Van Cortlandt House: The Oldest Building in the Bronx

Inside Van Cortlandt Park, at the southern edge of its broad glacial meadow, sits a Georgian fieldstone manor house that is both the oldest surviving building in the Bronx and one of the more consequential addresses of the American Revolution.

Frederick Van Cortlandt began building the house in seventeen forty-eight on land his father Jacobus had acquired around sixteen ninety-one. The construction used fieldstone and brick, enslaved labor, and a design that reflected the prosperous Dutch-English merchant class of the Hudson Valley. The family ran a wheat farm and gristmill on the property, trading through New York Harbor. Frederick did not live to see the house completed; his son James inherited it.

During the Revolutionary War the house served three armies in rapid succession, a measure of how fluid and contested the region was. British and Hessian forces used it after the Battle of White Plains in seventeen seventy-six. George Washington used the house as headquarters on more than one occasion: in seventeen eighty-one, when he met with the French general Rochambeau before the march to Yorktown, and again in late seventeen eighty-three as he coordinated the final British evacuation of New York. The French generals Rochambeau and Lafayette also used the house during the campaign.

The City of New York acquired the property in eighteen eighty-eight as part of Van Cortlandt Park. The Society of Colonial Dames of the State of New York leased the house in eighteen ninety-six and opened it to the public as a historic house museum in May of eighteen ninety-seven, making it the first such museum in New York City and the fourth in the country.

The house today retains much of its original fabric: the kitchen, the parlors, the staircase. It is a small, particular place in a large democratic park, easy to walk past without noticing what it is.