Bronck House: Oldest Home in Upstate New York

A few miles from this road sits what may be the oldest surviving house in upstate New York. Pieter Bronck, a Swedish-born settler of the Dutch colony, built his stone home here in Coxsackie in sixteen sixty-three, when this stretch of the Hudson Valley was still deep wilderness. The walls are thick fieldstone; the roof pitches steeply in the Dutch manner.

What makes the Bronck house remarkable is not just its age but its continuity: eight generations of the same family lived here across nearly three centuries, adding a second structure in seventeen thirty-eight and a third in seventeen ninety-two. The property passed to the Greene County Historical Society in nineteen thirty-nine and was declared a National Historic Landmark in nineteen sixty-seven. You may recognize the family name in a different form: Pieter was a relative of Jonas Bronck, the early settler for whom the Bronx is named.