Farmingdale Historic Notes

The Wainwright House at 48 Main Street may be the oldest house in Farmingdale. The first Wainwright (sometimes spelled Wainright) to own the house was Halsted H. Wainwright II who bought it in 1831.  His father, Halsted Wainwright I (1771-1818), rented the house to run a business with a post office, as early as 1817, when it was owned by the Corlies family. While it became locally known as the Wainwright house, does it actually date from an earlier time and, if so, who built it?

Britton Corlies bought 207 acres of a 345 acre tract from the Robert Lippincott estate in 1793.  It belonged to Corlies and then his son David until 1823. And even though David Corlies operated a saw mill at the southern end of the pond behind the house while he lived in the house, earlier owners more likely built the original structure.

The Proprietors of East New Jersey sold 345 acres of a large Marsh’s Bog tract to Stephen West in 1690. The area got its name from Jonathan Marsh who purchased property here in 1685. The Proprietor’s deed specifically states that the acreage was “bounded, abutted by barren lands unsurveyed,” - no one was living in the vicinity at that time. West was a Massachusetts Bay Colony planter and land speculator who never moved to New Jersey. In 1739, West sold the property to “Joseph Lippincott, yeoman.”   A yeoman was a working farmer who owned his own land, but still depended on his neighbors through bartering to exchange necessities like other foodstuffs, tools, candles, and clothing.

Joseph Lippincott’s son Robert was 26 when he married Rebecca Tilton in 1749 and probably moved his young bride into his father’s house. Two years later Joseph Lippincott’s will was witnessed by Adam Brewer and others neighbors who lived nearby, providing circumstantial evidence that Joseph did in fact live in a house on this property. When his son Robert Lippincott took it over in 1760, the phrase regarding bounded or unsurveyed land no longer appears in the new deed, so people had begun to live in and around Marsh’s Bog by then.

The architecture of the house exhibits many characteristics of mid-18th century Monmouth County house forms. These elements include hand-hewn post and beam construction (or half-timbering, the method of creating structures of heavy timbers jointed together with pegged wooden mortise and tenon joints); hand-made bricks used in the walls; Dutch doors (which were divided horizontally so that the bottom half remains shut while the top half opens); tight-winder stairs behind the chimney (wedge-shaped steps turning a corner); and clapboard siding (long thin timber boards that overlap one another).

In 2012, Virginia Woolley and her son John, both members of the Farmingdale Historical Society, purchased the Wainwright House and engaged in a six-month project of careful restoration. As a result of their work, the Monmouth County Historical Commission has given them a 2013 Preservation Award. All the historical documentation together with the house’s architectural characteristics suggests that the Wainwright house was built by the Lippincotts between 1739 and 1793 - most likely within 10 years of 1750.