Sunnyside

About this property

Sunnyside is a historic house built in 1835 on 10 acres (4 ha) along the Hudson River, in Tarrytown, New York. It was the home of the American author Washington Irving, best known for his short stories, such as "Rip Van Winkle" (1819) and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (1820). This cottage-like estate, designated a National Historic Landmark in 1962, reflects Dutch Colonial Revival, Scottish Gothic, and Tudor Revival influences, with its wisteria-covered entrance and jagged crow-stepped gable. In some sense, Sunnyside began almost 200 years before Irving with Wolfert Acker (sometimes spelled Wolfert Eckert), a Dutch-American inhabitant of the region. His property, Wolfert's Roost, was part of the Manor of Philipsburg. Among other buildings, Wolfert's Roost contained a simple two-room stone tenant farmhouse, built about 1650. The property came into the hands of the Van Tassel family, who were married into the Eckert family and owned it until 1802. That year, 150 acres (61 ha) were deeded to the family of Benson Ferris, one-time clerk of the Old Dutch Church of Sleepy Hollow, whose wife, Maria Acker, was a descendant of Wolfert Acker's. Irving would immortalize the Van Tassel family name in his short story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (1820). In 1832, Washington Irving visited his nephew Oscar Irving who lived near the old stone farmhouse. Irving had recently undertaken a substantial trip through the prairies of the Arkansas and Mississippi Rivers, and the frontier lifestyle made him lament his lack of a home of his own. He was also frustrated because he had lived most of his adult life as a guest in other people's homes. As Irving wrote, he was eager for a home and was "willing to pay a little unreasonably for it". Irving finally purchased the property on June 7, 1835, for $1,800; he would later, through the years, add to the property to expand the estate. Irving wrote a story, "Wolfert's Roost", about Acker and the site. In a letter to his brother Peter, he described it as "a beautiful spot, capable of being made a little paradise... I have had an architect up there, and shall build upon the old mansion this summer. My idea is to make a little nookery somewhat in the Dutch style, quaint, but unpretending. It will be of stone." Irving requested that his friend and neighbor, English-born painter George Harvey, become his aesthetic collaborator and foreman in the house's subsequent remodeling and enlargement, and the landscaping of the grounds in Romantic style, which included creating a pond Irving called "The Little Mediterranean", fed by Sunnyside Brook, and exited by a waterfall that led to the serpentine stream.

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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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