Carshalton Gates Traditional Cache

Erected at Planting Fields 1926. The wrought iron gates and railings were originally made for Carshalton Park in Sussex, England.  Carshalton Gates are an extraordinary example of early eighteenth-century English ironwork. Dated to 1711, these massive wrought iron gates exemplify the blacksmith’s art.

William Robertson Coe moved to the United States with his family at the age of 14 from England. At age 15 he worked as an office boy for an insurance broker in Philadelphia and in 1910 he became president of Johnson and Higgins Insurance Company and was involved in insuring the RMS Titanic. .Coe received his early schooling at Albion Academy in Cardiff, Wales. 

The "Carshalton Gates", made in 1712, were purchased by Coe and installed in 1926 here after he had the road widened to accommodate their immense size. Each element is hot forged into shape and held together with mortise and tenon joints like furniture, tightened only with wedges and pins. The gates were removed from an English estate and installed in 1926 at The Planting Fields Estate, NY, one of the great houses on Long Island’s Gold Coast.  If you think about how much it cost  Coe to purchase the gate, have them dismantled, shipped across the Atlantic and re-assembled here, it’s incredible.  But if you walk around the Planting fields and see what he has created, importing exotic trees from around the world, etc,. you realize what the term “money is no object” really means!

Directions to cache:  Carshalton Gates is the western entrance to the Planting Fields Arboretum which is used only by park employees. These  gates are closed to the general public year round.  You have to enter the arboretum and pay a fee (certain times of the year) to find this cache, it is not accessible from OUTSIDE the park.   The gates can be found on the East side of Chicken Valley Road, just South of Planting Fields Road.  The reason that Planting fields became a state park is a common one. When Coe died, the family inherited all of his land and over time, they realized how much it costs to maintain the land and the only way out of the financial burden required to maintain it and pay taxes is to donate the land to the state and have them create a park out of it.  Notice that, just like the Marshall Field estate at Caumsett park, wealthy people back then always had a grand entrance like this and had guests take a long, impressive drive through the estate until they finally reached the owners mansion.