girls, according to the New York Times, a “thorough education in every department, and to develop such qualities of mind and heart as will form accomplished Christian women.”

  Cornelia Stewart was the driving force behind them all. Her memorials to her husband were the Cathedral of the Incarnation, with its magnificent spire, the small seminary, the lavish bishop’s residency, and two schools. She was even further instrumental in persuading the Diocese of Long Island to move its formal headquarters to Garden City from Brooklyn, lured there in no small part by the exquisite cathedral and buildings placed at its disposal.

  In a 1998 New York Times article, Natalie Naylor, director of the Long Island Studies Institute at Hofstra University, said, “Garden City would be a very different place had it not been for her. Cornelia Clinch Stewart’s role has not been given the credit it should have. She was able to do it with his money and as a monument to him. Bringing the Episcopal Diocese from Brooklyn, which was the third largest city in the country, made a difference in terms of the character of Garden City.”

  The two schools, which remained integral parts of the Garden City community for decades, were ultimately closed in 1993 due to financial difficulties. Following Mrs. Stewart’s death in 1886, her heirs formed the Garden City Company to oversee the management of the community. After this move, residents for the first time were able to purchase homes in Garden City rather than simply rent them from the Stewart estate as they had previously done.

  “That move was one of a series of circumstances that kept Stewart’s project from failing. … The project could have faltered after they both died. … Those formative years, from 1893 to 1919, were solely credited to the Garden City Company’s incredible talent to doing the right thing.”

  —John Ellis Kordes, local historian, New York Times, November 15, 1998

  It was cold and damp inside the cathedral. Most of those with reserved seating in the front rows of the long wooden pews facing the bronze lectern kept their coats, furs, jackets, and long, dark capes on. Cornelia Stewart stood with the congregation as the organist, George W. Morgan, played the “Hallelujah Chorus,” on the cathedral’s magnificent organ, rapidly blinking her eyes and staring straight ahead with a bemused look on her face. Except for being seated in a place of honor at the very front of the church, she looked like any old woman of means: thin and gaunt, stoop-shouldered, her face badly painted on, her head weighted down by the ill-fitting curly black wig, and a large, wide-brimmed black hat with a sheer black mourning veil pulled up to reveal her face. Her frame was cloaked in a long, black wool coat with a red fox fur collar, her pale hands hidden within a black fur muffler from which hung a string of dark rosary beads.

  Life alone had been mostly good for eighty-three-year-old Cornelia Stewart. She could be thankful for many things, most of all the vast fortune her husband had left her. Since his death nine years earlier, she had lived alone in one of the most elegant mansions on Fifth Avenue in New York City, where her every need was tended to by a battery of servants. Even the vast fortune bequeathed to her was taken care of by Judge Henry Hilton, a trusted friend. Her children had passed away, so the entire fortune had come to her.

  Cornelia had no mind for business. She was glad Hilton oversaw her husband’s vast dealings. Her only concerns had become her vast collection of wigs and cosmetics. The cosmetics, hundreds of exotic ointments, potions, creams, elixirs, and lotions, all promised endless youth and beauty, and all of them, no matter how unusual or expensive, had failed miserably for her as her tired, wrinkled, pinched face attested. No amount of cosmetics could turn back the clock, a fact she still refused to believe as she spent more and more on acquiring the most elaborate creams and ointments in the hope of uncovering the youth she so desired.

  Seats in the cathedral had been reserved for family and close friends. In the front pew to the right of the center aisle sat Judge Henry Hilton and his wife; the former New York governor
R. E. Fenton and his wife; Brooklyn Mayor Seth Low and his wife; Prescott Hall Butler and his wife; the Rev. J. B. Wetherill and his wife, a grand-niece; John Hughes, a son-in-law of Judge Hilton’s; and Mrs. Stewart’s three maiden sisters, Emma, Anna, and Julia Clinch.

  The service was conducted by the Rev. G. R. Vandewater of St. Luke’s Church, Dr. J. Carpenter Smith of Flushing, New York, and the Rev. Dr. Snively of Brooklyn. Following the service, Bishop Littlejohn took his place at the lectern and opened his manuscript, beginning with a text of Isaiah from the Bible. Littlejohn looked over the gathering from his perch atop the ornate brass lectern and turned his gaze to Cornelia Stewart.

  Before proceeding to any other thought I stop here on the threshold of my subject to give utterance to what, next the reverent worship of Almighty God, is the strongest impulse in all hearts at this moment,” Littlejohn said.

  As we look about us on this rare scene of architectural beauty, these lines of grace, these rich traceries in wood and stone, yonder uplifted arches, floating in air like ascending hymns arrested in their flight to the skies; these windows glowing with a light that is religious but not dim … the story of the incarnation of the Son of God, from the world’s morning to its evening; that organ of exquisite modulation and mighty compass, combing the sublime diapason of the sea with the softest note of a bird warbling in the air; yonder monumental spire, whose chaste, serene beauty charms in sympathetic fellowship the rays of rising and setting suns, and the nightly gleam of the far-away stars—as we look upon all this our hearts with spontaneous unanimity unite in a loving and grateful tribute of admiration to her who, moved by tender remembrances of the departed, by a desire to do the most enduring good in her generation, has consecrated her wealth to make here the place of God’s feet glorious. That she may live to gather some of the fruit to grow upon this tree of her planting, that peace and happiness may be the portion of her declining years, and that, at the last, when her face shall be turned to the rest that remained for the people of God in the temple not made with hands, the recollection of this pious work for the living, this enduring memorial of her beloved dead, may bring with it the benediction of Almighty God, the redeeming presence of His everlasting Son, the sure comfort of the Holy Ghost—this is the prayer trembling on all lips at this moment and struggling for utterance with the impatient fervor of a long pent-up emotion.