Philipsburg Manor
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Philipsburg Manor is a historic house, water mill, and trading site located on Route 9 in Sleepy Hollow, New York. It is now operated as a non-profit museum by Historic Hudson Valley; an admission fee is charged.
The manor dates from 1693 when Frederick Philipse of Yonkers was granted a charter for 52,000 acres along the Hudson River by William and Mary of England. He built Philipsburg Manor at the confluence of the Pocantico and Hudson Rivers, creating it as a provisioning plantation for the Atlantic sea trade and as headquarters for a world-wide shipping operation. For more than thirty years, Frederick and his son Adolph shipped hundreds of African men, women, and children as slaves across the Atlantic.
By the mid 18th century, the Philipse family had one of the largest slave-holdings in the colonial North. The manor was owned by an Anglo-Dutch family of merchants, tenanted by farmers of various European backgrounds, and operated by enslaved Africans. (In 1750, twenty-three enslaved men, women, and children lived and worked at the manor.)
Now a National Historic Landmark, the farm features a stone manor house filled with a good collection of 17th-and 18th-century period furnishings, a working water-powered grist mill and millpond, an 18th-century barn, a slave garden, and a reconstructed tenant farm house. Costumed interpreters re-enact life in pre-Revolutionary times, doing chores, milking the cows, and grinding grain in the grist mill.
Although an English-deeded tract, some sources list Philipsburg Manor with the patroonships of New Netherland.
