The front of the Manor, the side facing the river, was dressed by the stone masons with regular stones, while the stones on the sides and back are irregular in shape and size. The front of the Kingsland Manor would be viewed first by people traveling on the Third River. An interesting feature that was pointed out by John Simco, Museum Director of the Nutley Historical Society and Museum, is a stone tablet set into the front facade. The tablet bears the inscription of “June 5th, 1702” and the initials “J. C. R.” John said that the tablet was from an earlier building in Nutley that was called Bend View and existed at a bend in the Passaic River.

In the book The History of Nutley, compiled in 1907 by Elizabeth Stow Brown, a member of the New Jersey Historical Society, the story of the stone tablet is on page 22:

The Van Zandt or Vreeland House by the Passaic, also known of late years as Bend View, was of the small plain type. The tradition of a lineal descendant is that it was built by Jacob Vreeland in 1702, and that hither he brought his bride in 1703.

A "rubbing" was taken from which an illustration was made by the "direct process." It has always been assumed in the town that this tablet read 1702. It has therefore been a surprise to find the date 1792. The initials belong to no one who ever owned the house or lived there so far as is known. It seems not improbable that the present nine may have been an alteration from a zero, as such mischievous changes are not unknown on tombstones.

The first mystery is why the stone had the initials “J. C. R.” and not the initials of the Jacob Vreeland who was said to have owned the home. An article from the Passaic Daily News of March 9th, 1893 states that the owner of the Bend View at the time, Mrs. Monroe Wheeler, was paying off the debts of her wastrel husband who ran off with a servant girl by the name of Kittie McBride. According to the article, Mrs. Wheeler “is the niece of Gen. Horace Porter, and the daughter of Wynant Van Zandt, who dwelt for many years in the old stone house on the bend of the river which is now used as a road and river resort.” The article provided evidence of a “Van Zandt” connection. The article continues: “The house is one of the most ancient in the township, and over the door is a tablet bearing the letters J. R., and the date June 5th, 1702. It was built by John Riker, who lived in it for many years, and afterward it became a part of the Morris estate.”

We know of a Peter Morris, who partnered with Joseph Kingsland Jr. to establish local paper mills that the Kingslands owned for over 80 years. He was married to Joseph Jr.’s sister, Sarah Kingsland. We have not been able to establish that Peter was the person who owned the Riker home as part of the Morris estate, but the location of the home makes it a real possibility. The Kingsland Manor sits on the border of Essex County and Passaic County. The Bend View home was near the Avondale section of Nutley. Around 1892, it was turned into a hotel and river resort. An article in the Passaic Daily News of a fire at Bend View Inn on September 13th, 1899 stated the following: “The Bend View Inn…is (o)n the River Road, a quarter of a mile or more below the Yountakaa (Yanticaw) Country Club…The hotel is in Essex County – about a stone’s throw from the Passaic County Line.” That places the location of Bend View about where Cambridge Heights is today.

So now we come to the final mystery. How did the stone tablet from the Bend View home built by John Riker in 1702 come to be attached to the facade of the Kingsland Manor? The Manor was built as a farm house around 1768 by the Walls brothers, John and James, and purchased by Joseph Kingsland Sr. in 1787.

We know that the building was still around in 1907 when Elizabeth Stow Brown wrote her history of Nutley. We know that Mrs. Wheeler no longer owned Bend View in 1899 when a fire destroyed the kitchen and an out-kitchen attached to the building. The proprietor at that time was named H. L. Lange. There is no record that the Bend View Inn continued to have guests after that fire. We know that a barn belonging to the Bend View Inn was used to hold a prize fight between Nick Lyons and Michael Donoghue in 1904 and that the Inn was no longer in service. All these facts were gathered from newspaper articles in the Passaic Daily News. The answer to how the stone showed up at the Kingsland Manor may lie with a subsequent owner, Bernard Charles “Bus” McGinnity.

“Bus” McGinnity was a third ward constable in Nutley and a cartoonist for the New York American newspaper who opened a speakeasy in 1927, during Prohibition. On the floor of the speakeasy is a stone with the date “1702”. It’s likely that “Bus” was inspired by the stone tablet he salvaged from the demolition site of the home built by John Riker and decided to borrow its establishment date. Our theory is that he built his story around the tablet and had it put on the facade of the Manor as “proof” of the established date.

Above are a rubbing of the stone from The History of Nutley, a current picture of the stone on the facade of Kingsland Manor, and a picture of the date engraved on the floor of the speakeasy.