The Italianate house known as the Copcutt Mansion [illustrations in archives], which now serves as Saint Casimir’s Rectory, located at 239 Nepperhan Avenue in Yonkers, New York, is of great historical and architectural significance to the City of Yonkers. Closely associated with John Copcutt, early, and often controversial, industrialist whose move to the city in 1845 heralded the transformation of the town from an agricultural to an industrial center, the Mansion remains one of the city’s few architectural artifacts from the mid-nineteenth century and a well-preserved example of the Italian Villa style. Although the building has housed a convent and a rectory within recent years, it remains surprisingly intact and boasts one of Yonkers finest interiors from the period.

John Copcutt was born at Oxfordshire, England in 1805. At the age of 12, he and his family immigrated to the United States and settled in New York City where his father set up business in the veneer trade. Following his father’s footsteps, in 1835 Copcutt opened a veneer mill in West Farms, New York and remained there until it was destroyed by fire in 1845. In that year, he purchased a large tract of land that was formerly part of the Philipse estate near the confluence: of the Nepperhan and Hudson Rivers and erected upon it a number of mills and stores. Copcutt’s veneer mill, built on the foundations of an old grist mill, was situated at the first water power of the Nepperhan, at the approximate location of the present–day Larkin Plaza and just southwest of Philipse Manor Hall.¹

In 1849, the opening of the Hudson River Railroad signaled.a time of new-found prosperity for the town of Yonkers. Land values in the central section of the village, where Copcutt’s veneer mill was located, increased dramatically and the town’s population grew substantially. In 1886 D. Cole noted that:

The industries of the place... began to loom up and to give lively promise of that strength and promise to which in later days they have attained. There was great activity in all departments of enterprise and work, in mills and factories, in stores and shops, in real estate, in surveying, in outlaying, in surveying, in grading, in building, in boating and trucking. The place that had been so long retired and dormant came into notice and was wide awake.²

Copcutt’s wealth kept apace with the growth of the town, and in 1854 he made an extensive purchase of woodland along Guion Street (now Nepperhan Avenue) and built his house. Shortly afterwards, he acquired more land and water power along the Nepperhan and erected in the vicinity of the house several factories and small cottages which he rented to the hands employed in his mills.³

Within the next two decades, Copcutt became the largest and most knowledgeable dealer in imported woods in the United States. Together with William C. Waring’s hat factory, the Copcutt mills constituted the earliest major industry in Yonkers. In 1862 the rapid and unchecked industrial growth of Yonkers made it necessary to extend Riverdale and Warburton Avenues across the Nepperhan River at the site of Copcutt’s mill on the first water power. Copcutt refused to move his dam, however, to permit extension of the roadways even though he had received payment for damages from the town fathers. When the dams finally came down, Copcutt brought suit against the village and its chief executive, John Waring. The case, though, was judged in the town’s favor.⁴

In 1875 the veneer mill burned and Copcutt moved his business to New York, renting the rebuilt mill to the “Eagle” Pencil Company for a factory. A few years later Copcutt again found himself in opposition to the city. By the 1880’s the Nepperhan had become, according to local authorities, a “seething nuisance“ of polluted water which, it was feared, might breed cholera and other diseases. Dr. Valentine Brown in 1892 urged the health department to remove Copcutt’s remaining dams at the fifth and sixth water–powers to prevent a cholera epidemic. When the dams were ordered down, Copcutt refused and brought suit in the courts. To prevent him from obtaining an injunction, the citizens organized and one night in December tore the dams down releasing the waters. The incident received much press and The Yonkers Statesman of the next day read: “Dams Down! Three Nuisances Removed, A Great Night’s Work.” Copcutt is reported to have pursued the issue for the next three years, until his death in 1895.⁵