By, Surabhi Ashok
Joseph Bonaparte’s Bordentown home is now open to public visitation as a historical landscape.
Joseph Bonaparte was the King of Naples and Spain, and the brother of Napoleon. After the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, he fled across the ocean to New Jersey, where he settled for twenty years.
Bonaparte built Point Breeze, his estate, to overlook both Crosswicks Creek and the Delaware River. He made sure to enhance the scenery by designing various carriage paths, stone bridges, sculpture gardens, and underground tunnels for quick escape, and by planting trees and forestry to make up a beautiful 60 acre park.
At the center was a three-story 38,000 square foot mansion, with an extravagant wine cellar, art collection, and library. The building even became a meeting ground for many notable personas of the time, including Henry Clay, the Marquis de Lafayette, Daniel Webster, and John Quincy Adams.
After Bonaparte left New Jersey, the estate was passed along through many owners. The one structure that has persevered through the years is the gardener’s house, which is being turned into a museum dedicated to preserving the history of the area. The museum showcases many of Bonaparte’s old memorabilia, a lot of which were collected privately by lawyer Peter Tucci, some period-specific furniture, and more.
The main mansion at Point Breeze no longer stands due to a fire that occurred in 1820 while Bonaparte was returning from a trip to New York. According to various accounts, he had come back to see his neighbors rushing into the burning house to recover many of his possessions, like his prized paintings and crowned jewels, and presenting it to him. His second reconstructed mansion was razed in 1850 after Henry Beckett bought the property.
In October of 2020, the New Jersey State Department of Environmental Protection’s Green Acres Program, Bordentown, and the Delaware & Raritan Greenway Land Trust together bought Point Breeze from the Society of the Divine World, a Catholic missionary organization, in order to turn the property into a public park called Delaware and Raritan Canal Park. The hopes are to bring interest from all over the world to Bordentown and ensure that their unique history is protected.
Linda Mead, the president of Delaware & Raritan Greenway Land, hopes to open the estate to the public by the fall and hopes that people will see the deep stories entrenched right in theirvery own backyards.
Source: https://njmonthly.com/articles/news/former-bonaparte-estate-opening-to-public-after-almost-two-centuries/
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/31/nyregion/bonaparte-point-breeze-bordentown.html