The Luykas Van Alen House: Dutch New York Preserved
Near Albany, New York
The brick house sitting close to the road here is one of the oldest and most complete Dutch colonial buildings in the entire state of New York. It was built around seventeen thirty-seven, and it has barely changed since.
Luykas Van Alen was the son of Dutch settlers who had come to the Hudson Valley when the English still called it a foreign country worth worrying about. He acquired this land from Mohican sellers, built a one-and-a-half-story brick farmhouse with steeply pitched gables, Dutch doors, and three chimneys, and planted himself along what was then the main road between Albany and New York City. The house was enlarged around seventeen fifty, adding a third room. The architecture is remarkably specific: the parapet gables, the way the walls extend above the roofline to form protective parapets, were a Dutch signature, and they required a masonry skill that faded quickly once the British cultural influence took hold in the valley.
The Van Alen family held the property for more than two centuries. They finally gave it to the Columbia County Historical Society in nineteen sixty-one. The National Park Service designated it a National Historic Landmark in nineteen sixty-seven, recognizing it as one of the finest surviving examples of Dutch colonial construction anywhere in upstate New York.
What makes the house remarkable beyond its architecture is its human layering. Mohican people had lived on this land for thousands of years before Luykas Van Alen arrived. Enslaved African Americans very likely worked here too, as in many Dutch farmhouses of the valley. Washington Irving, who grew up in the Hudson Valley and transformed its Dutch folklore into American literature, knew this landscape well. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, his famous story of the headless horseman and Ichabod Crane, draws on the atmosphere of exactly these kinds of old Dutch farmhouses along these roads. The Ichabod Crane Schoolhouse stands nearby.
You are passing through the place that gave American literature its first ghost.
