Built 1885 Designated NHL February 4, 1985 Architectural style Victorian architecture | NRHP Reference # 73001093 Opened 1885 Added to NRHP 2 October 1973 | |
 | ||
Similar Newark Museum, Military Park, First Baptist Peddie Memorial, Washington Street, Jewish Museum of New Jers | ||
The John Ballantine House was the home of Jeannette Boyd (1838–1919) and John Holme Ballantine (1834–1895). John was the son of Peter Ballantine, founder of the Ballantine beer brewery, and became president of the family business in 1883 after his father died. Ballantine died in 1895 of throat cancer.
The house was built in 1885 at 49 Washington Street in the Washington Park section of Newark, Essex County, New Jersey, United States. It is now part of the Newark Museum and is open to the public for tours.
History
The architect who provided designs was George Edward Harney (1840–1924) of New York City The house is a compact and symmetrical essay in a free Dutch Renaissance style, using salmon-colored Roman bricks with limestone quoins and window surrounds and Gothic-Renaissance details. The interiors were also provided from New York, by D. S. Hess Company, "decorators and manufacturers of artistic furniture". The Dining Room was hung with part-gilded embossed panels imitating the "Spanish" leather hangings that were popular in Holland and England in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. At Christmas season, the house is dressed with holly and other winter greens in traditional Victorian style. A brief history of the house, by its curator Ulysses Grant Dietz, The Ballantine House, was published by the museum in 1994 to coincide with the reopening of the house, which has belonged to the Newark Museum since 1937, after a two-year four-million dollar renovation. The Ballantine House was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1985.
