I recently went with a friend to the Merestead Estate in Mount Kisco. I had three reasons for going there: First, my friend offered to take me to visit somewhere interesting and I was only too keen to go; Second, I’d never been there; Third, there’s a connection to the work I’m doing for the Briarcliff Manor-Scarborough Historical Society (BMSHS). Last September I helped prepare a presentation on Walter Law’ Mysterious Lanterns. William Sloane, the owner of Merestead was a good friend of Walter Law (the founder of my village: Briarcliff Manor) and was for many years his partner at W. & J. Sloane, a luxury furniture and rug store in New York City that catered to the prominent and the wealthy. While researching the presentation we came across a photograph showing one of the lanterns. This was not a surprise as we already knew that Law had given one of the lanterns to Sloane. What was a surprise was that in the same picture, in the distance we could just about make out what looked like another lantern, the existence of which was unknown to us. So we just had to go an take a look.

“Merestead, the country estate of William Sloane, includes a large neo-Georgian mansion completed in 1907, a nineteenth-century farm complex modified at approximately the same date, and 136 acres of open fields, gardens, and woodlands. Approximately nine acres at the northwest corner of the estate property was sold off during the mid-twentieth century. The estate is located in a rural area of northern Westchester County on Bryam Lake Road east of the village of Mount Kisco, New York, There are ten contributing historic components which constitute the historic Merestead estate complex. The estate buildings and entire original estate lands have remained virtually unchanged since the early twentieth century and the property contains no non-contributing structures.” (United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places Inventory—Nomination Form)

Taken with a Fuji X-E3 and Fuji XC 16-50mm f3.5-5.6 OSS II