It Happened in Hillsborough: The Frederick Davey Mansion

Where do you picture an old sea captain retiring? In the 19 th century, if they didn’t return to their hometowns, a former captain usually wound up in a coastal town. In the US, this usually meant Cape Cod or Nantucket in Massachusetts, or Searsport or Kennebunkport in Maine. You wouldn’t expect to find an “old salt” landlocked in Somerset County. But that’s exactly where Captain Frederick Davey spent the last thirty-five years of his life!

The Frederick Davey Mansion

Frederick Davey, born in England in 1828, came to America with his older brother Henry probably before 1850. They first settled in Jersey City, where they made their living as merchant seamen, eventually becoming captains and owners of their own vessels. Before the age of steamships, they plied the ports of the eastern seaboard down to the West Indies in three-masted schooners. In 1856, Frederick married Rebecca Creby, and the couple had three sons and two daughters. After 1860, they moved to Hillsborough, bought a farm in the Weston section, and built what later became known as the Captain Davey Mansion.

The large three-storied house, with a mansard roof and a square belvedere, was located on what is today Manville’s South Main Street at the intersection with Kyle Street. In the 1870 US Census, Frederick Davey is listed as a “Farmer”, while Henry - living with the family - is listed as a “Sea Captain.”  After Henry’s death in 1873, Frederick commissioned a schooner that would bear his brother’s name.

The Henry Davey, launched from the Taylor & Mathis shipyard at Cooper's Point, was at that time the “finest and largest schooner ever built on the Delaware.” The Henry Davey was accidentally rammed and sunk by a steamship off Manasquan in 1882, after which Frederick Davey retired from the sea and became a successful steamship agent. At the time of his death in February 1900, the old sea captain had, according to the New York Tribune, “accumulated a fortune.”

Rebecca Davey sold the mansion almost immediately, and in 1913, with the addition of a wraparound porch, it was rechristened as the Weston Hotel. Beginning in the 1960s, a succession of businesses occupied the old mansion: The Elmcrest Inn, Wirzman’s Inn, Coconuts, Harmony Hill, and The Red Zone. The Captain Davey Mansion, the only

Hillsborough edifice to be pictured in Snell’s 1881 History of Somerset County succumbed unceremoniously to the wrecking ball in 1993 in favor of a CVS.

Gregory Gillette has been writing about local history for 20 years, starting with his Courier News column “Gillette on Hillsborough” and continuing today with a Facebook page of the same name. A recipient of the Somerset County Cultural and Heritage Commission History Award for Education/Leadership in 2018, he was named as Hillsborough’s first Local Historian in 2025.