At the confluence of Crosswicks Creek and the Delaware River, Point Breeze became the vast estate of Joseph Bonaparte, elder brother of Napoleon, after he left Europe following Napoleon's final defeat by the English. In 1816 he purchased the tract at the edge of Bordentown, a location with easy river access to Philadelphia and proximity to major roads, and over the next twenty years expanded it to more than 1,800 acres with a mile of frontage along Crosswicks Creek. Interested in garden design, he transformed the property into one of America's first romantic gardens in the French style, where natural and manmade features were blended into pleasing vistas through native forest crossed by twelve miles of bridle trails and carriage drives, with statuary, gazebos, a deer preserve, an aviary, and a large manmade lake with swans, landscaped islands, and fanciful boats. On a promontory with panoramic views of Crosswicks Creek and the Delaware River, he built a spacious, magnificently decorated home that held the country's finest collection of European art and the largest private library, and he received a steady stream of visitors, including many artists. The estate also had auxiliary buildings and housing for servants, farmers, and gardeners, as well as a three-story lake house for his younger daughter, Princess Zénaïde, and her husband, Prince Charles-Lucien Bonaparte. Known locally as Bonaparte's Park, the estate suffered a fire in 1820 that engulfed the mansion, though townspeople saved nearly all its contents, after which Joseph Bonaparte built a second manor house nearer the turnpike to New York, now Park Street. His dream landscape was short-lived: he returned to Europe in 1839, died in Italy in 1844, and was buried in Napoleon's tomb at Les Invalides in Paris. He left Point Breeze to his grandson, who sold the lands and furnishings in 1847; the new owner demolished Bonaparte's manor house and built a new Italianate home in 1850. That house, lavishly remodeled in the early twentieth century, was destroyed by fire in the 1980s, and only one building from the Bonaparte era survives on the property, which is now owned by a Catholic missionary order and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
