It was built by Colonel Philip Kiliaen van Rensselaer for his bride Maria Sanders, granddaughter of Peter Schuyler. During the early 19th century, it was the home of Solomon van Rensselaer, who served in Congress and several local governmental positions. It eventually became the manor house of a large farm. Within several years during the 1820s it was both accommodations for the Marquis de Lafayette on his return visit to the U.S.[2] and the scene of a murder which led to the last public hanging in Albany following a controversial trial. It is reputedly haunted.[3]
Van Rensselaer's descendants lived there for nearly two centuries, preserving intact not only the original interior finishes but also its furniture, portraits, kitchenware and family documents.[2] Since their tenure, it has been operated as a historic house museum by the Historic Cherry Hill Association. It is currently undergoing an extensive restoration[4] since the building was in danger of collapsing under the weight of its stored collections.[5]
Along both McCarty and First are detached two- and three-story 19th-century rowhouses. A more modern structure is located along Cherry Hill Street at the opposite corner of the block. Otherwise the land is undeveloped and wooded. The next block north has small, industrial buildings; larger facilities such as tank farms are located across I-787 and the railroad tracks east of the highway.[6]
A driveway leads up to the house from South Pearl, a short distance south of the onramp to I-787 across the street. It leads uphill to the house, a two-and-a-half-story, five-by-four-bay rectangular frame dwelling on a stone foundation with clapboard siding.[2] On the north there is a two-story projecting section with a flat roof. The main entrance, at the center of the east (front) facade, has a shed-roofed hood. It has a full-width wooden porch with turnedbalusters and long wooden steps; another porch is in the corner between the main block and the north projection.[7]
Fenestration consists of six-over-six double-hung sash windows with plain wide wooden surrounds. The main entrance is flanked by additional six-over-six double-hung sash as sidelights. At the attic level on the east and west faces are two additional windows.
A small moldedcornice marks the roofline. Above it is a gambrel roof shingled in asphalt. It is pierced on either side near the ends by two gableddormer windows. At the crest are two brick chimneys with corbeled caps.
History
In 1768, at the age of 21, Philip Kiliaen van Rensselaer married Maria Sanders, the daughter of another prominent Albany family. At the time the city was still small, largely limited to the area of the current downtown, from which the stockade had only recently been removed. From the family home on South Pearl Street, he continued the family's mercantile business, selling imports from the West Indies and buying local forest and farm products to ship down the Hudson via the sloops that carried much of the era's trade in the region.[8]
During this time, he began building a farmstead on family land located south of what was, at the time, the city limits. In the Revolutionary War he served on the local Committee of Correspondence, and later serving as a civilian liaison on the supply chain. By the end of the war Phillip Schuyler, who had his own large farm and house south of the city, trusted him to command ten men and oversee the storage of ordnance.[8]
In 1787, with the war behind him and independence achieved, van Rensselaer hired local carpenter Isaac Packard to replace the older, existing house on the farm, which he now called Cherry Hill, with the current structure. The house combined a Georgian body with a gambrel roof, commonly found on the Dutch Colonial houses van Rensselaer's ancestors (and indeed many of Albany's earlier settlers) had built.[9] The family and its many children moved in later that year.[8]
van Rensselaer kept building up the farm, and by 1790 it was almost a thousand acres (400 ha). That year's census reports that he had established a tannery and brewery on the property. In 1794 he was elected the first supervisor of the newly created Town of Bethlehem.[8]
Solomon van Rensselaer
Four years later he died three months after filing his will. It provided generously for his family, and his wife and children continued to live at Cherry Hill until her death in 1824.[8] One of his sons, Solomon Van Rensselaer, followed his father into public service. In addition to service in the U.S. House of Representatives, he was also Albany's postmaster and the state's adjutant general. In 1824 he hosted the Marquis de Lafayette at Cherry Hill on the Revolutionary War hero's return tour of the United States.[2]
Three years later, the house would be the scene of a more ignominious event, the Cherry Hill murder. Among the 17 people living there in 1827 was John Whipple, a prosperous businessman who had married into the van Rensselaer family. His wife, Elsie Lansing, became romantically involved with Jesse Strang, a drifter who had left his own wife and children in Putnam County and was living under an assumed name as one of the servants in the house. They plotted together to murder Whipple. Stang was caught and confessed in full, believing that Albany's establishment would balk at hanging Elsie and thus spare him the same fate. However, while he was convicted and sentenced to death, she was acquitted. His execution was the last public hanging in the city's history.[10] The affair drew national attention, and many thought Strang a victim of socioeconomic inequities of the time.[10]
That class hegemony, which the van Rensselaers had stood atop since Dutch colonial times, was already under threat at that point. With most of the family lands, its original source of wealth, being subdivided and sold, and the semi-feudal patroonship system of land ownership under legal threat, without anything to replace it the family fortune was already in trouble. Over the next several decades the rise of industrialization brought on by the Erie Canal and the development of the railroads fed vast fortunes which dwarfed the van Rensselaers', and brought immigrants to the city, diluting their political power and fueling its steady growth. Development began to encroach southward onto the family's ancestral lands. By 1872 the area around Cherry Hill could no longer be considered rural, and that year Albany formally annexed it into the city.[11] The two dormers were added to the roof sometime between 1850 and 1880.[9]
Through the late 19th and early 20th century Cherry Hill was the property of Catherine Putman Rankin, a cousin of the van Rensselaers.[12] Industry, and worker housing, was within a short distance of the house. Rankin, and later her daughter Emily, devoted their time to preserving what was left.[11]
In 1963, Emily died and specified in her will that the house was to become a museum. Five years later, that became a reality, and in 1971 it was among the first group of properties listed on the National Register of Historic Places in the city after the Schuyler Mansion. Its collection includes 20,000 objects—all the house's original furnishings, tableware—and 30,000 historic documents from the van Rensselaer family archives.[13] Some of the items, such as original 18th-century rugs, have been loaned to other museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art.[14]
By the 21st century, that collection, mostly stored in the attic, was putting such a strain on the house's structural system that it had to be moved before the building collapsed from the weight. In 2009, Cherry Hill closed to visitors and began a four-phase, $3.2 million restoration funded by various public and private grants.[5] Currently, various sections of the house's exterior and structure are being removed and carefully restored. The Historic Cherry Hill Association, which maintains the site, is offering behind-the-scenes tours of the work and other activities and programs in the interim.[14]
Rensselaer is a city in Rensselaer County, New York, United States, and is located on the east side of the Hudson River, opposite Albany and on the western border of Rensselaer County. As of the 2020 census, the city population was 9,210.
East Greenbush is a town in Rensselaer County, New York, United States. It is a suburb of Albany. The population was 16,748 at the 2020 census. The word Greenbush is derived from the Dutch het groen bosch, referring to the pine woods that originally covered the land. The first settlement of the land now known as East Greenbush was made by tenants under patroon Kiliaen van Rensselaer circa 1630. The town was established in 1855 as Clinton, and was renamed in 1858. It is mostly suburban along its major highways and rural in the southwestern and northeastern corners.
Leendert "Leonard" Gansevoort was an American political leader from New York who served as a delegate to the Continental Congress in 1788.
Peter Gansevoort was a Colonel in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War. He is best known for leading the resistance to Barry St. Leger's Siege of Fort Stanwix in 1777. Gansevoort was also the maternal grandfather of Moby-Dick author Herman Melville.
Killian Killian Van Rensselaer was an American lawyer and Federalist politician who served in the United States Congress as a Representative from the state of New York.
Solomon van Vechten van Rensselaer was a United States representative from the state of New York, a lieutenant colonel during the War of 1812, and postmaster of Albany for 17 years.
Pieter Schuyler was the first mayor of Albany, New York. A long-serving member of the executive council of the Province of New York, he acted as governor of the Province of New York on three occasions – twice for brief periods in 1709, after the death of Lord Lovelace, and also from 1719 to 1720, after Robert Hunter left office.
Rensselaerswyck was a Dutch colonial patroonship and later an English manor owned by the van Rensselaer family located in the present-day Capital District of New York in the United States.
The Van Cortlandt family was an influential political dynasty from the seventeenth-century Dutch origins of New York through its period as an English colony, then after it became a state, and into the nineteenth century. It rose to great prominence with the award of a Royal Charter to Van Cortlandt Manor, an 86,000-acre (35,000 ha) tract in today's Westchester County sprawling from the Hudson River to the Connecticut state line granted as a Patent to Stephanus Van Cortlandt in 1697 by King William III.
Schuyler Mansion is a historic house at 32 Catherine Street in Albany, New York. The brick mansion is now a museum and an official National Historic Landmark. It was constructed from 1761 to 1765 for Philip Schuyler, later a general in the Continental Army and early U.S. Senator, who resided there from 1763 until his death in 1804. It was declared a National Historic Landmark on December 24, 1967. It is also a contributing property to the South End–Groesbeckville Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984.
Schuyler Flatts is an important prehistoric and historic settlement site overlooking the Hudson River in Colonie, New York. The site includes evidence of prehistoric Native American, early Dutch colonial settlement, and 18th and 19th-century American use. Because of this rich confluence of archaeological sites, the area was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1993. It is now owned by the town of Colonie, and is known as Schuyler Flatts Cultural Park.
The Crailo State Historic Site is a historic, fortified brick manor house in Rensselaer, New York which was built in 1707. The word Crailo is derived from kraaien bos and refers to Kiliaen van Rensselaer's estate in Huizen, Holland, which is also named "Crailo". Fort Crailo is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Hendrick van Rensselaer was director of the Eastern patent of the Rensselaerswyck manor. The estate was composed of land in Columbia County, New York, and land opposite Albany, New York, on the Hudson River, named Greenbush.
Kiliaen van Rensselaer, was the patroon of Manor of Rensselaerswyck.
Kiliaen van Rensselaer, the eldest child of Jeremias and Maria van Cortlandt van Rensselaer was born in Rensselaerwyck.
Philip Kiliaen van Rensselaer was the second son of Colonel Kiliaen van Rensselaer and Ariaantie (Schuyler). He was a merchant by trade, and his experience in transporting cargo may have helped qualify him as keeper of the Albany arsenal. He was variously referred to as storekeeper, military storekeeper and Commissary for the Northern Department.
Colonel Kiliaen van Rensselaer was a colonial American soldier and politician who was a member of the prominent Van Rensselaer family.
Henry K. van Rensselaer, his given name Hendrick Kiliaen was a Colonel during the American Revolutionary War when he played a pivotal role in the Battle of Fort Anne.
Nicholas van Rensselaer was a Reformed Dutch Church clergyman, and one time director of the Manor of Rensselaerwyck.
Maria van Cortlandt van Rensselaer, also known as Maria van Rensselaer was the Dutch administrator and treasurer of the Manor of Rensselaerswyck, now Albany, New York.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
