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Van Cortlandt Manor After 1815"Van Cortlandt Manor telescopes time, it spans almost the history of our country...But, the purpose of this restoration is not merely to recreate a quiet, stately, authentic reminder of the past...Restorations such as this enable us to come face-to-face with history, to appreciate our debt to it, and they strengthen our resolve to help create a future that will be worthy of us." --Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, opening of Van Cortlandt Manor, June 13, 1959 The sole lineal heir of the Croton estate, Pierre Van Cortlandt III, married Catherine Beck in 1836 and moved into the manor house the same year. Pierre III "filled no public offices and...rarely appeared in public life. He was a domestic man, delighting in the quiet of home and country pursuits." His rejection of the sphere of politics and business was typical of Hudson Valley patricians during this era. Catherine Beck Van Cortlandt pursued a life of charity work, most notably serving as an advocate for female prisoners at Sing Sing. An ardent amateur historian, she assembled family possessions and papers and further enriched the interiors of the manor house with furnishings that had belonged to her Albany-area ancestors. From the mid-nineteenth century onward, enthusiasts of the colonial revival, a movement that popularized the American antiques, reveled in the Van Cortlandts' house, furnishings, and gardens as described and illustrated in books and magazines. Family fortune declined as the nineteenth century progressed. The reduced navigability of the Croton River due to the building of a railroad bridge at its mouth during the 1890s wiped out the Van Cortlandts' milling business. The size of the family's land holdings also eroded. When Pierre died in 1814, he divided 2,400 acres among his heirs. Pierre III eventually inherited one-third of his grandfather's acreage. Circa 1900, the descendants of Pierre III sold off five hundred acres to Croton land developer Clifford Harmon. The era of Van Cortlandt ownership ended when the manor house property was sold in 1945. Remarkably, the estate had remained in the hands of the same family since the land was purchased in 1688. Upon hearing that the manor house was threatened with demolition, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who spent summers and falls at Kykuit in nearby Tarrytown, acquired the structure and five surrounding acres in 1953. He purchased the ferry house and additional land the next year. Mr. Rockefeller commissioned staff members of Colonial Williamsburg, the pioneering outdoor museum he had founded in 1926, to study and restore the property. Architects, curators, archeologists, and historians conducted exhaustive research as a basis for restoration. Van Cortlandt Manor is, in a sense, the culmination of Rockefeller's life-long devotion to preservation. Not only did he spend much time overseeing the details of its restoration, it was the last preservation project he worked on before his death in 1960. In 1959, title to Van Cortlandt Manor was transferred and the house and grounds opened to the public as a property of Sleepy Hollow Restorations, the forerunner of Historic Hudson Valley. -by Kathleen Eagen Johnson
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