It is the second-oldest extant church and the 15th-oldest extant building in the state of New York, renovated after a 1837 fire. Some of those renovations were reversed 60 years later, and further work was done in 1960. It was listed on the Register in 1963, among the earliest properties so recognized. It had already been designated a National Historic Landmark in 1961. It is the property of the Reformed Church of the Tarrytowns, which holds summer services there, as well as on special occasions such as Christmas Eve, Easter, and Reformation Sunday.[3]
Building
The Old Dutch Church in 1907Interior of the Old Dutch ChurchEast elevation, 2020
The building was designed and funded by Frederick Philipse I, the first lord of Philipsburg Manor. It is located on the east side of Albany Post Road, opposite the Devries Road intersection, just north of downtown Sleepy Hollow. The neighborhoods to the west are residential. A wooded area to the southeast buffers the church from residential areas in that direction. Approximately 300ft (100 m) to the south is the mill pond at Philipsburg Manor House, another National Historic Landmark. The churchyard and Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, itself listed on the Register, are to the north.
The structure is rectangular, with a three-sided projecting rear apse on the east end. It has two-foot–thick (60cm) fieldstone walls. They give way to clapboard above the roofline, within the fields of the Flemish-style gambrel roof, with its lower segments flaring outward like a bell. On the west end of the roof is an octagonal wooden open belfry. Within it is the original bell, engraved with a verse from Romans 8:31, "Si Deus Pro Nobis, Quis Contras Nos?" ("If God be for us, who can be against us")[4] and "VF", Philipse's initials. The latter monogram is also on the wrought ironweathervane atop the belfry.[5]
To the west, a stone retaining wall raises the church above grade level. A few shrubs flank the stone steps that lead up to the main entrance, paneled wooden double doors recessed within a Gothic archway. Above it is a glass transom with curved, intersecting muntins. It is set within a brick surround. The north and south side elevations have double-hung sash windows, as do the two side facets of the apse. At the roofline is a molded wooden cornice.[5]
The interior has its wooden pews, with two side aisles, arranged so that all could focus on the pulpit. The pulpit is located on a raised platform in the rear, directly opposite the main entrance. A balustrade with turned wooden posts, open at the aisles, sets the platform off from the rest of the wide-planked floor. Behind it is a table, with a lectern on the north and an enclosed pew along the south side. The ornate wooden pulpit is raised further above the table level; access is provided by a short spiral stair. A pipe organ is located at the rear.[5]
History
Frederick Philipse, first lord of Philipsburg Manor, owned the vast stretch of land spanning from Spuyten Duyvil in the Bronx to the Croton River. After swearing allegiance and later being granted his manorship from the English Crown, he chose to establish a wharf and an agricultural facility for his extensive shipping and trading operations at what was then known as the Upper Mills, where the Pocantico River flowed into the Hudson River. A small Dutch community had already been established there when he arrived in 1683, with several dozen graves in the small cemetery.[5]
Philipse's wife, Margaret Hardenbroeck de Vries Philipse,[6][7] died in 1691, and he soon remarried. His second wife, Catharine Van Cortlandt Derval,[7] urged him to build a more permanent stone church for his tenants. Later in the decade, he obliged her. Under Philipse's command, enslaved laborers erected the stone church[8] at the cemetery's southern end. Philipse was its architect, financier, and aid in its construction (a carpenter by trade,[9] he is said to have built the pulpit with his own hands).[10] A marble tablet in front of the church gives its completion date as 1699. The tablet was placed in the 19th century, however. It is more likely that the church was built between 1685 (the date on its bell, cast to order in the Netherlands[11]) and 1697, when the congregation was organized.[4]
After Frederick Philipse III was officially stripped of his lordship title in 1779,[13] the special pews for the lord of the manor were removed from the church, and the plain oak benches built for the Philipses' tenants were replaced with pine pews. Thereafter, the church continued without the manorial patronage. Washington Irving, whose Sunnyside estate was a few miles to the south, made the church famous when he gave it prominent mention in his 1820 short storyThe Legend of Sleepy Hollow as both a setting and a site connected with the Headless Horseman. (The church was already old when Irving first saw it as a teenager.[4]) Irving later gave yellow bricks from the church to outline the construction date on the wall above the door at Bolton Priory in Pelham Manor.[14]
In 1837, a fire damaged the church. During the repairs some significant changes were made to the building. The main entrance was moved from the south facade to its current location on the west, the windows and door entry were changed to the Gothic arches, then in style, and given brick surrounds. Inside, the north gallery was removed and the west one enlarged. The original ceiling beams and pulpit were replaced.[5]
The church was renovated again in 1897 for its bicentennial. That work reversed the 1837 renovations, restoring the original ceiling and the original pulpit. The Tarrytown area population had significantly grown through the 19th century, and a branch church had been built in Tarrytown to minister to the expanded congregation. Eventually, that church, the Reformed Church of the Tarrytowns, became the main church, and the original building was used only for special occasions, a practice that continued until the most recent renovation in the 1990s. Currently, worship services in the Old Dutch Church (which has no electricity and can only be heated with a wood stove[15]) are held from June through September. It is also a popular location for weddings.[3]
Old Dutch Burying Ground
Some of the oldest gravestones are near the northern wall of the church.Southeastern part of the Burying Ground
The three-acre (1.2 ha) historical churchyard of the Old Dutch Church is contiguous with, but separate from, the 90-acre Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.[16] It is one of America’s oldest burying grounds. Established by an early Dutch community, it predates the church.[5] The earliest legible gravestone dates to 1755, but initial interments of Dutch settlers at this site may have occurred before 1650.[11]
The earliest documented graves are those of the original, Dutch-born members of the church congregation, including the Acker (and variants like Ecker and Echert), Van Tassel (Van Texel, Van Tessel), Martling (Martlings, Martelingh), de Younge (Yongs, Youngs), and Storm (Storms) families and their early descendants.[17] Family plots of Swiss, German, French Huguenot, and English Puritan and Quaker settler families include, among others, those of the Odell, Pugsley, Romer, and Requa families.[17] These names and burial places are documented in family papers and the 1926 biographical index, The Old Dutch Burying Ground of Sleepy Hollow,[11] based on a survey of surviving gravestones.[16]
None of the abovementioned records indicate whether the churchyard also served as the resting place for the enslaved individuals of Philipsburg Manor[8] or house slaves of local families. Some historical sources, however, mention the preexistence of an old Wecquaesgeek burying ground on the hill where the Old Dutch Church was later built[18] and of a separate "burial ground west of the church for the Philipsburg slaves."[19] If that was the case, no traces of these graves have survived: because enslaved people were not permitted headstones, their graves were often marked with simple fieldstones or wooden markers that would have long since decayed.
The Old Dutch Burying Ground holds one of the highest concentrations of Revolutionary War veteran graves in the state of New York.[20] Many of these local residents served as crucial scouts, guides, and foragers for the Continental Army in the infamous "neutral ground," knowing the terrain well.[21][22] The graves are marked with small plaques and American flags. The Revolutionary Soldiers' Monument in the adjacent Sleepy Hollow Cemetery was built in 1894 specifically to honor those interred in the Burying Ground; invaluable historical information on the families whose names are inscribed on the monument, as well as related Revolutionary War events, was compiled in a commemorative book[17] by local newspaper publisher Marcius D. Raymond.
Frederick Philipse (1626-1702), first lord of Philipsburg Manor and builder of the church, his two wives, and several of his children are buried in a crypt under the floorboards of the church.[11] The exact number of those buried is not known because the crypt has never been publicly opened and formally cataloged.
Dirck Storm (1630–1715) – author of Het Notite Boeck der Christelyckes Kercke op de Manner of Philips Burgh, a book about the early years of the Old Dutch Church. He also served as Town Clerk in the early years of many New Amsterdam communities, as well as tax collector for Frederick Philipse. His son, David Storm, deacon and elder of the church, is also buried in the Storm family plot. This family plot is the only one on the grounds that is enclosed by a fence and has the family name displayed on the cast-iron gate, which signifies the family's prominent role in the community and its members' landowning status as yeomen.[24]
Hulda of Bohemia (c.1700-c.1777) – the semi-legendary "witch" and Revolutionary War hero of Sleepy Hollow, killed by British soldiers while protecting the local Militia on Battle Hill, where the Revolutionary Soldiers' Monument stands now.[25][26] As a suspected witch, she was buried in an unmarked grave. In 2011, that place in the burying ground was marked with a small orange flag. A permanent headstone was finally erected in her honor in 2019, commemorating her as an herbalist, healer, and Patriot. The unveiling ceremony was presided over by the pastor of the Old Dutch Church.[26] Hulda is believed to be the inspiration for the “High German witch doctor,” who bewitched the land in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.[27]
William Paulding Jr. (1770–1854) – U.S. Representative from New York and two-term mayor of New York City (1825-1826 and 1827-1829); veteran of the War of 1812. Washington Irving was an intimate friend of the Paulding family; his brother, William Irving, married Julia Paulding, William's sister.[11]
Adam Badeau (1831-1895) – Ulysses S. Grant's military secretary, diplomat, author of the seminal three-volume Military History of Ulysses S. Grant (1881)[30]
Washington Irving's own final resting place is also just over 150 feet away from the graves of those who inspired his characters, in the oldest part of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery abutting the Burial Ground.
Irving's Headless Horseman of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow may have been inspired by the rumored discovery of a headless corpse in the area after the Revolutionary War Battle of White Plains, later allegedly buried by the Van Tassel family in an unmarked grave in the burying ground.[31] (There is, indeed, a record of an anonymous Hessian soldier being decapitated by a cannonball during the battle,[32] but there is no documented record of his body being found and buried.)
The site is permanently closed for future interments, even though some ground space near the Old Dutch Church remains open.[33]
It stands on a knoll, surrounded by locust-trees and lofty elms, from among which its decent, whitewashed walls shine modestly forth... To look upon this grassgrown yard, where the sunbeams seem to sleep so quietly, one would think that there at least the dead might rest in peace. (The Legend of Sleepy Hollow)
12Zimmerman, Jean (January 1, 2006). The Women of the House: How a Colonial She-merchant Built a Mansion, a Fortune, And a Dynasty. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. ISBN978-0151010653.
↑"Manor Mysteries". Philipse Manor Hall State Historic Site. Retrieved January 12, 2026.
↑Edited Appletons Encyclopedia, Famous Americans: Biography of Frederick Philipse: "...He worked at the carpenter's trade for several years, aided in building the Old Dutch church, and is said to have made the pulpit with his own hands.
↑"Diary Entry: July 1781". Founders Online, National Archives. Original source: The Diaries of George Washington, vol. 3, 1 January 1771–5 November 1781, ed. Donald Jackson. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978. Archived from the original on June 17, 2025. Retrieved January 10, 2026.
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