Nevis: Son's estate honors Founding Father Alexander Hamilton

This sketch shows Nevis as it would have appeared before 1860 during the lifetime of Col. James Alexander Hamilton, son of America's Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, who died at age 91 in 1878. (Columbia University photo)

The third son of America's Founding Father and first treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, and Elizabeth Schuyler, daughter of American Revolutionary War Major General Philip Schuyler, Colonel James Alexander Hamilton purchased a property of some 150 acres at 136 South Broadway in Irvington, N.Y., west of U.S. Rt. 9 and east of the Hudson River.

Hamilton and his wife, Mary Morris Hamilton, bought the land in 1834 and fashioned their home there a year later. He named the estate Nevis to honor the eponymous British West Indies island, now the Federation of Saint Kitts and Nevis, where his father was born to an unwed mother. 

This portrait of George Washington, the Constable-Hamilton Portrait, hung in James Alexander Hamilton's mansion at Nevis in Irvington. The oil-on-canvas work by famed portraitist Gilbert Stuart, was commissioned by New York merchant William Kerin Constable as a gift to Founding Father Alexander Hamilton. The portrait commemorated the signing of the Jay Treaty between the United States and Great Britain in 1794 resolving issues left hanging by the 1783 Treaty of Paris that ended the American Revolution. The elder Hamilton designed much of the treaty's policy stances. Chief negotiator was John Jay. Washington is shown holding the treaty while the seascape behind him recalls Hamilton's focus on international trade. The Hamiltons donated the portrait to the Lenox (Mass.) Library in 1896. It sold at auction in 2005 for $8,136,000 to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, founded by Walmart heir Alice Walton, in Bentonbville, Arkansas. (Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons) 

Like his Treasury Secretary father before him, James A. Hamilton served in the Cabinet of a U.S. president. He served as acting Secretary of State for a month in March 1829 under U.S. President Andrew Jackson until the confirmation of Secretary of State Martin Van Buren. He served as a Brigade Major in the New York State Militia in the War of 1812.

He was a practicing attorney and prosecutor and was just 16 when his father was mortally wounded in his infamous duel with U.S. Vice President Aaron Burr at Weehawken, N.J., on July 11, 1804, three years after Hamilton’s oldest son Philip was shot and killed in a duel at the same location on the west bank of the Hudson River directly opposite today's midtown Manhattan. 

These are the actual flintlock pistols used in the deadly Aaron Burr-Alexander Hamilton duel on 11 July 1804 at Weehawken, N.J. The pistols were by London gunsmith Wogdon & Barton. (Photo c. 1904 courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Along with his mother and surviving siblings, James was at his father's bedside in a Greenwich Village boarding house when Hamilton died on July 12, 1804.

Among the many family treasures the Hamiltons housed at Nevis was a full-length  portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart. Upon the death of Hamilton in 1878, his son, Union Civil War veteran Col. Alexander Hamilton III (1816-1889) inherited Nevis. Alexander rebuilt the main house, adding wings on the north and south and encasing the frame mansion in brick. When he died, the estate was acquired by his cousin Philip Schuyler, grandson of General Schuyler who combined Nevis and his own next-door estate. The Schuylers lived at Nevis until their deaths, Philip in 1906 and his widow in 1915, when the property was sold out of the family for the first time in almost 80 years.

This is the south face of the Nevis mansion in 2015. The building was constructed in 1835 and rebuilt and expanded with wings on the south (right) and north (left) under the direction of famed architect Stanford White in the late 19th century. It was home to many Columbia University Nevis lab graduate students and others after 1946. (Photo c. 2015 courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Schuyler’s great-grandparents included Founding Father Hamilton and Revolutionary War General Philip Schuyler.

The estate changed hands several times after 1906, including to Charles Eastman Danforth Sr., a prominent Wall Street stockbroker, eventually being purchased by U.S. Senator Thomas Coleman DuPont of Delaware in 1920. In 1934, DuPont’s wife donated the house and its remaining 68 acres to Columbia University.

James Alexander Hamilton is shown
in a portrait c. 1834-1837 by Aimée Thibaut.
(Courtesy Frick Art Reference Library)

Mary Morris Hamilton is shown
in a portrait c. 1834-1837 by Aimée Thibaut.
(Courtesy Frick Art Reference Library)

Columbia constructed a physics lab on the 60-acre site and, in 1950, dedicated the world’s most powerful particle accelerator — a cyclotron — with then-Columbia president and future U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower on hand. Many of the researchers assigned to the project had participated in the nation's earliest work on the atom and/or were prominent Columbia physics department faculty members.

The cyclotron was described in the December 14, 1946 edition of Boston's Christian Science Monitor newspaper as a fashionable name for an "atom smasher." Its 2.500-ton electromagnet was made to accelerate protons — which the Monitor called "the energy-stuff of matter" — up to 300,000,000 electron volts surpassing any energy previously achieved by atomic researchers. The protons were expected to reach speeds of more than 130,000 miles per second, producing energy found previously only in cosmic rays, 

The cyclotron was decommissioned in 1976, but the house and lab remain in use by Columbia  as a physics and biological research facility known as Nevis Laboratories.

Columbia physics professor John Parsons once explained the practical modern side of the cyclotron particle accelerator to journalist Barbara Moroch of The Hudson Independent newspaper:

“Most of to­day’s par­ti­cle ac­cel­er­a­tors are not used for physics re­search, but in hos­pi­tals and in in­dus­try, for pur­poses such as can­cer ther­apy and fab­ri­ca­tion of ma­te­ri­als. Many med­ical de­vices, such as X-ray ma­chines, MRIs and PET scan­ners all were de­vel­oped first in labs. In fact, the World Wide Web (today's Internet) was de­vel­oped at CERN (the Eu­ro­pean Or­ga­ni­za­tion for Nu­clear Re­search based in Switzer­land) to im­prove com­mu­ni­ca­tion among physi­cists. It was then pro­vided, free of charge, to the world.”

Nevis Laboratories specializes in designing and building high-energy particle and nuclear experiments and equipment distributed to major laboratories worldwide. The lab also performs data analysis for those experiments.

The laboratory is also home to the Radiological Research Accelerator Facility, a National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering biotechnology resource center specializing in microbeam technology.

Columbia University hosts regular free public lectures at the estate’s Nevis Science Center, a repurposed barn from the heyday of the estate.

This sketch shows the Nevis estate as it would have appeared during the lifetime of Col. James Alexander Hamilton, son of Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, who died at age 91 in 1878. (Columbia University)

The presentations are normally held the second Thursday of each month during the school year. Columbia physicists and scientists discuss international and local experiments on which their research teams are working. Topics include such items as big bang cosmology, dark matter, neutrino physics, particle colliders, biophysics and astrophysics.

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