Before becoming a park in 1888, the land was part of a colonial farm, a canal corridor, and a country estate. Cadwalader Park takes its name from Dr. Thomas Cadwalader, who settled near Trenton in the 1740s after studying medicine in Scotland and inheriting land and money from his father, built a house called Greenwood, and cleared land for a farm. He served as Trenton's chief burgess from 1746 to 1750, later moved to Philadelphia, and became one of the first doctors at Pennsylvania Hospital, while Greenwood remained a summer house and tenant farm. After his death in 1779, the farm was gradually divided and sold, and in 1841 Henry McCall, Sr. bought the parcel that now contains most of the park. In 1845 McCall hired architect John Notman to design the country estate Ellarslie, the first known house built within what is now the park. Notman, known for introducing the Italianate villa to the United States, combined estate architecture with landscaped grounds of curving drives and naturalistic plantings and worked with Andrew Jackson Downing in advancing the picturesque style. In 1881 Henry McCall, Jr. sold Ellarslie to George W. Farlee, who used it as a summer home and farm, raised Jersey cows there, and sold much of the farm for residential development, including the Hillcrest subdivision northeast of Stuyvesant Avenue. In 1888, as Trenton was seeking land for a park, the city bought the remaining 82 acres along with Ellarslie and its outbuildings. By the early 1970s Ellarslie was in very poor condition after serving variously as a natural history museum, refreshment stand, ice cream parlor, and monkey house for the park zoo. Restoration began in 1971, and in 1978 the building opened to the public as the Trenton City Museum, owned by the City of Trenton and operated by the Trenton Museum Society.