History

The section of South Orange that called Tuxedo Park, was given that name at least two years before the first house was built here in 1913. Thomas D. Kilburn once owned the entire tract of land that our houses were built on. Kilburn was born on October 9, 1796 and died on February 15, 1882. He resided in Orange, New Jersey his entire life. He owned this property in 1860, perhaps even earlier,and his descendants still owned it by 1904, when it was referred to in an Essex County Atlas as “Homestead Farm.”

It is possible that our area is called “Tuxedo Park” after Tuxedo Park in New York, which was established in 1886, the same year that an heir to the Lorillard tobacco fortune wore the first tuxedo (a formal jacket without the tails) at a Tuxedo Park function. The New York Tuxedo Park was named after a tribe of Delaware Nation Indians known as the P’tuksit. The name means the “wolf-footed or round-footed” ones. English settlers later anglicized the name to Tucksito, which finally became Tuxedo.

Our neighborhood, when originally designed in 1911 included a park as part of the development. This park was to be located on Sinclair Terrace, between South Kingman Road and South Stanley Road and would have taken up about one third of the block. It would have had an additional street on its fourth side, Flower Place.

A 1911 Essex County Atlas includes a detailed map of our neighborhood. All of our streets existed plus others that don’t exist today. In 1911 South Kingman Road only went from South Orange Avenue to Sinclair Terrace. The section from Sinclair to Cameron was labeled “Dyer Place” and the section from Cameron to Varsity was called “Synott Place”. Although no houses had been erected on the property, each block was divided into parcels of land, almost all with twenty-foot frontages. Future homeowners would purchase multiple parcels, most bought three so that they would have sixty-foot frontages.

The only structure on the property was a building labeled “Office”, which was located on South Orange Avenue, just about midway between South Kingman Road and South Stanley Road. The first three homes built in Tuxedo Park were erected in 1913. Development at first was slow, with only 21 homes built between 1913 and 1919.The next ten years saw massive development however. Between 1920 and 1929 151 houses, 78% of the existing 219 houses, were built. The decade 1930-39 saw an additional 13 houses built, with the remaining 9 houses constructed after 1940.