Philipse Manor Hall

About this property

Philipse Manor Hall State Historic Site is a historic house museum located in the Getty Square neighborhood of Yonkers, New York. Originally the family seat of Philipsburg Manor, and later Yonkers city hall, it is Westchester County's second oldest standing building after the Timothy Knapp House. Located near the Hudson River at Warburton Avenue and Dock Street, it is owned and operated by the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation. The southwest corner, the oldest part of the structure, was built around 1682 by Dutch-born merchant and trader Frederick Philipse, the first lord of Philipsburg Manor, and his first wife Margaret Hardenbroeck who was a prominent merchant in her own right. Philipse, who by his second marriage became a son-in-law of Stephanus Van Cortlandt, had amassed by the time of his death a 52,000-acre (21,000 ha) estate along the Hudson River that encompassed the entire modern city of Yonkers and much of western and lower Westchester County. For more than thirty years, Frederick and Margaret, and later their son Adolphus, shipped hundreds of enslaved African men, women, and children across the Atlantic. By the mid-18th century, the Philipse family had one of the largest slave-holdings in the colonial North. During Philipse's life, the building, one of his two manor houses, was used primarily as a stopover point on the long journey up and down the river between his home in New Amsterdam and the northern parts of his estate, where he had another house (which is now the Philipsburg Manor House historic site in Sleepy Hollow, New York). That is where the majority of the Philipses' slaves lived and worked. His grandson, Frederick Philipse II, the second lord of the manor, and his great-grandson, Frederick Philipse III, the last lord, successively enlarged and enhanced the former stopover building, making it the primary family residence, Philipse Manor Hall. On November 28, 1776, nearly five months after the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the start of the American Revolution, Frederick Philipse III and over 200 of his contemporaries signed a document declaring their allegiance to the British Crown and their unwillingness to support the Revolutionary cause. The Philipse Manor Hall was used during the war, most notably by British General Sir Henry Clinton during military activities in 1779. It was there that he wrote what is now known as the Philipsburg Proclamation, which declared all Patriot-owned slaves to be free, and that blacks taken prisoner while serving in Patriot forces would be sold into slavery.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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