Dyckman Farmhouse Museum

Built by William Dyckman in approximately 1784, this house became the center of a thriving farm of more than 250 acres. The Dyckman family’s presence in northern Manhattan began when Jan Dyckman arrived in New Amsterdam in the 1660s and began acquiring land there. By the time of the American Revolution, Jan’s grandson William had inherited the Dyckman estate, and the family homestead stood near present-day 210th Street and the Harlem River. During the British occupation of Manhattan from 1776 to 1783, William Dyckman and his wife Mary fled to upstate New York. After the war, William returned to find the family home destroyed and is believed to have immediately begun building this new farmhouse at a location farther inland on the newly rerouted Kingsbridge Road, now Broadway. The small two-story Dutch Colonial house served three generations of the Dyckman family. William’s son Jacobus took over in the 1790s, reestablished the farm, and saw it prosper. After Jacobus died, his bachelor sons Isaac and Michael inherited the farmhouse. By the 1850s, Isaac, Michael, and their nephew Isaac Michael Dyckman had moved away, ending Dyckman family residency there. After Isaac’s death in 1868, Isaac Michael inherited much of the property. The farmhouse left family ownership by the 1870s and was used mainly as rental housing for several decades. By the early 20th century, it had fallen into disrepair as the neighborhood’s rural character changed. In 1915, Mary Alice Dyckman Dean and Fannie Fredericka Welch, daughters of Isaac Michael, bought the property to preserve it. With their husbands, curator Bashford Dean and architect Alexander McMillian Welch, they carried out a major restoration meant to return the farmhouse to what they believed was its earliest appearance, furnished the interiors, landscaped the grounds, and added a reproduction smokehouse and a reconstructed Hessian Hut. Since 1916, the house, smokehouse, and reconstructed Hessian Hut have been open to the public as a museum.

New York, New York · United States