Philipsburg Manor

The site now known as Philipsburg Manor sits on land granted to merchant Frederick Philipse I under a royal charter in 1693. Philipse, who had arrived from Holland as a carpenter and built himself into the wealthiest merchant in colonial New York, used the grant to establish a commercial farming and milling operation on the Pocantico River, a tributary of the Hudson.

The operation was built on and maintained by enslaved labor. For more than thirty years, Frederick and his first wife Margaret Hardenbroeck — one of colonial America's most successful merchants herself — shipped hundreds of enslaved African men, women, and children across the Atlantic. By the time Frederick's son Adolphus died in 1750, twenty-three enslaved men, women, and children were living and working at the manor. Adolphus's probate inventory listed them as the most valuable property on the estate. The enslaved workers operated the gristmill, worked the fields and wharf, maintained the household, and slept in shifts in a cramped room in the manor basement.

The Philipse family's support of the British during the Revolution led to the confiscation of the estate. Frederick Philipse III, the third lord of the manor, was exiled to England in 1783. The property passed through several owners and periods of use before Historic Hudson Valley — the nonprofit founded by John D. Rockefeller Jr. — acquired it in the 1940s and began archaeological and interpretive work.

Philipsburg Manor was designated a National Historic Landmark on November 5, 1961. The site's interpretive mission, significantly expanded in recent decades, now centers explicitly on the enslaved workers: their documented names where the historical record preserves them, their labor, their living conditions, and the northern American context of plantation-scale slavery that the Philipse operation exemplified.