to the
J. William Fosdick
Salon No. 4

From King's Notable New Yorkers, 1899

Today the stately mansion graces what is now the campus of Georgian Court University, and Fosdick's twelve panels still decorate the beautiful library that now serves as the meeting room for the president of the university.

It is hoped that in the near future images of Fosdick's fire-etched panels will be on display here in this salon of the E-Museum's Antique Hall. An illustration of one of the panels appeared as the fifth image in a 1900 article entitled BURNT WOOD DECORATION by Marie Jonreau in Puritan Magazine, exhibited here in the E-Museum.

In the 1969 book by Edwin Palmer Hoyt entitled The Goulds: A Social History is the following mention of the Fosdick panels on p. 142: "The library's handsome burnt-wood walls were designed by J. W. Fosdick."

Back in 1909, J. William Fosdick himself commented on these panels in his article "Fire Etching in Home Decoration" in Country Life Magazine, as follows:

"Mr. George Gould's library at Lakewood is in very dark coca-bola wood, and above his bookcases, which stand about five feet high, there is a series of panels illustrating decoratively the book plates of famous authors."

Georgian Court University's archivist Sister Barbara Williams has confirmed that Fosdick's panels are there, and that they were at one time restored and re-gilded. She described two of the panels as flanking the fireplace on one wall and the remaining panels embedded in the paneling that surrounds what was once the Gould family's personal library.

The Sisters of Mercy acquired the estate from the heirs of George J. Gould and this beauty of the Gilded Age with the stately residence at its center has been the campus of their Catholic university since 1924. Following is how the mansion looks today at Georgian Court University.