CityView Magazine

22 | October 2019 T he paint is peeling and the rooms are bare. But there's still plenty at Long Valley Farm to excite the imagination about the fabulously wealthy Rockefellers who owned the 1,420-acre property outside Spring Lake for nearly 70 years and vacationed there, particularly when the weather was cool. "ey usually came down the day aer Christmas," says Colleen Bowers, a ranger at Carvers Creek State Park of which the farm is now a part. James Stillman Rockefeller and his family would then hunt, fish, hike and even swim in the millpond if the weather was nice. And from photos and stories collected by the park, it's clear they had a wonderful time. e house, which is opened for tours at least once each month, is a memorial to those heydays. James S. Rockefeller, whose grandfather and great uncle founded Standard Oil, bought the Long Valley Farm property in 1937. en about 35, the Yale graduate already had plenty of accomplishments to his own name, including an Olympic gold medal (he captained a winning rowing crew at the 1924 games in Paris); he was married (to a great-niece of Andrew Carnegie); he had four children; and he was well-established at the bank over which he would eventually preside (you know it today as Citibank, or Citicorp). Rockefeller was well-acquainted with the Long Valley Farm area. Percy Rockefeller, his uncle, owned the Overhills estate, based just a few miles away and which had included the farm property among its thousands of acres. But Overhills, originally an exclusive club, was much grander than John S. Rockefeller's house at the farm would be. Overhills boasted elegant brick homes and grounds, a clubhouse, a golf course designed by Donald Ross, a polo field and stables. Down on the farm with the Rockefellers The rustic charms of their one-time vacation home BY CATHERINE PRITCHARD | PHOTOGRAPHY BY MATTHEW WONDERLY F E A T U R E

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