Jacob Ford Jr., a wealthy iron manufacturer and colonel in the New Jersey militia, built this Georgian-style home in the early 1770s. Ford died of pneumonia on January 10, 1777, while General George Washington’s Light Infantry quartered in his home, and Washington directed the Light Infantry to provide him with a military funeral. Nearly three years later, Ford’s widow, Theodosia Ford, allowed Washington, his wife Martha, and his military family of five secretaries and eighteen servants to return and use the Ford Mansion as their quarters from December 1779 to June 1780, when army headquarters was in Morristown. General Marquis de Lafayette and Spanish and French ambassadors later visited the home with their servants and secretaries, and with Mrs. Ford, her four children, and her servants, the house might have quartered over 300 people a night. After Mrs. Ford’s grandson died in 1872, the 100-year-old mansion was put up for public auction on June 28, 1873. Four prominent men bought it for $25,000 to prevent its conversion into a boarding house or worse, and in 1874 Theodore Randolph, N. Norris Halstead, George Halsey, and William Lidgerwood formed the Washington Association of New Jersey to manage it. The association preserved the mansion and operated it as a museum until 1933, when it donated the house and its historical collections to the United States of America. Together with the donations of Jockey Hollow by Lloyd W. Smith and Fort Nonsense by the township of Morristown, this helped lead to the creation of Morristown National Historical Park, the first designated national historical park in the National Park System.
