It Happened in Hillsborough: The Countess of Somerset County

She was the only person listed in Hillsborough’s 1905 New Jersey State Census who refused to give her
birth year. People in the township knew her as an eccentric middle-aged woman who inherited millions
from a deceased spouse. In fact, Evelyn Wentworth Murray was not a widow at all, but a twice-divorced
adventuress, and an inscrutable beauty full of mystery and contradiction.

The Countess of Somerset County

She was born in Canada about 1865 (exact date unknown) to English immigrant parents. Her last name
at birth may have been Eastman, but that’s only a guess based on the name of a brother mentioned in
her 1951 obituary. The names Evelyn Wentworth and Lena De Grasse (she was known as the Countess
DeGrasse when she made the scene as a teenager in Buffalo, New York, driving a coach through the
streets; the newspapers reporting her “large blue eyes, dark hair, and beautifully developed figure” gave
her the appearance of a Russian Countess) were both stage names.

In Buffalo, at 18, she became involved with a married man until his father paid her $10,000 to return to
Toronto. She went to New York instead and briefly became an actress before returning to Buffalo in
1884 and quickly marrying and divorcing (with another large settlement) another young man.
By the time she got to Hillsborough in 1890 and bought the old Frelinghuysen estate on River Road, she
had been married (again) and divorced (again) from an actor, David Murray, whom she met while
performing with Maud Granger’s famous troupe.

Full of contradictions, she campaigned (and personally intervened) to save teamsters' horses from
maltreatment on the streets of New York, and had an expensive drinking fountain for horses installed on
the road to Bedminster while at the same time having the livestock on her own farm in Hillsborough
euthanized to prevent them from ending up in the slaughterhouse. She was generous with her
employees and nieces and nephews, while also standing guard with a rifle to protect the wild
blackberries on her property from passing motorists picking them.

Over 30 years, she lost four houses to fire, rebuilding each time except the last. She moved to Easton
Avenue in the mid-1920s and suffered a crippling auto accident in 1930 from which she never fully
recovered. She never had any children, and spent her last decades with a caretaker at her home in
Franklin Twp.

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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.