Walter Law founded Briarcliff Manor, the village where I’ve lived for the past 23 years:

Walter William Law (November 13, 1837 – January 17, 1924) was a businessman and the founder of the 8,000-person village of Briarcliff Manor, New York. He was a vice president of furniture and carpet retailer W. & J. Sloane, and later founded the Briarcliff Lodge, the Briarcliff Table Water Company, Briarcliff Farms, and the Briarcliff Greenhouses. He founded or assisted in establishing several schools, churches, and parks in the village, and rebuilt its train station in 1906. In the early 1900s, Walter Law was the largest individual landholder in Westchester County.

Walter Law was born in Kidderminster, England, and was one of ten children of a carpet dealer. He relocated to the United States in 1859, where he lived until his death. Throughout his life, he was employed at various places, including at W. & J. Sloane, where he worked for 24 years. After retiring to a house on Scarborough Road in the small community of Whitson’s Corners, New York, he developed the surrounding farmland into a suburban village. Law died in 1924 in Summerville, South Carolina, during rest cure treatment. (Wikipedia).

The mansion is still in private hands so I couldn’t walk down to get a picture of it (although once when I was passing I saw a woman come out of the driveway and cross the road to pick up mail. She waved to me and I thought about asking her if it would be OK to take a few pictures. But I didn’t have the courage to do it), but the picture above shows the road down to it with its fairly awful statues. The entrance gate is guarded by the lions below and their twins (i.e. a pair of each).


The first picture was taken with a Panasonic Lumix GF-1 and and Panasonic Lumix G Vario 14-42 f3.5-4.6 II, and the two lions with a Sony A6000 and Canon 50mm f1.4 LTM (I think).

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