From Job Allen’s Iron Works, to John Heyward Glover’s Summer Home – from Slavery, to one of Baseball’s Founding Father – from Protectory to Sanitarium to Senior Living

by Vito L. Bianco*

The recent announcement of the sale of St. Francis, its pending closure, and probable demolition has shocked and alarmed the greater Denville community.  The potential destruction and loss of this iconic facility, will be the most dramatic alteration to Denville’s beaucollic landscape since the burning of the Wayside Inn in 1953. 

Few Denville properties can boast such historic significance as St. Francis.  Its origins date to the very founding of Denville itself, culminating with the establishment of St. Francis in 1895, which it has been ever since. For decades beginning in 1974, thousands of Denville residents answered the call of the Sisters of St. Francis to assist in raising funds at the annual Harvest Festival for St. Clare’s Hospital, which they once owned.  Selfless volunteers happily endured many months of planning, manned the food tents, concessions, and keyosks, directed traffic, sold raffle tickets, and then cleaned it up only to begin the whole process all over again for the next year.  What must those people be feeling today? 

The Denville Historical Society has spent the past 50 years trying to save what’s left of our historic places. To our credit, we’ve had a number of successes, but also, regretably, many losses.  Afterall, we’re just 17 volunteers with limited resources. Often, our Township government and the public have been very supportive.  Never has there been a greater need for all Denville interests to ban together and stop this potential assualt on our heritage. Together we must Save St. Francis! 

In his will, John Heyward Glover left his property in New Jersey to his son, John Heyward Glover, Jr. with the right for his wife, Eliza, to occupy it as long as she was living.  He also bequeathed to his son all of his furniture in Pequannock and Hanover Townships. John Heyward Glover, Jr. (1816-59) spent part of his youth vacationing and/or residing in Denville.  He returned to South Carolina and became a rice planter after his father’s death, and married Jane Porter Bolan (1820-1911) on March 15, 1838. His family carried on the tradition of spending the summer months in Denville until the Rockaway Farms was sold in 1840 “for $10,000 by the Glover estate.”  

Back in South Carolina, Eliza Glover was not entirely a part of the close-knit Glovers of Colleton County. She was described as “a beautiful lady, and much more refined than most of her in-laws. . . . who spent her life helping the needy, as she was a young widow.”  Her home at Fontainbleau, her principal residence when her husband died, was probably the most elaborate in Colleton.  It was described as “a palatial brick two and one half story plantation home, containing a very large ballroom, white and black marble mantlepieces, decorative plaster and crystal chandeliers.”  Eliza Vincent Glover died on January 26, 1859. 

After John Heyward Glover, Jr. sold his father’s Rockaway Farms estate in Denville in 1840, the property changed hands 16 times in 22 years, until 1862, when it was purchased by Maria and Louis Fenn Wadsworth. An attorney, politician, judge, and professional baseball player Louis Fenn Wadsworth (1825 -1908), is considered to be one of the “Four Fathers of Baseball.” 

Louis Fenn Wadsworth was born on May 26, 1825, in Hartford, CT. His father ran a business known as J.C. & A. Wadsworth, which manufactured and sold clocks. Wadsworth graduated from Hartford’s Washington College (now Trinity College) in 1844. After college, he moved to Michigan but returned to the east coast to practice law in New York City in 1848.  In 1851, Wadsworth was appointed as Deputy Clerk by the Clerk of the House in Albany. He also served as Clerk of the New York Legislature’s “select committee to investigate the funds of the late court of chancery,” for which he was paid $500. In 1853, he was nominated for Schools Inspector for New York City’s 8th Ward on the Regular Democratic Whig ticket.  For several years he had a place in the Custom House in New York and was an active Tammany man. 

Despite being a leading and prominent figure in local and state politics, “it was baseball that was his great passion.” Wadsworth was a first baseman with the Washingtons/Gothams as early as 1850, then with the Knickerbockers Baseball Club (1854–57), only to return to the Gothams. One of the veteran Knicks, told the New York Sun in an1887 interview, “I had almost forgotten the most important man on the team and that is Lew Wadsworth. He was the life of the club. Part of his club suit consisted of a white shirt on the back of which was stamped a black devil . . . His hands were very large and when he went for a ball they looked like the tongs of an oyster rake. He got there all the same and but few balls passed him.” 

The game that Wadsworth played in the 1850s bore only slight resemblance to today’s game. Wadsworth, however, had a “crucial role in affixing nine innings and nine men to the rules of baseball. While Alexander Cartwright’s Written rules for the Knickerbockers in 1845 are generally thought of as the game’s establishing fundamentals, and are usually acknowledged to have established the distance between bases at 90 feet, the number of players on a side at nine and the length of a game at nine innings, they in fact did no such things. The nine players and nine innings, at least, are actually attributable to Louis Wadsworth.”  

It was not until 1857 that the New York Game rules were modified during the New York Baseball Convention among a group of 16 organized clubs, which was held to unify the playing rules. As a representative from the New York Knickerbocker Baseball Club, along with teammates Doc Adams and W.H. Grenelle, Wadsworth led the opposition to those who advocated seven players and seven innings, including his own Knickerbocker Club. Wadsworth convinced the other clubs to go with nine men and nine innings. He made the motion that resulted in the adoption of the standard we have today. Afterwards, a pariah among his clubmen, Wadsworth resigned and resumed his former affiliation with the Gothams. Wadsworth may have actually been paid to switch teams by the Knickerbockers, which, if true would make Wadsworth one of – if not the – first professional baseball player. 

In 1862, Louis Fenn Wadsworth retired from baseball and left New York to become a gentleman farmer on the old Glover Estate in Denville. He married Maria Isabel Meschutt, widow of Jackson Fisher, a wealthy woman of Morris County with two young children.  In Denville, Wadsworth rekindled his educational interests and served as Rockaway Township’s Superintendent of Schools.  In 1866, Wadsworth reported to the New Jersey State Board of Education that schools in Rockaway Township (which then included Denville) “are kept open while public money lasts, and, with few honorable exceptions, close when that is expended. . . .Our teachers, for the most part, teach but three or six months.  They do not intend to make it a vocation, and never acquire the experience requisite to success.  Until a sufficient sum shall be annually raised to procure able and experienced teachers, the schools in this township will remain in their present condition, and all who desire that their children shall receive even a fair education, must send them away from home.”  Louis Fenn Wadsworth continued his practice as an attorney and also served as the local Justice of the Peace in Denville.