Built circa 1652, the original portion of the Wyckoff Farmhouse Museums is the oldest structure in New York City and a National Historic Landmark. Its history exemplifies the diversity of Brooklyn's colonial farms, where Dutch-American landowners, enslaved and freed Africans, and later European immigrants labored on some of the country's most fertile land. Pieter Claesen Wyckoff, an illiterate teenage farm laborer, arrived in the New Netherlands in 1637. After serving his indenture to the van Rensselaer family, he and his wife, Grietje van Nes, settled in the village of Nieuw Amersfoort, modern East Flatbush-Flatlands, Brooklyn, where Wyckoff became a successful farmer and magistrate. Today, more than 50,000 Americans are descended from Pieter and Grietje Wyckoff. The Wyckoff Farmhouse Museum typifies the vernacular farmhouse architecture of the Dutch-American farms of Brooklyn and Queens. Generations of Wyckoffs enlarged and altered the house and continued to farm the land until 1901. Wyckoff descendants established the Wyckoff House and Association in 1937 and repurchased the house from its last private owner in 1961. In 1965 the house became the first structure to be designated a New York City Landmark. The Association donated the house to the City of New York in 1969. Extensively restored, it reopened to the public in 1982. Today its mission is to educate visitors about the diverse peoples of Brooklyn's colonial farms.
