Edgerly. (Photos courtesy of Kevin and Hope Cotter and Janet Six.)

Kevin and Hope Cotter now live in the mansion that was the capital of Webster Edgerly’s Victorian-era health cult

The Castle

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By Matthew Kassel

Small-town stories are often apocryphal, the stuff of popular myth. However, in the case of Webster Edgerly, a bigoted health reformer who moved to Hopewell in the late 1800s to establish a utopian community based on his own principles of hygiene and eugenics, the odd and disturbing stories surrounding him are mostly true.

Next to the Lindbergh House, probably the most well-known artifact of Hopewell’s parochial history is the Castle, across the street from the Highland Cemetery on Greenwood Avenue, up a long, gravel road, and tucked snugly away in a wooded clearing dappled with tall Japanese maples and ginkgo trees.

Most Hopewell residents are told that an eccentric white supremacist once lived there; that he wanted to create an exclusive, utopian community; that he failed, and his mansion—the Castle—is all that really remains. Those details are, indeed, accurate.

And today, the current residents of the mansion—a married couple seeking to foster community involvement—serve as an intriguing foil to the legacy of the bizarre man who once haunted the estate formerly known as Ralston Heights.

Janet Six, an archaeologist who teaches at the University of Hawaii-Maui College, lived in the Castle from 1995 to 2003. She was so intrigued by the ambiguous story of its prior occupant, Webster Edgerly, that she wrote her master’s thesis on the subject, and published an article in Archaeology magazine titled “Hidden History of Ralston Heights: The story of New Jersey’s failed ‘Garden of Eden’” in 2004.

Ralston Heights was the name of Webster Edgerly’s estate—the brick mansion and its surrounding land—which he bought in 1894. Six, 52, served as property caretaker of the estate while she researched its history for her thesis, which she wrote as a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania.

When she decided to look into Edgerly, she found that there was very little available biographical information about him.
So she pieced together the story of his life based mainly on interviews, his substantial body of writing and 18 years of editions of the Hopewell Herald, the town’s old newspaper, from when Edgerly lived there.

“I was horrified when I first got there,” Six said. “I put nightlights everywhere.”

Why would she be scared?

“When I moved there, there was so much intrigue and mystery. The house is unnerving,” Six explained. “You’re super disoriented when you walk in; it’s designed specifically for [Edgerly’s] principles.”

Edgerly, who went by the pseudonym Edmund Shaftesbury, had intended to create his own Garden of Eden on the Hopewell property, and believed in eugenics as a purifying agent that could restore the glory of the Caucasian race.

As Six writes in her article, Edgerly was born in Massachusetts and graduated from Boston University with a law degree in 1876, the same year he established the Ralston Health Club of America. After careful research and inquiry, Six discovered that Edgerly had co-founded the Ralston-Purina Company with Will Danforth, the founder of Purina Mills.

But Edgerly was not entirely focused on pushing his brand of whole-wheat cereal, which the Purina Mills Company manufactured in the late 19th century. In his lifetime, he published 82 books, with titles like Lessons in Artistic Deep Breathing, Sexual Magnetism and The Transference of Thought.

Six said it was bizarre, in a meta sort of way, reading Edgerly’s books in the house in which they were written. As she continued to research the life of this self-proclaimed “health guru,” though amused by his odd, Victorian proclivities, Six was put off by the often racist bent of his ideas.

In that vein, it seems a clever twist of history that the residents now living in the Castle bought the property for the sake of forming community relationships. Their values stand in stark opposition to Edgerly’s exclusionary philosophy.

Spouses Kevin and Hope Cotter moved to 10 Castle Lane in November of 2009 from Palmer Square in Princeton. By that time, the house was newly renovated, and Ralston Heights was a palimpsest of Edgerly’s confusing and spotty past.

“It was really important for us to have a space for community and for people to gather, because we really like when people connect,” said Hope, 31, who works as assistant to the CEO for a public finance company in New York called Solar Capital.

“The reason we bought the house is because we’re people of relationship; relationship is the most important thing to us.”
Kevin (from Buffalo) and Hope (from Pittsburgh) both grew up among middle-class families in small homes. They call the house their dream home. “We’ve always been plugged in to the arts in New York City,” said Kevin, 37.

He works with his alma mater, Princeton University, in the development office.

Kevin and his wife have hosted about 20 gatherings in their home for promoting the arts. They said that they used to host salons and dinner parties with opera singers, painters and philosophers in their small, 700-square-foot Princeton apartment. But they outgrew it, and in two years in Hopewell, the Cotters have seen around 400 visitors circulate through their 11,000-square-foot, three-story residence.

“The great thing about owning a castle is that visitors can spend the night,” Kevin joked.

Neither Hope nor Kevin feels affected by the property’s weird history.

“[Webster Edgerly] was quirky and definitely had some beliefs that are unorthodox, but one of the things he did believe in is fellowship and getting people together, and that’s one of the things that Hope and I really believe in,” Kevin explained.

“In terms of the history of the house, you make it what you make it, and although the funky history is there, I don’t think we’ve felt affected by it,” Hope said.

Among Edgerly’s odd notions: he thought watermelons were toxic to Caucasians; that all non-Caucasian males should be castrated at birth; that mind control was possible; that one should walk only on the balls of one’s feet to prevent the “leakage of vital force,” as he wrote in his 1888 book, Lessons in the Mechanics of Personal Magnetism.

Ralston was even an acronym for Edgerly’s seven principles: Regime, Activity, Light, Strength, Temperation, Oxygen and Nature.

Seven is a recurring number in the phenomena of Edgerly’s obsessive-compulsive system of beliefs, perhaps related to the lunar cycle, Six explained. There are seven rooms on each floor of the mansion and seven ponds on the property, which Edgerly hoped to establish as a “City of Ralston.”

In fact, he planned to build seven mansions, along with home lots, small farms and a temple for his devoted Ralstonites, Six said, based on archaeological research she conducted on the property. During his time, Edgerly attracted 800,000 followers to the Ralston Health Club—Queen Victoria even had a set of his books—and hoped to establish his utopia by selling the home lots to devotees culled from his following.

The Cotters say that the house is like a living museum of artifacts. A copper intercom, now out of use, is on the wall in the master bedroom, and old flashlights are set on the walls throughout the house. Interspersed among these vestigial rarities are paintings by friends and local artists that the Cotters know. They also have a few books by Edgerly on display: humorous gifts from friends.

They have hosted art shows in the mansion, including one for a photographer from Tennessee who focuses on Civil War-era photography, which they opened publically to the Hopewell community. In January, they are planning to hold a Princeton Festival event on the first floor.

Kevin and Hope are both musicians (Hope plays pipe organ and Kevin piano), and Hope said that they “wanted to create an acoustic and stimulating space” that was also “serene.” They chose well. According to Six, the main staircase in the house was designed to hold a 36-piece orchestra: 72 steps, one musician every other step.

“The mind needs to be constantly stimulated; you have to pay attention. It’s all designed for acoustics,” Six said of the house. “It doesn’t make sense to a normal person. I never saw anyone in there that didn’t get lost.”

Kevin and Hope, who rent out an attached house of the building, said that they have only gotten lost once. There is not a single room in the entire house that is not the same shape. They are often asked about ghosts.

“We tell people that we keep all the ghosts in the vault,” Kevin said. The walk-in vault in the basement cannot actually be locked anymore. Though for someone as seemingly paranoid as Edgerly, a vault was probably a necessary addition.

The couple plans on staying in the house for a long time, and they are excited to connect with their neighbors in Hopewell, which Hope called a “less transient” town than Princeton. She said she would like to host a town Easter egg hunt on the property.

“In a very disconnected, very fast-paced world, it’s kind of wonderful to have these cinematic moments in your home, with your family and your friends, and then all these people you don’t know, which is even better,” said Hope.

Kevin added, “We hope our chapter in the provenance of the house will be an uplifting, enlightening one before it passes on to the next person.” In a way, the Cotters have realized the potential of the Castle more than Webster Edgerly ever could.

Six guesses that Edgerly’s legacy has been ignored because of his particularly sinister interest in eugenics. She said that Purina even changed its corporate history to black out any association with the “health guru.” Nestlé S.A. bought the Ralston-Purina Company in 2001, changing its name to Nestlé Purina.

Edgerly’s utopian community never materialized. Only 25 of the 400 or so lots on Ralston Heights were sold. All that really remains of Edgerly’s sordid and quirky past is the Castle and the deteriorated home lots around the property. Edgerly died in 1926 in Trenton, after he was run out of Hopewell in the wake of building a faulty town water tank, which still sits, dilapidated, on the property.

Six explained that although Edgerly gutted and remodeled the Castle, he didn’t build it, though he added a front when he bought it standing. To prove this, she dated a fireplace in the house back to 1820, about 75 years before Edgerly moved in.

She believes that a Northern General of the Civil War, a Colonel Gordon, built the house. And ironically, Six added, the building was probably used for the underground railroad to transport black slaves to freedom.

Whether or not that’s true, it’s amusing to wonder what Webster Edgerly would have made of such a tidbit.