Hamilton Grange

Alexander Hamilton’s only home, which has been moved twice through the streets of Harlem

Local name: Hamilton Grange National Memorial

Collection: Harlem and Upper Manhattan · USA · Open in OpenStreetMap

Hamilton’s house in St. Nicholas Park · Kalfatovic, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

The story

Before you is Hamilton Grange, the country home of Alexander Hamilton, one of the Founding Fathers and the first Secretary of the Treasury. It was the only house Hamilton ever owned. It was designed by the architect John McComb Jr., and the family moved in in 1802. The estate covered 32 acres. Hamilton called it the Grange, after his family’s ancestral home in Scotland. He got to enjoy it for only two years. On the eleventh of July 1804, Vice President Aaron Burr fatally wounded him in a duel. His widow, Elizabeth, lived in the house for another thirty years. Later the estate was sold off in lots. In 1889 the house passed to St. Luke’s Church, and it was moved onto nearby Convent Avenue. It stood there for one hundred nineteen years. Then the National Park Service moved the house into the park, onto land that had been part of the estate. The house, some 270 metric tons, was raised on jacks and set on wheels. On the seventh of June 2008, it was rolled downhill about 500 feet in six hours. The front was turned to face northeast; otherwise the house would have faced a cliff. After restoration the museum reopened on the seventeenth of September 2011. Inside, Hamilton’s study, the parlor and the dining room have been restored.

Visiting

414 West 141st Street, St. Nicholas Park. Subway: the A, B, C or D train to 145th Street. Open Wednesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; closed on Thanksgiving and Christmas. Admission is free. Hamilton’s rooms can be seen only on a tour: Wednesday through Friday at 11:30, 1:30 and 3:30, and on Saturday and Sunday also at 10:30 and 2:30. Up to fourteen people, first come, first served.