Kykuit: Home to ultra rich Rockefeller clan remains focal point of community

This is a colorized postcard showing a side view of the initial Kykuit mansion, shown in 1909. John D. Rockefeller Sr. and his family moved into the house at the time but, disillusioned at its design, moved out and ordered it redesigned and built to its current 4-story Georgian design specifications between 1910 and its completion in 1913.

Pocantico Hills is the site of oil baron John Davison Rockefeller Sr.’s 40-room masterpiece Kykuit (from the Dutch “kijkuit” or “lookout”), and home to many Rockefeller heirs today.

Sitting atop the highest point of Pocantico Hills near Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow, Kykuit commands breathtaking vistas of the Hudson River Valley as far north as West Point and as far south as New York City.

Rockefeller (July 8, 1839-May 23. 1937), among the richest private citizens who have ever lived, was introduced to the area in 1886 by younger brother William Avery Rockefeller Jr., one of his Standard Oil co-founders. William had purchased the nearby Rockwood Hall estate and rapidly enlarged it to 1,000 acres.

John D. Rockefeller was not to be outdone by his younger brother. In his 2020 book, "David Rockefeller Memoirs" (Random House, 2002), JDR's grandson explained: “Grandfather had started buying property in Pocantico in the early 1890s. Southwestern Westchester County was still very rural then, with woodlands, lakes, fields and streams all teeming with wildlife. Eventually the family accumulated about 3,400 acres, which surrounded and included almost all of the little village of Pocantico Hills, where most of the residents worked for the family and lived in houses owned by Grandfather.

“The wooden house my grandparents occupied (the Parsons-Wentworth House) burned down in 1901. Rather than rebuild, they simply moved down the hill to a smaller place, known as the Kent House, where they were perfectly content. After a great deal of prodding by Father (John D. Rockefeller Jr.) they finally built a larger and more substantial house near where the original structure had stood. Grandfather occupied Kykuit from 1912 until his death in 1937, and then Mother and Father moved into it.

This is the Parsons-Wentworth House, home to John Davison Rockefeller Sr. from about 1893 through 1902 at his Pocantico Hills estate. Rockefeller did not begin construction on his 40-room Kykuit mansion until Parsons-Wentworth burned down in 1902. (Images of America, Tarrytown & Sleepy Hollow, The Historical Society Inc., Serving Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow, 1997)

“My parents’ first home in 'the Park,' Abeyton Lodge, was a large, rambling wooden structure down the hill from Kykuit. Abeyton’s interior was filled with oak paneling and floors, which gave it a warm and comfortable feeling. …”

SON OF ‘DEVIL BILL’ ROCKEFELLER

John D. Rockefeller Sr. (July 8, 1839-May 23, 1937) was born in Richford, N.Y., one of six legitimate children of William Avery Rockefeller Sr. and Eliza Davison. His father, a con man whose top selling scam was a bogus cancer cure, was commonly called “Devil Bill.” Devil Bill had two illegitimate daughters with his family’s housekeeper, Nancy Brown.

The family settled in the Cleveland, Ohio suburb of Strongville in 1853 and William Sr. abandoned the family by 1855 to enter into a bigamous marriage under the alias “Dr. William Levingston.”

John D. was a self-made man. He became an assistant bookkeeper in 1855 at age 16 for $5 a week and was an entrepreneur four years later co-founding a shipping company that provided much of the hay, meat, grain and supplies needed by the Union army during the Civil War.

The impeccably-timed business venture was a huge success. Rockefeller used its windfall profits to invest in oil, eventually founding the Standard Oil Company with brother WIlliam and others in 1870. Rockefeller ran the company until 1897 when he turned over its day-to-day reins to his trusted right-hand man, John Dustin Archbold, who owned Tarrytown’s “Cedar Cliff” estate west of Broadway across from today’s Church of the Transfiguration.

At its peak, Standard Oil controlled about 90 percent of the nation’s oil. It remained a virtual monopoly until 1911 when it was broken up by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The court split Standard Oil into 34 new companies, including what are now ExxonMobil, Amoco, Chevron, Marathon, Atlantic Richfield (ARCO) and ConocoPhillips (Phillips 66).

Ironically, the breakup compounded Rockefeller’s net worth within four years. It turned out that the trust had deflated the company’s stock price and shareholders in the newly independent companies -- including Rockefeller -- reaped windfall profits as the newly issued stock values doubled and then trebled by about 1915.

The Rockefeller family “Playhouse” (pictured ca. 2000) is a two-story, Tudor-style complex built by John D. Rockefeller Jr. in 1927 for his family to get together. The building is located next to a 9-hole golf course and includes tennis, basketball and squash courts, an indoor swimming pool, a billiards room and a pair of bowling alleys. It is the site where up to 270 Rockefellers would meet twice a year to discuss family business. In July 2018, the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund announced that the Playhouse and other guest houses and surrounding land from the Rockefeller estate would become part of the Pocantico Center as part of a bequest from David Rockefeller. (Rockefeller Brothers Fund)

ABOLITIONIST, PHILANTHROPIST

After stepping down from the helm of Standard Oil, Rockefeller Sr. became a renowned philanthropist.

A Baptist and ardent abolitionist before and during the Civil War, Rockefeller donated heavily to educational facilities for freed slaves and their children, including Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary in Atlanta for African-American women, which became Spelman College and was named after his wife, Laura Spelman Rockefeller.

Other beneficiaries of Rockefeller’s largesse during his lifetime included the University of Chicago, Rockefeller University, Johns Hopkins, Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Brown, Vassar, Bryn Mawr and Wellesley.

Kykuit, the family home of John Davison Rockefeller Sr. and his descendants, is shown in a 2005 photo. The 40-room mansion overlooks the Hudson River and was once the centerpiece of the 3,500-acre Pocantico Hills estate. (Wikimedia Commons)

His heirs would continue his philanthropic efforts. They funded what became Colonial Williamsburg and Historic Hudson Valley as well as Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in Manhattan.

At the time of his 1937 death, Rockefeller’s personal wealth was estimated at $1.4 billion when the total U.S. gross domestic product was $92 billion compared to $21.43 trillion in 2019, or 0.43 percent. As a percentage of GDP, no other American billionaire’s net worth -- Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Bill Gates are the top three -- would come close.

Rockefeller’s Pocantico estate eventually grew to include more than 60 buildings, a nine-hole golf course, a $1 million ''Playhouse'' with an indoor swimming pool and tennis, basketball and squash courts, as well as a billiard room and two bowling alleys.

John Davison Rockefeller Sr.’s Pocantico estate stables, ca. 1915, are shown in a colorized postcard from the era.

The formal gardens include terraces, fountains and a vast collection of sculpture throughout the landscape. The company of Frederick Law Olmsted, who landscaped Manhattan’s Central Park, was hired to design Pocantico Hills, but Rockefeller Sr. didn’t like what he saw and took over design himself. In 1906, he hired William Welles Bosworth who completed the gardens near Kykuit still seen today. Bosworth’s work includes the Morning Garden, Grand Staircase, Japanese Garden, Italian Garden, Japanese-style brook, Japanese Teahouse and semicircular rose garden.

Deirdre Carmody wrote about it in an Oct. 25, 1981 New York Times story about the estate: “Pocantico Hills was immersed in traditions. Every fourth Sunday, while John D. Rockefeller Jr. was alive, one of his four sons who lived at Pocantico would come for a formal lunch at the big house, Kykuit, complete with flowers floating in finger bowls. Every Thanksgiving, the sons' wives would take turns putting on dinner for the entire family at the Playhouse, where all large family parties were held.

“The first three generations of Rockefellers were characterized by their love of the land at Pocantico Hills. In the latter days of John D. Jr.'s life, he drove around the estate’s 45 miles of crushed stone-paved carriage trails in horse and buggy or in a limousine with a blanket over his lap. Then he and his wife would stop and walk through the beautiful woods, while the chauffeur waited a discreet distance away beside an idling black Cadillac.”

The Pocantico estate’s Orangerie, a stone greenhouse used to house tropical citrus and other plants during the winter, is shown ca. 1933. (Historic American Buildings Survey, Library of Congress)

FAMILY DONATES KYKUIT, HALF OF POCANTICO ESTATE

John D. Rockefeller Jr. (1874-1960) inherited Kykuit upon John Sr.’s death in 1937. John Jr.’s son Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller, four-term governor of New York who served as U.S. vice president under President Gerald Ford, moved into the main house after his father’s death.

After Nelson Rockefeller’s death in 1979, his family and his brothers donated Kykuit to the National Trust for Historic Preservation and some 1,700 acres of the 3,500-acre Pocantico estate to the State of New York which incorporated the land into the Rockefeller State Park Preserve which includes nearby Rockwood Hall, formerly the estate of William Rockefeller.

Kykuit is listed as a National Historic Landmark owned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and is generally open for tours conducted by Historic Hudson Valley.

As many as 10 Rockefeller families still live in houses they own on the remaining 1,800 or so acres of the estate.

This image, taken between 1911 and 1919 demonstrates the sweeping views from the front of Kykuit looking west over the nearby Hudson River. Note the flock of sheep used to crop the lawns of the estate early in the 20th century. (Arnold Genthe Photograph Collection, Library of Congress

Stone dairy barns built on the estate by John Jr. in the early 1930s were refurbished and donated by David Rockefeller with an accompanying 80 acres in 2004 and is now the non-profit Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture.

The non-profit is an agricultural lab and training ground for aspiring farmers also features a grazing program used on the nearby Rockefeller State Park Preserve that includes some 34 cows, 200 sheep, 30 goats, 800 hens and 300 ducks. It is intended to increase the health and viability of the Preserve’s grasslands. ...

... For a look at some 165 historic photos of Kykuit and its landscaped grounds, click here. ...

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