Rockwood Hall: America's 2nd largest home once proposed as site of fledgling United Nations

This is a colorized postcard of the east facade (facing away from the Hudson River) of William Rockefeller’s 204-room Rockwood Hall mansion, ca. 1900. The house was located some 500 feet east of the river and was purchased by Rockefeller in 1886. Rockefeller extensively renovated and expanded the mansion shortly thereafter. (Wikimedia Commons)

Rockwood Hall was the home of the "other" Rockefeller robber baron of the Gilded Age, William.

Now part of Rockefeller State Park Preserve, Rockwood Hall is located just north of Phelps Hospital and west of Route 9 on the east bank of the Hudson River. The property extends along the river to Country Club Lane, just south of today’s Sleepy Hollow Country Club in Mount Pleasant, New York. The main house was located between the river and today’s Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc., west of Rockwood Road

William Avery Rockefeller Jr. might best be known as the younger brother of John Davison Rockefeller Sr., who many believe was the richest private individual to have ever lived.

William, who died at Rockwood Hall of complications from pneumonia at 81 on June 24, 1922, might not have had John D.’s money, but he was fabulously rich all the same and he introduced his more famous sibling to the charms of country living in the Hudson  Valley.

John D. followed his younger brother to the area in 1893 and built his massive Kykuit mansion in 1913 on his nearby Pocantico Hills estate.

William Avery Rockefeller Jr. (1841-1922) is pictured in a

Feb. 18, 1910 photo. (George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress)

SCION OF CON MAN 'DEVIL BILL'

William, son of a con man of the same name, co-founded Standard Oil with his brother and others. William helped build what is today’s Citigroup and was an owner of Anaconda Copper Company, the fourth largest company in the world in the 1920s.

The Rockefeller brothers’ shady dad, William Avery Rockefeller Sr., went by the alias Dr. William Levingston after 1855 but was commonly known as “Devil Bill.” The name was appropriate for a man who made his living selling what he called “rock oil,” billed as an herbal cancer cure. William Sr. used his “rock oil” profits to make usurious loans to desperate farmers who couldn’t hope to pay him back thereby opening their farms to foreclosure by him.

He wasn’t much of a father -- or husband -- either. Devil Bill once bragged: “I cheat my boys every chance I get. I want to make 'em sharp." Devil Bill wasn’t around long enough to do too much damage to John, William Jr., their elder sister, Lucy, and three younger siblings, abandoning them and their mother around 1855. He quickly remarried under the “Dr. Levingston” name -- without bothering to divorce William’s mother, Eliza Davison.

Rockwood Hall’s formal gardens, designed by renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, are pictured in a 1916 photo at the height of the estate’s elegance. (Wikimedia Commons)

Then again, Eliza was familiar with her husband’s libertine ways; Devil Bill also fathered a pair of daughters with the couple’s housekeeper, Nancy Brown, before hitting the road.

Ever his father’s son, William Jr. pulled off one of the shadier -- albeit legal -- business deals of the 19th century.

In the late 1890s, William Rockefeller and Standard Oil colleague Henry Huttleston Rogers devised a scheme in which they purchased Anaconda Properties from a man named Marcus Daly for $39 million, with the understanding that their check was to be deposited in National City Bank (the future Citigroup) and remain there for a predetermined amount of time.

Rogers and Rockefeller then set up a paper organization known as the Amalgamated Copper Mining Company, with their own clerks as dummy directors, and claimed the new company was worth $75 million.

Rockwood, built by merchant Edwin Bartlett, is shown in 1860 at the time of its purchase by William Henry Aspinwall. (New York Public Library, photo-lithograph by A.A. Turner, Villas on the Hudson: A collection of photo-lithographs of thirty-one country residences)

They had Amalgamated Copper buy Anaconda from them for $75 million in capital stock, which was printed purely for that purpose. They then borrowed $39 million from National City Bank using Amalgamated Copper as collateral. After covering the check Daly had deposited for Anaconda they sold $75 million worth of stock in Amalgamated Copper to the public. The transaction netted them $36 million -- $1.1 billion today, adjusted for inflation.

HISTORY TRACES TO DUTCH COLONIAL PAST

Rockwood Hall had a long, illustrious past before its purchase by Rockefeller. Adriaen van der Donck, a Dutch resident of  New Netherland, bought the property in 1645 as part of a much larger tract from the Dutch West India Company. Van der Donck sold to Frederick Philipse in 1693, 19 years after New Netherland was transferred to British control.

Philipse received a royal charter from the Dutch-born King William III of Great Britain, also known as William of Orange, eldest son of Mary Stuart, daughter of Britain's King Charles I who was executed in 1649. Philipse established Phillipsburg Manor, an estate of over 50,000 acres mostly in today’s Westchester County.

The Philipse lands were confiscated by New York State during the Revolutionary War because of the Philipse family’s ties to the British crown and were divided up into hundreds of parcels. What would become Rockwood Hall eventually wound up in the hands of U.S. Navy Commodore Alexander Slidell Mackenzie, who lived there from 1840 until his death in 1848.

The Rockwood Hall farm barn is pictured in 1921, a year before William Rockefeller’s death from pneumonia. In front is the estate’s flock of more than 100 Southdown sheep used to trim and fertilize the lawns and provide meat, milk and wool. The barn included 32 stalls for cows and two more for bulls. (Rockwood Hall History, New York State Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation)

Mackenzie captained the USS Somers in 1842 when it became the only U.S. Navy ship to undergo a mutiny. Without a court martial, Mackenzie ordered the execution of three of the mutineers, including Philip Spencer, the 19-year-old son of U.S. Secretary of War John C. Spencer.

Mackenzie’s decision led to his disgrace and calls for better training for American seamen. In 1845 it was cited as a key reason for the establishment of the U.S. Naval Academy.

Edwin Bartlett, the U.S. consul at Lima, Peru and co-founder of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company and the Panama Railroad Company, bought Rockwood from Mackenzie’s heirs in 1848 and built Rockwood Hall from locally quarried stone.

A CIVIL WAR CONNECTION

Bartlett sold the estate in 1860 to fellow Pacific Mail and Panama Railroad co-founder William Henry Aspinwall. Aspinwall enlarged the estate to about 200 acres and used it as a summer residence. He passed it on in his will to his son, Civil War veteran General John Lloyd (Lloyd) Aspinwall, in 1875.

Rockwood Hall is shown after completion of William Rockefeller’s renovations in this illustration that appeared in the Sept. 6, 1890 edition of Harper’s Weekly magazine. Note the two men at left playing lawn tennis while several women look on.

Lloyd Aspinwall, a New York attorney, served with the 22nd New York State Militia in the Civil War and rose to the rank of brigadier general in the National Guard after the war. It was he who sold the estate to William Rockefeller in 1886.

After Rockefeller bought the property, he quickly enlarged it to more than 1,000 acres and began remodeling the mansion into the 204-room manse that was second in size only to George Washington Vanderbilt II’s 250-room Biltmore mansion in Asheville, N.C., among American private residences.

The castellated Elizabethan house was 174-feet long and 104-feet wide. Its exterior walls were built of granite, interior of brick and a four-inch insulating space of air was reserved between them.

The walls were 3½-feet thick at the foundation and 2-feet wide upstairs.

The 17 greenhouses built at Rockwood Hall by William Rockefeller in the late 1880s were used to grow figs, melons, grapes, peaches, nectarines, vegetables, roses, orchids, gardenias, carnations, potted plants, ferns and palms. The estate also had a mushroom cellar. (Rockwood Hall History, New York State Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation)

Rockefeller took great pride in the landscaping of the estate, hiring firms affiliated with Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed Manhattan’s Central Park.

SELF-SUFFICIENT ESTATE

The estate was mostly self-sufficient. Among its many outbuildings were a 3-story coach house/horse stable, a carpentry shop, a paint shop, a farm barn, a “hennery,” a massive ice house, 17 greenhouses in which were grown flowers, fruits and vegetables, and a four-acre outdoor nursery in which were nurtured more than 1,000 valuable rare trees and shrubs.

The estate featured a flock of more than 100 Southdown sheep that trimmed its lawns in addition to providing meat, milk and wool, and herds of dairy cows and cattle. It also had six miles of 16-foot wide carriage roads paved with paving stones and crushed stone for carriage rides and horse riding.

This 1910-11 map shows Rockwood Hall, part of William Rockefeller's estate and some of its outbuildings. To adjust for distance, note that Rockwood Hall stood some 500 feet inland from the Hudson River. (Published by G.W. Bromley & Co., New York Public Library digital collections)

For visitors by water and deliveries from New York City, a multi-level boathouse in the Hudson River was reached by a 150-foot steel bridge over the New York Central Railroad tracks from the estate. Nearby was a dock that could accommodate a 700-ton coal barge.

Early on, the estate had its own electric plant to provide lighting. A spring offered about 75 gallons of drinking water per minute. A siding was added to the New York Central Railroad tracks along the river, where Rockefeller kept his private railroad car.

The stone ice house could hold 400 tons of ice and included rooms for storing meats and vegetables. The refrigeration system used rock salt and ice in the same way an ice cream maker uses those materials to freeze ice cream today.

Rockefeller died in 1922 and his heirs sold the property to a group of investors who converted the property into the exclusive Rockwood Hall Country Club. The club failed in 1936 and was purchased out of bankruptcy in 1937 by Rockefeller’s nephew, John D. Rockefeller Jr., who leased the mansion briefly to the new and short-lived Washington Irving Country Club.

By 1942, J.D. Rockefeller Jr. had all the buildings on the property razed except for the gatehouse on Route 9. The only other remnants of Rockwood Hall today are the mansion’s stone foundations.

This is an image of the map of the Rockefeller State Park Preserve donated by Rockefeller family to the State of New York. Rockwood Hall is at upper left, west of Route 9, just north of Phelps Memorial Hospital. To view an expandable version of this map, click here.

In 1946, Rockefeller gave the estate to his son, Laurance S. Rockefeller. Laurance sold 80 acres east of Rockwood Road below Broadway to IBM in 1970. That acreage was later sold to New York Life and finally to Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, which played a key role during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic developing treatments to help victims recover more quickly, most prominently in September 2020 the experimental antibody “cocktail” REGN-COV19. Regeneron lies between the Old Croton Aqueduct State Historic Park trail and Rockwood Road.

Rockefeller already planned to donate the balance of the estate to New York State for park purposes (he initially leased it to the state for 26 years at $1 per year), and hoped the commercially owned acreage would help offset property tax losses he projected for the Town of Mount Pleasant.

In 1998 Rockefeller donated the land to his charitable foundation, the Laurance S. Rockefeller Fund, with orders that half would go to the state for a permanent park, the other half to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. New York State bought the Memorial Sloan Kettering’s half and took full control of what is part of today’s 1,771-acre Rockwood Hall State Park Preserve, comprising much of the former Rockwood Hall and Pocantico estates of the Rockefeller family, and is open to the public.

AUTHOR’S NOTES: Laurance Rockefeller offered to donate Rockwood Hall to serve as the home of the fledgling United Nations in the aftermath of World War II, but it was felt that the site was too far from Manhattan to be feasible. 

Instead, the UN headquarters was built in Manhattan on land originally purchased -- and later donated -- by Rockefeller’s brother, future four-term New York governor and U.S. Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, with financing by Laurance and Nelson's father John Jr. ....

... By 2014, the steep slopes and historic stone foundations of Rockwood Hall were overrun by invasive plant species. To control the vines and manage the grassy hillsides, the Rockefeller State Park Preserve partnered with the nearby Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture, a non-profit working farm and education center supported by the Rockefellers on a slice of Pocantico, to rotate sheep and goats around the old Rockwood Hall site.

The project began in mid-summer of 2014 with 50 sheep and seven goats. In 2015, the site hosted 10 Boer goats and 30 Tunis sheep and 50 Finn Dorset sheep. There was precedent in the Rockefeller family for this. Photos exist of a shepherd and flock of sheep "mowing" the lawns in the extensively landscaped Pocantico estate of John D. Rockefeller Sr. at nearby Kykuit in the 19-teens.

At Rockwood Hall,  the grazing proved successful, opening previously inaccessible areas of the Rockefeller State Park Preserve to visitors. ...

... For a more in-depth look at Rockwood Hall, the illustrated booket Rockwood Hall: The country estate of the late Wm. Rockefeller (Wm. A. White & Sons, New York, 1924) associated with the 1924 real estate offering for the estate can be accessed free by clicking here. ...