Gallaher Mansion (1931)

The Gallaher Mansion in Norwalk was built in 1929-1931 for the inventor and industrialist Edward Beach Gallaher (1873-1953). A graduate of the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., Gallaher became a pioneer in early automobile design. In 1910 he settled in Norwalk and established the Clover Manufacturing Company, a producer of industrial abrasives. In 1917 he purchased land for an estate from Dr. Edwin Everett Smith. The site where the mansion would eventually be built, in the Cranbury section of Norwalk, had been the location, from c. 1886 to 1912, of Dr. Smith’s Kensett Sanitarium, which served people suffering from mental disorders and addictions. After a fire destroyed the sanitarium and Dr. Smith’s private cottage in 1912, the institution was moved to 65 East Avenue, on the Norwalk Green, where it operated until Smith’s retirement in 1914. The fieldstone Gallaher Mansion was designed by Percy L. Fowler in the Tudor Revival style. After Gallaher’s death, his wife Inez followed his wishes in bequeathing the mansion to the Stevens Institute. The Institute’s plans to house research projects in buildings to be erected on the estate’s grounds did not materialize. After Inez Gallaher died in 1965, the City of Norwalk acquired the 227-acre property from the Stevens Institute for use as a public park called Cranbury Park. Recent efforts by the city and the Friends of Cranbury Park, a non-profit citizen’s alliance formed in 2006, have restored the mansion and grounds. The mansion can now be rented for weddings and other events.