Dyckman Farmhouse

This restored farmhouse in Northern Manhattan at the corner of 204th Street and Broadway is Manhattan's only surviving farmhouse built in Dutch colonial style.

Jan Dyckman arrived in New Amsterdam in the 1660s and settled on a farm in Northern Manhattan, building a farmhouse just north of what became 207th Street. The farm grew to 250 acres and remained occupied by the family through the Revolutionary War, when Jan's grandson, William Dyckman, and his family fled upstate during the British occupation. Following the war, William Dyckman returned to the land and built this new farmhouse around 1784. The house remained a residence for successive generations of Dyckmans through the 1850s and was owned by the Dyckman family until being sold in the 1870s and falling into disrepair.

With the continuing growth of New York City, Northern Manhattan slowly became more urban in character and the Dyckman farm was subdivided and sold off for development. In 1915, Mary Alice Dyckman Dean and Fannie Frederica Dyckman Welch (two sisters who had grown up in the house but were not direct descendants of patriarch Jan Dyckman) purchased the old farmhouse on its remaining 1.5 acre plot and, with their husbands serving as curator and architect, converted the property into a museum of American life across the 130 years of the house's existence. After repairs and renovations were completed in 1916, the house was donated to the City of New York.