Madam Brett Homestead: Beacon's Oldest House

The Dutch-style house sitting near the bank of Fishkill Creek has been standing since seventeen oh nine, making it one of the oldest buildings in the Hudson Valley and the oldest in what is now Beacon.

The story of the house is really the story of a woman who refused to be written out of the frontier she had helped build. Catheryna Rombout was born in New York City in sixteen eighty-seven, the daughter of Francis Rombout, a former mayor of the city and co-holder of a massive land grant in southern Dutchess County called the Rombout Patent, eighty-five thousand acres stretching across today's Beacon and the surrounding highlands, granted by King James the Second of England in sixteen eighty-two.

Catheryna inherited a third of that patent at age four after her father's death. At sixteen she married Roger Brett, a British naval officer, and the two moved upriver to settle their land, reportedly among the first European settlers to put down permanent roots in this part of the valley. They built the house in seventeen oh nine, expanding it in seventeen fifteen.

Then Roger Brett drowned in the Hudson River, knocked from his sloop, leaving Catheryna a widow at thirty-one with three surviving sons and a thirty-thousand-acre wilderness estate on a colonial frontier. She stayed. She ran a gristmill at the mouth of Fishkill Creek. She organized the first produce cooperative in the Hudson River highlands, gathering twenty-one men to market grain and goods collectively in a region that had no established commercial infrastructure. She managed her own affairs for more than thirty years until her death in this house in seventeen sixty-four at the age of seventy-seven.

During the Revolutionary War, Catheryna's granddaughter and her husband Major Henry Schenck kept the homestead in family hands while lending the building to the American cause as a shelter and supply depot. George Washington, the Marquis de Lafayette, and Baron von Steuben are recorded as having been guests here.

The house has been preserved by the Daughters of the American Revolution since the early twentieth century and stands today as a rare surviving portrait of colonial life, and of one woman's extraordinary refusal to leave the wilderness she had made her own.