Written and photographed by Diane Stulga
For decades, a small, four-story Victorian house on Route 9 in West Creek, New Jersey has mystified passersby and locals alike. For perched atop its flat-roofed cupola 67 feet above the earth sits a single wooden chair. This lofty lonely seat has spawned speculation and folklore as to its origin and purpose. Even dark tales are told of its use as the ultimate time-out chair for misbehaving children. Some say it was used to spy on Red Coats during the Revolutionary War or to surveil rum runners on Little Egg Harbor Bay. Local legend has it as a place of silent vigil kept long ago by a local ship captain’s widow as she waited in vain for his return from the sea and there are those who believe it is a landing pad for Santa.
The history of the small Victorian house, known far and wide as The Chair House is as unusual as the chair on its roof. Originally constructed in Holgate, New Jersey around 1887 — it was not a house but a three-story wooden structure containing a standpipe that provided artesian well water to the town.
At the time it was built, the Holgate tower — and structures like it were called water towers — although they were unlike water towers of today that store large reservoirs of water. Instead, the Holgate water tower is an interesting part of architectural history known as a folly. Popular in the Victorian era and still used today a folly is an ornamental structure — oftentimes unusual, whimsical, or fantastical — built for just one purpose: aesthetic pleasure.
While sometimes non-functional, many architectural follies had a dual purpose. For example, a folly might serve to disguise utilities or as a landmark in addition to its aesthetic role.
The original Holgate water tower with its Victorian exterior, cupola and gable windows concealing the three-story water pipe within would appear to have served all these purposes. -Susan Spicer-McGarry
The tower was abandoned in the early 20th Century. Time and coastal weather took its toll on the old wooden structure, and it fell into disrepair.
In 1938, Albert Lindholm, a Swedish immigrant with a vision, bought the Holgate tower, cut it into sections, and brought it across Barnegat Bay to West Creek to its current location. Lindholm rebuilt the original three-story tower into a four-story home where it still stands today looking very much as it did on Holgate at the turn of the century albeit one story taller.
In this early 1900s image, the Holgate water tower can be seen over the shoulder of the Bond’s Station Coast Guardsmen on the far left, much as it does today as The Chair House. Ewer Family Collection.
Lindholm passed away in 1947. His wife, Hilma, sold the house in 1959. By then, the house with a chair on its cupola roof was already a local legend. Perhaps just as odd as the highly visible roof-top chair is what lies beneath the house — unseen by passersby — a bomb proof basement. With war looming in Europe and fearful of it reaching his family in the United States, when constructing the foundation Lindholm made the floor and walls of the basement at least eighteen-inches thick.
“My grandparents, Harry and Nancy Chambers bought The Chair House from Mrs. Lindholm in 1959,” says Nancy Hall of West Creek, New Jersey. Lindholm built the house with two one-story additions, one on either side of the renovated Victorian folly now turned four-story home at the center. Recalling the home’s interior at the time her grandparents owned it, “The addition on the right was a bedroom and the one on the left was a kitchen. At the center on the first floor was a living room, small dining room, and a bath,” says Nancy. The second floor which Lindholm added during reconstruction accommodated one large bedroom. “There were stairs to the third floor which was unfinished, and a ladder was used to get to the fourth floor [cupola]. The concrete island in front of the house used to have gas pumps where Mr. Lindholm sold gas.”
“We visited my grandparents every weekend,” says Nancy. “Eventually, my parents put a trailer with a large sunroom in the backyard. In those days the property went from Route 9 back to Railroad Avenue. There were several small out-buildings that were full of antiques.” She smiles as she recalls playing with the old crank operated Victrola with its heavy records stored in the cabinet below.
From a small building near the house, Nancy’s grandfather, Harry, operated a produce stand as a side business selling vegetables he grew in a large garden behind the house and on property across the road that he rented from Bill Cox. Nancy recalls spending her summers at The Chair House, helping her grandfather with the gardens and at the produce stand. She enjoyed riding around the property on the tractor with her grandfather.
As for the mysterious chair on the roof, “Hilma Lindholm, [Albert’s wife], told me the story,” says Nancy. “While doing the work renovating the old water tower into their home they always used to stand on this chair [instead of a ladder]. The chair always seemed to get in their way. When the house was finished, Mrs. Lindholm told her husband, ‘Put that chair somewhere out of the way.’ So, to be a wise guy he put it up on the roof.”
Mystery solved.
