House & Garden 
mainly used as 
boundaries. 
The location of 
subordinate 
structures, such 
as barns and 
stables, was also 
left to the good 
taste and judg¬ 
ment of future 
dwellers — 
there was noset¬ 
ting apart oi 
such buildings 
in separate ave¬ 
nues. Further 
than this,except 
for careful provisions as to voting and proxies 
at the annual meetings of landholders, the 
original deed did not go. There was nothing, 
for example, as to the social qualifications of 
intending buyers. Any one able to pay the 
price of property to an owner willing to sell is 
at liberty to-day to become a park resident. 
Above all, the park was intended by Llew¬ 
ellyn Haskell as a retreat wherein a man 
could exercise to the utmost his own rights 
and privileges without interference and with¬ 
out causing his neighbors inconvenience. 
Mr. Haskell himself, with a few of his 
early associates, belonged to a religious cidt 
whose members were known as Perfectionists, 
from their tenet that by right living they 
might attain to a standard of absolute perfec¬ 
tion on this 
earth. Whether 
Haskell, as an 
amiable ideal¬ 
ist, expected to 
make the park 
named after 
him a sort of 
modified earth¬ 
ly paradise, it is 
now too late to 
discover, but 
there is no 
doubt that its 
establishment 
and growth gave 
him keen pleas¬ 
ure and that his 
aims regarding 
it were broad 
and worthy. 
So Mr. Haskell 
and his fellow 
Perfectionists 
set up a little 
chapel or meet- 
ing-place, in a 
large plot of 
ground just 
outside the 
park, a 11 d 
thither they 
were wont to 
repair for spir¬ 
itual comfort. 
Gradually, 
however, the little group suffered diminution, 
and the ultimate fate of the chapel was to 
become part of a dwelling-house. 
There were professed atheists in the park, 
too, in its early days, when that form of 
thought was less common than now, and 
there were recluses to whom the shaded 
slopes of this mountainside and the loneli¬ 
ness that distinguished the place before its 
population grew to the present forty-five or 
fifty families, were unendingly grateful. I'o 
live near New York, and yet to enjoy an at¬ 
mosphere of utter remoteness—this was the 
privilege of all early settlers in Llewellyn 
Park. At one time, however, there was 
much outside comment upon a marriage cer¬ 
emony held at sunrise under a great tree 
near the eastern 
edge of the 
park, and more 
recently, the re¬ 
ported burial 
of a y o u n g 
woman, with 
only a shroud 
between her 
body and 
mother earth, 
attracted some 
notice. And 
there have been 
a few other con- 
spicuousdoings 
in days gone by. 
Life in this 
community has 
A LEVEL STRETCH OE GLEN ROAD 
Showing unrestricted undergrowth in the Ramble 
33i 
