“Fleischmanns, in Delaware County, has a large park that is the home of the Fleischmann family during the Summer. The grounds in this park are considered the finest in the Catskills and the residences are in keeping with the grounds.”

The New York Times, 1907

Built in the early 1880’s by the Fleischmanns Yeast family, who were an extraordinary example of the sprawling, brilliantly-big visioned ambition of the Industrial Revolution, Spillian was part of a 160 acre compound with half a dozen or more mansions. Each of the five siblings from the first generation of Fleischmanns, immigrants from Eastern Europe by way of Austria, had a summer “cottage” here, as did two of the oldest sons.

When the Fleischmanns arrived in the Catskills to build this property, they had a major national company and were making a point about creating their own elegant rustic mountain experience during an era of heavy anti-Semitism. Their arrival ushered in what became the first “Borscht Belt” of the Catskills, with over 500 hotels between Fleischmanns and neighboring Pine Hill, many serving middle class and wealthy Eastern European Jewish immigrant communities.

The Fleischmanns were a fascinating family, with wide-flung interests in culture, philanthropy, business, and politics.

They introduced commercial yeast to the United States in Cincinnati, and then grew into a national company centered in New York, with a huge production plant in Peekskill and bakery/cafés in cities around the country. From cake yeast delivered every morning by horse-drawn carriage to those familiar red and yellow packets of yeast in every grocery store, they re-invented how the country baked, and how companies functioned and marketed their products. In just one of many stories about them: the phrase “bread line” originated with their Vienna Model Bakery in Manhattan. It was the first large scale commercial bakery in the city, and men from the tenements would line up, smelling the bread as it baked. The Fleischmanns set up a kiosk outside the bakery to give people bread to eat, and eventually added an employment agent to help those with families find work.

Julius, who served as the youngest mayor of Cincinnati, and Max Fleischmann, who fought in the Spanish American War, sailed around the North Pole with his sister and her husband in 1915, and who built the deep water harbor in Santa Barbara when he moved there so he had somewhere to park his yacht; were co-owners of the Cincinnati Reds baseball team. They created a mountain baseball league in the village, playing in it and bringing in the occasional shill from the Reds to play with them. When the family sold the property, they gifted the ball park to the village, which in turn formally renamed the village in their honor. The ball park still exists today, and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The property is an interweaving of Stick Style and Shingle Style Architecture — transitional styles moving from Victorian to the 20th Century Arts and Crafts Movement.

The architect, in true Fleischmanns family fashion, married into the family. Theodore G. Stein was an up-and-coming young architect in New York City, and when he married a Fleischmann daughter, became the architect for many of the family’s company and personal buildings. He ultimately sold his practice to Emery Roth, another rising architectural design star who designed many of the city’s most iconic art nouveau buildings.

The house is remarkably intact, with clear pine paneling throughout and extraordinary hand painted murals on the walls that date from the Fleischmann era. Conservators looking at them have told us that they are unique. We aren’t sure who painted them, but our working theory is that they were done by scenic artists at the Metropolitan Opera. The Fleischmann family was deeply connected to the company; they were supporters and close friends with artistic director and conductor Anton Seidl (who used to visit here and then built a house next door), and their architect son-in-law Theodore designed the grand revolving stage mechanisms for the opera house.

As you walk the grounds, you’ll see an exquisite ice house, a spring house, and the remnants of many of the buildings and landscape design elements that the Fleischmanns built, including the Meadow’s stone stage, which has been built into the side of the mountain on the old foundation of another ice house.

When the Fleischmann family sold in 1913, the property got broken into smaller pieces and became a summer hotel for many years and a variety of owners, notably the Lederer family, who hosted decades of internationally acclaimed Talmudic scholars after World War II as they explored how their community could recover from the Holocaust. The site remains something of a sacred space for the Orthodox and Hassidic communities who still visit the Catskills.

An extended family, the Rainises, bought and loved the house and remaining acreage as a multi-generational summer home from the Lederers, and then it was sold to Haruna Kimora, who began to renovate it as a Japanese meditation center. It sat empty for almost twenty years before Spillian partners Leigh Melander and Mark Somerfield purchased it in 2012, only after promising Ms. Kimora that we would ensure its preservation. Mark spent almost 18 months bringing it back to life and we opened it as Spillian: A Place to Revel in October, 2013.

We see ourselves more as stewards than owners, and are proud to say that we have successfully gotten the property listed on the National Register of Historic Places to help ensure its future.

A marvelously Victorian description of the Fleischmanns property…

“Some years ago several members of the Fleischmann family, in search of rural quiet and picturesque scenery, visited this retired neighborhood, and, charmed with its pure air, high altitudes, and care-banishing influences, resolved that their first visit should by no means be their last. Accordingly, about 1882, Mr. and Mrs. Louis Fleischmann and Mr. and Mrs. Leopold Bleier came to the locality, and purchased a part of the old farm then owned by John M. Blish, building pleasant summer cottages, well adapted to the requirements of health and pleasure seekers. They were soon joined by others, among them Charles Fleischmann, Carl Edelheim, Mrs. Max Fleischmann, Anton Seidl, Louis Josephthal, and Carl Hermann. Bernard Ullman and Henry Mierlander added to the architectural beauties of the place by establishing spacious and picturesque homes on the mountain side, Mr. Charles Fleischmann building three more large and tasteful dwellings.

The grounds surrounding these attractive residences are exquisitely laid out, teeming with flowers and shrubbery, and broken here and there with convenient walks and well-graded carriage drives. A large deer park, in which ramble at will some choice specimens of their kind, adds greatly to the interest of the landscape. Swimming Pond, supplied with pure mountain spring water, is a convenience that has not been forgotten; neither have commodious stables and carriage houses. Another most interesting and luxurious feature of this realm of pleasance is a fine riding-school in a magnificently equipped hall, with a commodious gallery, in which the friends of the riders can sit and watch their graceful evolutions. There are costly paintings on the walls, which are elsewhere tastefully draped with rich bunting; and four large chandeliers provide brilliant illumination for evening pleasures. A portable floor has also been provided for dancing, and an orchestra of skilled musicians from New York is kept in good practice throughout the season. The railroad station, a tasteful structure, erected by the liberality of the Fleischmanns, invites the attention of the passing traveller. The surrounding grounds attest the work of an artist in landscape gardening.

This charming spot, whose natural beauties have been so enhanced by a boundless liberality, directed by cultivated taste, is yet but in embryo. The plans for the future are well calculated to dwarf the achievements of the past; and in the choice and secluded settlement of “Fleischmanns,” nestling in the shadow of the romantic Catskills, redolent of health, innocent gaiety, and cultured ease, we may view a place where sordid cares are excluded and the rude turmoil of life’s battle stilled, its faint echoes only touching the chord of remembrance, as the reverberations of the swift express, with its varied freight of human interests, hopes, and passions, break softly on the air and lose themselves in the rural solitudes.”