Fall 2004 Edition          

Ackerman-Naugle Family and Their Houses  By Jane Lyle Diepeveen, Borough Historian On October 21, 1925, Leslie D. Naugle inherited the unusual stone house on Dunkerhook Road from his grandmother, Mary Ann Ackerman, thus retuning the home of his Naugle ancestors to the family after many decades – perhaps more than a century. The house was still referred to as the Mary Ann Ackerman Homestead as late as 1949 but as a National Historic Site it is known as the Vanderbeck-Naugle House    This house has been in the news lately, since it has been sold to a developer. Unless the deed of sale was restricted against it, he had the right to demolish the building which is listed by the Borough as a historic site and is on the State and National Registers of Historic Sites. The new owner has presented the Planning Board and Council with plans to build town houses on the property and the adjacent lot also owned by the Naugle family, but to leave the historic home and repair it. The Planning Board and the Council have recommended rezoning, but the Council has not introduced a Zoning Ordinance amendment as of this writing.  It is not known when the first Naugle arrived in America. The earliest we know of was the Naugle who lived in the Vanderbeck-Naugle House on Dunkerhook Road at the time of the Revolution. The property belonged to Jacob Vanderbeck, Sr., who bought a large tract of land on both sides of the Saddle River in 1734. One source says the house was built about 1740. Other accounts tell that Mr. Naugle built the home in 1761 when he married Vanderbeck’s daughter. Naugle had helped Vanderbeck farm his land.  The historic marker at the house states that Naugle was a paymaster to General Lafayette’s troops during the Revolutionary War and that the General later visited the house. Lafayette’s correspondence relates that he made two visits to this country after the war and on one of these he visited his old paymaster.  The Naugle House is not a typical Dutch stone house. It is built on a hillside, with the kitchen at the road or basement level and the main living space accessed from higher up the hill. However, the large living area has the typical wide cooking fireplace and adjacent cupboard of all the early stone houses, so it seems probable that in early times this room was the kitchen/eating/living area and the basement level kitchen was a later use. The only other rooms on the first floor are a hall with stairs going up and down and a storage room. The half story above is frame construction with low windows at the front and larger ones at the gable ends. The measured drawings made by the Historic American Building Survey in 1937 show two small bedrooms and two storage rooms all accessed by a hall. It is not known whether the upper story is a later addition replacing an original sleeping/storage garret. There are no fireplaces at this level; the only heat in early times came from the chimney.  We do not know when the Naugle family left this house. Jacob Vanderbeck, Jr. sold the entire property to John A. Garretson upon his father’s death in 1800, but the Naugle family may have stayed on as tenants. The forebears of Leslie Naugle lived on Saddle River Road, near Broadway, from about 1850 to about1925.  This section was then known as Arcola. Maps of 1867 and 1913 show a Naugle house on eight acres of land there. After he inherited the old stone house on Dunkerhook Road, Leslie Naugle moved to the house of his early ancestor. His late son, Melvin, was the last of the family to live in the homestead. The family acquired the property next door and had a house built on it about 1930.  The Naugle House property was first separated from the original Vanderbeck property in 1869 when Thomas J. Ferdon, the owner at that time deeded the house and a one-acre lot to his daughter, Mary Ann, who had married into the Ackerman family.  David Ackerman, the founder of the Ackerman family in Bergen County, left the Netherlands in 1662 for religious freedom in America on the famous ship, Fox, which carried many Hollanders to the New World. Two of his sons moved to Bergen County in 1686 and two more in 1694. These sons had many children and left hundreds of descendants. No Ackerman property is shown in what is now Fair Lawn on the 1867 map, although many Ackermans are shown in surrounding areas. We do know that Mary Ann Ackerman lived on Dunkerhook Road from 1869 probably until her death, but we do not know what relation she was to the other Fair Lawn Ackermans.  According to the late Ethan Ackerman, a life-long Fair Lawn resident, the former restaurant on the corner of Dunkerhook Road (now Century Road) and Saddle River Road was once the homestead of the Fair Lawn branch of the Ackerman family. This home, now demolished, is reputed to have been built as early as 1715, but this is extremely doubtful. The home had been so extensively remodeled in the Victorian Gothic Revival style that the only signs of the original construction visible were the large rough-hewn support beams in the cellar and a beautiful hand carved mantel, reported to match those in the Vanderbeck House and the former Garret T. Hopper House on Prospect Street.  In 1867, the property was owned by C.Z. Berdan, who owned farmland on the other side of Saddle River Road. The 1913 map shows the same property owned by Albert Berdan who also owned 50 acres across Fair Lawn Avenue. Next to this property, on Saddle River Road, was a 28-acre farm owned by Mrs. C. Ackerman. This was later the home of Ethan Ackerman. There is no current information on when the Ackermans lived in the former Berdan House. This is a puzzle for later research.    See Jane Lyle Diepeveen's Summer 2004 article on the Mysterious Disappearance of George Morlot.