Collection of Seven 1794–1795 Legal Documents Relating to Affluent New York City Merchant Cary Ludlow’s Purchases of Lots Along State Street, with Five Later Family Legal Documents.
New York City: 1795–1836. Twelve documents totaling fourteen pages. See description for full inventory. Generally very good to excellent. Item #List3741
Cary Ludlow (1736–1814) was a lawyer and merchant from the prominent New York City Ludlow family. In 1768, Ludlow had bought a property at 9 State Street, on the Battery, with plans to build a mansion there—lower Manhattan was becoming fashionable after the building of the Kennedy Mansion at 1 Broadway by Archibald Kennedy, 11th Earl of Cassilis.[1]
However, Ludlow was an ardently pro-Stamp Act Tory, and because of this had to flee with his family to England around the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. Upon his return in 1784, he began work on the 9 State Street mansion, which was completed around the mid-1790s, shortly after the marriage of his daughter Catherine (1767–1849) to Jacob Morton (1761–1836). Later New York City Comptroller and Major General of the New York Militia during the War of 1812, Morton—who also appears in these documents—had been the marshal at George Washington’s first inauguration.[2]
After the Revolutionary War, many of New York’s high society were moving to lower Manhattan, especially on Front Street, State Street, and Broadway, around Bowling Green and the Battery.[1] The collection of legal filings offered here document this process of gentrification: they show Ludlow purchasing multiple lots surrounding his property on State Street from members of the lower classes. In particular, Ludlow buys lots occupied by John Roorbach, a grocer, and Richard Anders, an oysterman. Roorbach and Anders may have been renters or partial owners, as the deals go through Samuel Craig (whose occupation is listed as “gentleman”), Robert Tuite Kemble, formerly an officer of the British Army,[3] Cornelius Rosevelt (likely of the Roosevelt family; also listed as “gentleman”), and others.
Following Cary Ludlow’s death in 1814, the 9 State Street estate passed to Catherine and Jacob Morton, and became a social center for the well-to-do, epitomized by the 1824 ball the couple threw for the Marquis de Lafayette. However, after Jacob Morton’s death in 1836, the house became a boarding house; by the 1870s the 26-room mansion was home to “twenty-six Irish families”, and Battery Park had become a spot where “roughs played base-ball” and vendors sold “horrible sweetmeats, wormy apples, and villanous lemonade”. [1]
The documents offered here illustrate several features of life for the elite during the Early Republic era: first, they are primary documents of the gentrification of a neighborhood, showing the displacement of its lower-class residents and the consolidation of property in the hands of a small number of wealthy owners; second, the names appearing in them—Ludlow, Morton, Kemble—indicate that, other than a small blip during the Revolutionary War, financial ties outpaced political ones.
State Street property documents:
Other family documents:
Of interest to historians of development and demographic change in New York City during the Early Republic era.
[1] Rodolphe E. Garczynski, “Some Old Houses (illustrated),” Appleton’s Journal 8, no. 195 (Dec 21, 1872), 696–699.
[2] “Jacob Morton (1761–1836),” American Aristocracy, https://americanaristocracy.com/people/jacob-morton, accessed April 23, 2026.
[3] “Robert Kemble (1755–1820),” American Aristocracy, https://americanaristocracy.com/people/robert-kemble, accessed April 23, 2026.
Price: $1,500.00