Westchester County has a wealth of vintage homes. In my part of the county – the northern and western portions along the Hudson River – roughly 20% of the houses offered for sale and sold in the last year pre-dated the Second World War, and a significant portion of those were more than 100 years old.

I’ve always been drawn to old, historic homes, an affinity my work as a realtor allows me to indulge. In recent years I’ve sold houses dating from the 1700s, 1800s and early 1900s. Some belonged to notable historical figures like Mabel Dodge, Floyd Dell and Gloria Swanson; others were owned by regular citizens, not well known beyond their time or locality. Whatever the case, their houses offer both a glimpse and a reminder of the county’s rich history going back to colonial times.

Sometimes these antiques come with some local lore or limited records of their history. A renovated brick colonial that recently sold on Dutch Street in Montrose, for example, was “known” by long-time neighbors (my wife grew up next door) to have served as a tavern and a brothel in the 19th Century, and a speakeasy during Prohibition in the 1920s. Iron bars on windows in the lower level seemed to confirm other tales that the place had also been used as a jail.

Too often, however, there is nothing to speak of the past of these houses but the “old bones” of the house itself, and the imagination of the modern visitor. The current residents know only what the previous owners told them, and that could be limited to “We think it was once a farm and an orchard.”

In May of this year I listed a house built in the 1700s in Croton-on-Hudson. What realtors like to call a classic rocking-chair front-porch colonial, this house has all the character and charm coveted by devotees of the genre – multiple working fireplaces, wide-plank or random-width wood floors, built-ins, window seats, a big screened porch, lots of nooks and crannies, even an old brick smokehouse outside. But it also comes with a trove of original documents from the distant past, notably a series of “Indentures,” or deeds recording early sales of the property. Written longhand in a penmanship reminiscent of the Declaration of Independence, the earliest of these noted “This Indenture made the Twenty-first Day of January in the Ninth Year of the Independence of the State of New York, and in the Year of Our Lord One Thousand Seven Hundred and Eighty Five.”

It revealed that the original 84-acre property had been confiscated from its owner, one William Bayard, by Isaac Stoutenburgh and Philip van Cortlandt, Commissioners of Forfeiture, “appointed in pursuance of an Act of the Legislature of the said State, entitled ‘An Act for the Speedy Sale of the confiscated and forfeited Estates within the State.’” In other words, the unfortunate William Bayard had been on the losing side of the recently fought American Revolutionary War. The sale was recorded “In Consideration of the Sum of One Hundred and Twenty Pounds Lawful Money of the Said State,” less than a pound and a half an acre. (New York State was issuing its own money at the time.) The new owner was Peter Goetschius, a physician, who sold it 45 years later to James Goetschius, who sold it in turn in 1837 to John Goetschius for $573.20 (U.S. money).

For those sales within the Goetschius family and subsequent sales recorded in these documents right into the 20th Century, the boundaries of the three parcels comprising the property were described in language like the following: “Beginning at the highway and running northwesterly to a heap of stones in the line of the lot now owned by Brazilla Dusenberry; thence northeasterly along said Dusenberry’s land to a heap of stones; thence southeasterly along David Ferris’s land to the highway; thence southerly as the road runs to the place of beginning, containing twenty-two acres, two roods, thirty-four rods; be the same more or less.”

The “heap of stones,” like the “certain cherry tree” of another parcel’s description, or such measurements of distance as “eight chains and seventy-one links,” have been replaced in our era by surveys and coordinates of latitude and longitude. But they are preserved in these precious documents, the more picturesque of which are framed on the living room walls of the original house. We have no record of when the house itself was built, and town records are no help. A photograph of the house in the local Citizen Register newspaper almost fifty years ago states that it was built “prior to 1730,” but with no further information.

For much of the 19th Century, the farm belonged to the Odell family. Isaac and Benjamin Odell were identified as owners of adjacent property early in the century, and John Goetschius sold the farm to Betsy & William Odell and their children in 1860. The widow of Jackson Odell sold it to Maurice & Anna Bigelow of the Bronx in 1905. And in a fascinating sidelight, a strip of land was deeded to the Town of Cortlandt around the turn of the century for the purpose of widening Rose Ave., as Watch Hill Road was known at the time. (Rose Ave. was still the street’s official name in the 1995 edition of Hagstrom’s Westchester County Atlas, with Watch Hill Rd. appearing in parentheses.)

Also interesting, a 1916 “Abstract of Title” recording the history of this strip of land places it “at Boscobel, in the Town of Cortlandt, Westchester County, New York.”

From 1857 to 1883, it turns out, Boscobel was the name of the post office at Crugers. To locals, Boscobel is the name of the elegant mansion built overlooking the Hudson River in the early 1800s by States Morris Dyckman and later dismantled to make way for the F.D.R. Veterans Hospital in nearby Montrose. Reconstructed fifteen miles north in Garrison in the 1950s, today Boscobel House is one of the great historical attractions of the Lower Hudson Valley. Another, of course, is Croton’s Van Cortlandt Manor, the restored family estate of Philip van Cortlandt, the Commissioner of Forfeiture who confiscated and sold the house on Watch Hill Road.

Meanwhile, in utter defiance of today’s staggering housing market, that living antique on Watch Hill Road brought eager buyers out of the proverbial woodwork. The old farmhouse, its property now reduced to an acre and a quarter, was listed for sale in May. It drew multiple offers and sold within the first week, well over the asking price of $545,000.

Posted by:  Bruce Dollar

Early in the last century – the Twentieth, that is – Croton-on-Hudson became a Mecca for New York’s artsy, leftist crowd. Easy access from the City via the new electric trains (which switched back to steam at Harmon, now Croton-Harmon station) enticed both leading lights and fellow travelers – actors, writers, poets, painters and left-wing intellectuals – to build or buy summer or year-round cottages in the hills above the village. By the 1920s there was a thriving bohemian community centered in Croton, which became known as ”Greenwich Village on the Hudson.”

The focal point for this community became Mount Airy Road, which starts in the village downtown and climbs up what old timers still call “Red Hill” for the political leanings of these very particular settlers. A few years ago, long-time Croton resident Cornelia Cotton, artistic and political scion and chronicler of the history of this group, gave a lecture and slide show on historical Mount Airy houses to a standing-room-only audience at the Croton Free Library. She had to stop after 2½ hours and two full carousels of slides, not half-way through her program.

As a realtor with family roots in Croton, I’ve always been fascinated by this history, and if I drive by these noteworthy houses with clients in the car, they’ll probably get the full guided-tour treatment, even when we’re on our way somewhere else. I take special pleasure in showing and selling these homes, and I’ve sold more than my share.

Joseph Freeman, a writer and frequent visitor in the post-World War I period, described the radical colony in his 1936 memoir, An American Testament:

“At this time, Croton-on-Hudson was a kind of literary and political shrine. The sacred grove was a stretch of brown hilly earth known as Mount Airy Road, on both sides of which, separated by an acre or two of land, stood the houses of John Reed, Boardman Robinson, Lydia Gibson, Floyd Dell and Stuart Chase… . It was some time before I realized that Croton was only a suburb of Washington Square.”

Freeman usually stayed with Floyd Dell, who bought the 1892 farmhouse at 75 Mount Airy Rd. in 1919. Dell was an influential editor, novelist and literary critic who held virtual salons at his house for visiting radical artists and intellectuals. Freeman recalls a memorable weekend there with Upton Sinclair, author of The Jungle, the muckraking novel about the U.S. meatpacking industry that had led to passage of the Pure Food & Drug Act in 1909. Last year I sold this house to a charming young couple who have been restoring it.

Across the street at no. 66 lived Boardman Robinson, artist and political cartoonist, in a classic center-hall colonial perched high on a bluff with views of the Hudson River. The poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, another frequenter of the Croton colony, was married in this house in 1923.

Next door and up the hill at no. 70 is the 200 year-old house that belonged to Max Eastman and his sister Crystal. Max was the dashing literary and social critic who was a leader in the radical Greenwich Village community. He was also editor of The Masses, a magazine combining socialist philosophy with the arts. His sister was a journalist and a prominent feminist who co-wrote the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923 and was a founding member and lawyer of the ACLU. Their home was the main crossroads for visiting luminaries, and their house guests included Charlie Chaplin and Max’s great friend Leon Trotsky. As a realtor, I was fascinated to discover that when Eastman bought this house, his down payment was twenty dollars and the purchase price was $1,500. In 2005, it sold for well over the asking price of $799,000.

Around the bend at the top of the hill, at no. 106, stands the 1840 house that John Reed bought in 1916. Reed is best known as the radical journalist who, with his wife Louise Bryant, participated in the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and wrote about it in his famous book, Ten Days That Shook the World. Warren Beatty based his great Oscar-winning movie Reds on “Jack” Reed’s story, and part of the film is set in Croton (though it was filmed in England), at the house where Reed wrote his book. Beatty took the role of Reed, of course, Diane Keaton played Bryant, and Floyd Dell was also featured in the screenplay. The Reed house was recently listed for sale.

History might have been different if Mabel Dodge hadn’t turned down Jack Reed’s proposal of marriage early in 1916, the same year he later married Louise Bryant. Dodge was the formidable heiress and patron of the arts who had established a weekly salon at her Fifth Avenue apartment in Greenwich Village. In 1913, she and Reed ran off to Paris, where they became lovers. In Paris and in Mabel’s palatial Tuscan villa outside Florence, they hobnobbed with the likes of Picasso, Gertrude Stein & Alice B. Toklas, Artur Rubenstein and Andre Gide. Back in the U.S., Dodge lived in a house on Mount Airy, but when she rebuffed Reed’s marriage proposal, she moved to Finney Farm, not far away in the village. There, in a rambling farmhouse built in 1870, she offered Reed the use of the third floor as a writing studio. He tried it for a time, but it didn’t work out. He then bought her Mount Airy house and, that same year, Mabel married painter Maurice Sterne, her third husband. (1916 must have been quite a year.) Finney Farm already had a rich history when Dodge bought it. Horace (“Go West, young man”) Greeley was just one of the prominent visitors there in the mid-19th century. When I sold this house two years ago it was full of documents and other lore evoking this colorful past.

The stories and the history go on and on. Farther along Mount Airy, at no. 131, is another landmark of the time, Longue Vue Farm, the grand estate where Gloria Swanson lived and entertained in the late 1920s, and where Isadora Duncan loved to dance on the terrace of the castle. I sold this property too, but that’s a topic for another time. Croton’s history is too rich to be covered in other than small, manageable bites.

Posted By: Bruce Dollar