Tuxedo Park History

In the fall of 1885, Gilded age architect Bruce Price, along with Pierre Lorillard, who owned more than 6,000 Orange County acres, took a train from New York City and got off at the Lorillard family stop on the Erie Railroad. Despite the terrible rainy weather, in one afternoon they planned what is now known as Tuxedo Park. Within weeks of their visit, 1,800 men started working to make their vision a reality. Within eight months, thirty miles of graded roads were complete, in addition to a water and sewage system (the first complete one in the world), the Park gatehouse and police station, twenty-two cottages, two blocks of stores, the village stables, a new dam, an icehouse, a swimming tank and a fish hatchery. 

Before Tuxedo Park’s inception, the Tuxedo lake swarmed with black bass, which had gradually accumulated through the years. When fishing became a daily practice, the bass rapidly became scarce. To supplement them, in 1886 the hatchery began its years of experiments with landlocked salmon, bass fry, steelhead and brook trout for the Tuxedo Lake, the Wee-Wah and the Warwick Brook. The fish hatchery is no longer operating, but the lakes are still stocked annually in the Spring, with ice fishing when the Wee-Wah lake freezes.

Boating on the lake provides one of the more attractive features of the summer life at Tuxedo. Canoes have in recent years largely been supplanted by electric launches, although there has been a recent resurgence of a fleet of Adirondack guide boats. Other summer sports popular earlier on were summer horse racing, for which a half-mile trotting track was built. The grounds were then used for football, polo, the annual horse shows, dog shows and the Fourth of July celebration. It is currently a community park with walking trails. 

In 1889, a six-hole golf course was laid out on what are now the Tuxedo Park School grounds. By 1892 the sport had become so popular that a nine-hole course was laid out near the old North Gate of the Park. The old caddie shack remains in ruins to this day. An eighteen-hole course was completed shortly thereafter, which straddled both sides of Route 17. The country’s first interclub golf team match was a four-way contest held at Tuxedo in 1894. The teams were The Country Club (Brookline, MA), St. Andrew’s, Shinecock and The Tuxedo Club. The trophy presented that year to The Country Club was donated to the U.S.G.A and is now the Senior Open trophy. 

Tuxedo Park has a diverse and welcoming population of 650 residents. The transportation system continues to improve every year, with train connections to Penn Station, Newark Airport, and Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor. Busses also leave from Route 17 for Midtown Manhattan on a regular basis. The Village of Tuxedo Park boasts its own DPW and a police force which monitors its 24 hour gate, along with many thriving institutions, from the Tuxedo Union Free School District (pre K - 12), to the Wee Wah Park (open to all residents) to the Village Boat Club (open to all property owners) to the Tuxedo Park Garden Club (consisting of men and women) to the Tuxedo Park School (pre K3 - 9) to the (private) Tuxedo Club, which has the most racket sports of any club in the world, in addition to a world class eighteen hole Robert Trent Jones golf course.