Some History about Muller’s Farm

Emilie Grootendorst Barry, Evanston, Illinois – for 6l years (March 19, 2018 at 7:41 pm)

Well, I am the youngest, and the last of the six grandchildren of Katie Pfeiffer and William Muller, who came to Oakland in the 1890’s. They were married in Manhattan in 1887, when both were 23. My grandmother had no premonition she was to leave her mother’s high stooped brownstone at 502 West 43rd Street neighborhood on New York’s West Side to spend the rest of her life in Oakland, Bergen County, NJ! But someone put the bug in grandfather’s ear about the countryside in Oakland. And he acquired the property with the pond, and across the Ramapo River and up the mountainside! His intention was to be a gentleman farmer, instead of a prosperous baker with his father, George, at 599 Tenth Avenue. NYC. I think his intent was to raise horses! That didn’t happen, but he still had a horse, Delocky, when he died in 1938. I was six.

My childhood memory was the developing swimming pool and picnic grounds that was Muller’s Park. So I appreciated your including the photo of the farm with all its buildings extant, and your memory of the carriages up in the “big barn.”

My last visit to Oakland was in 1991, and nothing of the property that I knew, existed. My family sold the property in 1965, and various happenings occurred to it in the following years. The big frame house burned, and the end of the pool and picnic facility came with a shooting between rival gangs brought out from Brooklyn by bus, to celebrate a Puerto Rican holiday.

The Borough of Oakland has acquired it and neighboring Pleasureland to make a park of it! And so more than a hundred years has seen the changes of the Muller’s Oakland, and you looked back on them from the early 1930’s,

(I think your younger sister, Nancy, was aboard the Holland America run “Groote Beer” – the constellation- sailing to Europe with me, when we were college students, the summer of 1952. It was a marvelous adventure!)

Thank you, Bradford, for your accounting of your memories! Tinker was in my class at our Oakland Grammar School. My dad was a councilman and mayor, following Clifford McEvoy in the 1940’s. When my mom died in 1947, he was at a Mayors Convention in Atlantic City. I was 15…