Bedford Road Historic District

St. Stephen's, 2020

Built in 1842, this Greek Revival church at 50 Bedford Road is the oldest building in the district. Its clapboard-clad facades rise to a front-gabled roof topped by a two-stage tower with belfry. On its north (rear) is a non-contributing mid-20th century Sunday school wing.[1]

The main entrances, on the south facade, are on either side of a recessed porch. Two round fluted Doric columns in antis are in the center, flanked by square Doric pilasters. The porch is topped by a full entablature and pediment.[1]

The tall, narrow rectangular stained glass windows on the east and west sides are set in decorative surrounds. Inside the church has been remodeled in the Gothic Revival style; the pews are arranged so that there is no center aisle. Both stages of the tower have corner pilasters topped by molded cornices with broad overhanging eaves; the second stage has louvered vents. Atop are four narrow wooden steeples connected by a balustrade.[1]

To the rear and west of the church, filling out most of the remainder of its two-acre (8,100 m²) lot, is its cemetery, considered a contributing site to the district. It contains approximately 450 marked graves, dating to 1844 at the earliest. To its south it is bordered by a wood post and rail fence, with a more modern stone fence topped with a wooden rail on the west, parallel to Elm Street. A wire fence sets it off on the east, leaving the north open.[1]

What is now the Town of North Castle was first settled by Europeans at the beginning of the 18th century. The colonial governor gave the town its name around 1721, when it was first used in records. Pound Ridge was split off from it in 1745. Even so, it still rivaled nearby Bedford as the most populous town in Westchester County as of the first U.S. census in 1790, the year before New Castle was created from the town's former northern portion.[1]

Most of the land in North Castle was ideal for agriculture, and thus the town was primarily known for its large farms. Over the century, a few small settlements had sprung up, such as Banksville, Kensico and Mile Square, the beginnings of today's Armonk. But despite the large and prosperous population, most of whom were of English descent and members of what had, after American independence, become the Episcopal Church, there was as of the early 19th century no house of worship in North Castle. Congregants had to go to Bedford, or other nearby towns such as Mount Kisco or White Plains, for services.[1] A plan that had supposedly in the works in the early 1740s to build a church near the present St. Stephen's location was abandoned. Instead, one was built in 1761 at what is now North Castle Corners.[5]

This began to change in 1831, when The Rev. Robert William Harris was appointed rector of Grace Church in White Plains, one of those that North Castle residents traveled to for services. He took it upon himself to tend to the area's other congregations that did not have clerical leadership, including a growing group in Mile Square. By 1841 he was conducting informal services in a log cabin near the church's present site.[1]

Late in the following year the church was formally incorporated as St. Stephen's Church North Castle, Westchester County, New York. Harris was appointed its rector. The first order of business was to build a dedicated church, and two of the first committees formed had the tasks of raising money for that project and overseeing its planning and construction.[1]

The church soon settled on a draft plan, and the building committee was expanded. One of its new members, Elisha Sutton, donated a quarter-acre (1,000 m²) from the northeast corner of his farm. After the committee budgeted $2,000 for the construction of the actual church, a vestryman, Ziel Eggleston, donated some of the lumber and built the church for free.[1]

With the church erected, the congregation concentrated on two more goals: financial stability and getting a pastor who would be exclusive to St. Stephen's. Harris proposed a way of ensuring both. The congregation should obtain a lot on which it could build a parsonage, or already had a suitable house. It would be owned by the vestrymen and wardens, who could purchase shares for a hundred dollars apiece. Once he was settled in the home, the new pastor would be able to buy back those shares at that same price when he so chose, and thus the house would over time revert to his ownership. He would also have to set up a girls' school in the building.[1]

It took until 1850 to begin to put this plan into action. A 13-acre (5.3 ha) lot to the north and west of the church was purchased from the estate of Sutton, the congregant who had donated the church's original land. It would be subdivided into 40 lots, with two set aside to serve as a burial ground and parsonage (now 40 Bedford Road) respectively. Construction of the house on the latter lot was financed via subscription, to start when two-thirds of the possible subscriptions had been sold; like the church, its budget was capped at $2,000.[1]

The new land soon became known as "the Armonk Square", after the new name of the growing hamlet, derived from the Native American term for the area meaning "a valley or fishing place between hills" that the church officers were using to promote the available land. St. Stephens' officers heavily promoted the lots within it, and the houses to be built on it were expected to cost at least a thousand dollars. In 1852 a new pastor, The Rev. Isaac Dychman Vermilye, was appointed assistant rector and the principal of Chester Female Institute, the girls' school, then run out of the rectory. Early the next year, Rev. Harris resigned the rectorship, and Vermilye replaced him. The church's board also approved a plan to add classroom and dormitory space for at least 32 students to the parsonage; however, a separate structure (no longer extant) was built instead. Two years later the church formally adopted Harris's plan by which Vermilye would come to own the remaining lots and received the proceeds of their sale.[1]

Armonk and the Bedford Road buildings on the 1867 Beers North Castle map

Vermilye served as pastor through his death in 1864. The church prospered during this period, with its congregation including Major Gen. Alexander Hamilton, grandson of his namesake, whose service during the Civil War included commanding the Union Army troops that suppressed the New York City Draft Riots. After his death, the congregation conveyed the house and accompanying lots to his wife Josephine; she continued to operate the Female Institute for several years.[1]

In 1867, Vermilye's successor, The Rev. Cornelius Winter Bolton, referred to as just C.W. Bolton, became rector. In 13 years, he oversaw significant renovations to the church. The original clear glass side windows were replaced with stained glass and the original pew doors were removed. Across the street, he supervised the construction of a new rectory (no longer extant), since Josephine Vermilye was still living in the original one.[1]

The changes to the church and its surroundings continued after Bolton left in 1880. Four years later, the church bought from Josephine Vermilye, who was still living at 30 Bedford, two of the lots of the Square in order to expand its cemetery. Around the same time, 44 Bedford Road, the last of the district's contributing properties, was built. In 1888, 16 Bedford was moved from its location closer to 24 Bedford and converted from a shoemaking shop into a residence. At the other end of the district, the church's interior was renovated, with the original gallery removed and the entire sanctuary redone in the more contemporary Gothic Revival style, the only concession to tastes that had changed since church and accompanying buildings were constructed.[1] Vermilye later sold her house to a family whose members lived in it and grew an extensive vegetable garden throughout the first half of the 20th century.[3]

As the 20th century dawned, the automobile made its presence felt in Armonk. Three of the Bedford Road houses had garages built behind them in the 1910s. Westchester's growing suburbanization made itself felt in Armonk, which was not on the railroad lines that had fed that growth,[6] in the early part of that decade when New York City's continuing growth necessitated the construction of Kensico Reservoir two miles (3.2 km) to the south. Kensico, the hamlet that had given the reservoir its name, was abandoned and flooded.[7] Some of its former residents resettled in Armonk, further contributing to its growth.[8]

During the next decade, New York began to build its state highway system to serve its growing population of motorists. Bedford Road was designated part of what has since become NY 22 in 1924, and then a decade later NY 128 was routed along Bedford Road as well. These developments brought traffic from the city and Greenwich, Connecticut, respectively, into Armonk from the south along Bedford Road.[9]

Thus, in 1948, North Castle decided to build its new town hall complex on the south side, opposite the church and houses. This required the demolition of the new parsonage that Rev. Bolton had had built in the 1860s. The church repurchased 30 Bedford Road to serve as the parsonage; it has remained in their ownership.[1] A decade later, the last member of the family Josephine Vermilye had sold her house to died; the heirs in turn sold it to a man who used it as an auction house for several years before closing that business down. It remained unused until its demolition late in the century.[3]

A decade and a half later, Armonk and Bedford Road would face another transformation. In 1964 IBM moved its corporate headquarters from New York City to the hills south of the hamlet, between it and the Connecticut state line. By the end of the decade the state had begun construction of Interstate 684 to handle the increased traffic.[6]

In conjunction with the construction of I-684's Armonk interchange just to the hamlet's west, the state highways were realigned off Bedford Road. NY 22, which had followed the Old Post Road into town past IBM, now overlapped with New York State Route 120 for a short distance at the north end of the reservoir to a new four-lane divided highway that bypassed Armonk to the south on its way to the interstate exit. Similarly, NY 128 was truncated so that it followed an extension of Main Street to end at a new intersection with NY 22. Both no longer followed Bedford Road, which in turn was vacated to a dead end at one of the interchange's offramps, greatly reducing passing traffic.[1]

In the years after the historic district was delineated and listed on the National Register, Armonk began to become a desirable suburb despite its distance from local commuter rail lines. Residential property values rose in the area, and developers began looking at opportunities to build commercial projects downtown, where demand was quickly outgrowing the buildings that had served the hamlet well through its time as a country town and early years of suburbanization. Of particular interest was the property just north of the district, part of the original lots the church and the Vermilyes had subdivided and sold.[6]

However, development had been hindered by toxic waste contamination of groundwater in the area. For years several dry cleaners had dumped and spilled their waste chemicals in the area, until the county health department discovered the extent of the pollution in 1979. Downtown Armonk had been declared a Superfund site, and the federal Environmental Protection Agency was supplying affected homes and businesses with bottled water while monitoring it.[3]

During the late 1980s, a developer proposed a project called Heritage Square, with condominiums and residences, to be built mostly on the land that had once been the Vermilyes'. It would solve the water problems via a pipeline from a similar condominium project in the town of New Castle to the north. But local opposition to that aspect and the extra parking it would require blocked it.[3]

In the late 2000s, the Armonk Square project, a 51,000-square-foot (4,700 m²) development mixing commercial space and one-room apartments with a supermarket, was proposed. In order to meet town parking requirements and provide access from the south, Elm Street was upgraded from a driveway serving 44 Bedford Road into a full paved public street. This met with heavy opposition from local preservationists as well as the state's Historic Preservation Office, who claimed it would needlessly divide the historic district.[10] After a slight reduction in size, the project was completed and opened in 2014.[11]