Mabee Farm: Oldest House in the Mohawk Valley

Beside the Mohawk River in Rotterdam Junction stands the oldest house still in existence in the Mohawk Valley, and it has been here since seventeen oh five. Daniel Janse Van Antwerpen acquired this riverside land from the Mohawks in sixteen seventy-one and received an English patent from Governor Edmund Andros in sixteen eighty and ran it as a fur trading post, intercepting Native American traders before they could reach the merchants in Schenectady.

In seventeen oh six, Van Antwerpen sold the farm to Jan Pieterse Mabee, and the Mabee family held it for the next two hundred eighty-seven years without interruption. The stone house they built around seventeen oh five still stands, alongside a seventeen sixties brick house, a seventeen nineties inn, and a Dutch barn moved from Johnstown and restored on site. In nineteen ninety-three the last family owner donated the whole property to the Schenectady County Historical Society, which operates it today as a living museum of Dutch colonial life.