Panther Valley: the deal a father shared with his son

On June 11, 1959, The Gazette carried big news from the next township over: the late Clendenin J. Ryan’s estate — 1,506 acres in Allamuchy known as Panther Ledge Deer Park — was being sold to Robert S. Conahay III, a Morristown advertising executive, in a deal the paper put at more than $200,000. The Gazette’s aerial photograph mapped a world apart: a seventeen-room stone-and-frame Colonial, an oval concrete pool with its cabana, tennis courts, a gardener’s house, a pheasant hatchery and pens, a fifteen-acre lake — and an enclosed deer park where a herd of some eight hundred deer roamed. Ryan, who had inherited millions from his grandfather Thomas Fortune Ryan and begun buying land here in the 1930s, had died four years earlier; his family had scarcely used the place since. The next day’s paper carried the other half of the settlement: Guy and Winthrop Rutherfurd were buying portions back — restoring land, the Gazette noted, to the Rutherfurd estate it had been purchased from years before, including a hunting lodge once owned by Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt. It was that kind of country. Rutherfurd Hall still stands up the road, near what is now the Route 80 East entrance — a museum and community center now, where the town gathers for concerts, classes and celebrations.

That same season, a few miles east on Main Street in Hackettstown, Leonard M. Fiedler was starting a real estate firm in the living room of his home. His first year in the business, his commissions came to $1,600 — total. His second year he made $3,200. “He doubled — he was so happy,” his son Dan remembers. The estate and 227 Main Street knew nothing of each other yet.

What connected them, a decade later, was a road. As Dan tells it, the men who came for Panther Ledge were betting on Route 80 — not on whether it was coming, but on exactly where its interchange would land. They bet on Allamuchy.

Then the highway stalled. “Route 80 must go on,” the papers demanded, while it didn’t. The developer was Frank H. Taylor, with Travelers Insurance behind him as financial partner, and when the waiting outlasted Taylor’s money, Travelers bought out his position. But the bet on the interchange had been right.

Taylor’s trucks were painted “Frank H. (note the first name) Taylor” — there was another Taylor in the building business, and he wanted nobody confusing the two.

When the sale of Panther Ledge Farms finally closed — 1969, by Dan’s reckoning — more than a thousand acres changed hands, and several brokerages split the commission. One of them was Fiedler. Len came home that evening to the family’s apartment above the office, sat down in his easy chair in the front room, and showed his son a check for $10,000 — more than he had earned in the entire previous year, on one sale. Dan was there, and he has never forgotten it. Ten years on, when The Forum profiled the firm, it counted the deal among Fiedler’s landmarks: the transfer of 1,500 Allamuchy acres “that would later become known as Panther Valley.”

Fiedler’s Panther Valley didn’t end at the closing table. Len had made the deal — and Danny, a teenager then, helped build the place. The developer put him to work with a chainsaw, cutting the first roads out of the woods, and hired him to “guard the place,” as he still puts it, on weekends: sleeping in the pool house with a .22 rifle for company. Patty, the girl he was dating — Patty Fiedler now, his wife — would drive up and sit with him awhile before heading home. The pool is still there: first right past the gate, driveway on the left.

The first street he cut was Mallard, and that is where the model homes went up — topping out around $49,000. Word went around that Jackie Gleason had bought the first house. “That was just a ruse to get people to come out,” Dan says; he spent the days before the grand opening sweeping those same streets in a brand-new red Jeep Wagoneer the developer had handed him. The streets were named for birds, and Mallard today is one of the most sought-after addresses in Panther Valley. He didn’t just watch Panther Valley begin — a teenager with a chainsaw opened its first street.

Panther Valley has been a neighborhood for half a century now — twelve hundred families in the developer’s early brochures, generations since. Fiedler was there before any of it: before the bird-named streets, before the model homes, before Route 80 itself — when the whole place was still a pheasant estate wearing another name. And the night it all began is still told on Main Street, by the son who was in the room — because what he watched come home was never just a check. It was the turning point: the first of the big things, a father’s long bet beginning to pay. Two years later, that boy was running the firm.