Lindenwald: Martin Van Buren's Long Retirement
Near Albany, New York
The estate you are passing is called Lindenwald, and it was the home of the eighth president of the United States for the last twenty-one years of his life. Martin Van Buren bought it in eighteen thirty-nine while he was still in the White House, and he moved here permanently when he left office in eighteen forty-one, not entirely willingly.
Van Buren had the great misfortune of taking office in eighteen thirty-seven, just as the American economy collapsed in the worst financial panic the young nation had yet experienced. Banks failed, credit dried up, and unemployment spread. He was blamed for the disaster even though the speculative bubble had inflated under Andrew Jackson. He ran for reelection in eighteen forty and lost to William Henry Harrison, who died of pneumonia thirty-one days into his term, denying Van Buren even the consolation of an incompetent successor.
The property he had purchased was a handsome Georgian brick house built in seventeen ninety-seven, originally owned by a man named Peter Van Ness. Van Buren named it Lindenwald after the linden trees on the grounds. He spent two decades transforming it, hiring the architect Richard Upjohn in eighteen forty-nine to add a Tuscan tower and a front porch that blended Gothic and Romanesque elements. The house grew into a thirty-six-room showpiece. Van Buren received politicians, reformers, and former presidents here. He ran again in eighteen forty-eight on the Free Soil ticket, opposing the extension of slavery into western territories, winning no electoral votes but drawing enough support in New York to deny the Democratic candidate the state.
He died at Lindenwald on July twenty-fourth, eighteen sixty-two, as the Civil War he had spent decades trying to prevent through accommodation was consuming the country. The National Park Service has managed the estate since nineteen seventy-four. The house remains one of the most layered presidential homes in the country, a place where you can read the arc of American political compromise in the wallpaper and the architecture.
