Cornish Estate Ruins Trail

Northgate was built in the early 1910s as a Gilded Age showpiece: a sprawling manor on 650 acres between Bull Hill and Breakneck Ridge, commissioned by Sigmund Stern, a New York City diamond merchant. In 1917, Stern sold the estate to newlyweds Edward and Selina Cornish; Edward was president of the National Lead Company, and the couple furnished it as their country retreat. Both died within two weeks of each other in May 1938, and the mansion stood mostly empty through the 1950s before a 1958 fire destroyed most of it. Stone walls, window openings, a fireplace still standing, and the outlines of a swimming pool, a greenhouse, a pump house, and a barn-garage complex remain, all slowly being reclaimed by second-growth forest.