page_title: Greeley House (Chappaqua, New York)
section_title: 1853–1872: Horace Greeley and his farm
hierarchical_section_title: Greeley House (Chappaqua, New York) / History / 1853–1872: Horace Greeley and his farm
caption_attribution_description: English: Horace Greeley Full-length portrait, three-quarters to the right, seated in chair, wearing tall hat, folded newspaper in lap, carpet on floor.
context_page_description: The Greeley House is located at King and Senter streets in downtown Chappaqua, New York, United States. It was built about 1820 and served as the home of newspaper editor and later presidential candidate Horace Greeley from 1864 to his death in 1872. In 1979 it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places along with several other properties nearby related to Greeley and his family.
  Built in the 1820s as a typical small farmhouse, it was expanded in the mid-19th century. Greeley, editor of the New-York Tribune, settled in Chappaqua shortly before the Civil War in the mid-19th century, living there with his family primarily during the summer. After a mob of citizens opposed to Greeley's abolitionist editorial stance threatened his wife at their earlier "House in the Woods," Greeley bought the farmhouse and moved his family there, near the hundred acres where he ran a small farm and practiced experimental agricultural techniques.
  After the war, Greeley built a mansion called "Hillside House" to live in, but died along with his wife shortly after the 1872 presidential election, where he ran on the Liberal Republican line against incumbent Ulysses S.
context_section_description: The railroad also drew city residents to Chappaqua. In the early 1850s the Haviland house was extended by a third and its exterior decorated with the piazza-style porch and balcony, Victorian mantles and French windows. Similar decorative woodwork was added inside. In 1853, Horace Greeley, the editor of the New-York Tribune, bought the first part of what would eventually become a 78-acre (32 ha) farm nearby, much of it developed for that purpose either by Greeley himself or under his supervision to use as an experimental farm, testing new agricultural techniques he wrote about in his column. While he was frequently ridiculed for this in his day, due to his own professed previous ignorance of the subject, much of the advice he published in those columns was actually correct.
  Originally the farm was intended to be a summer residence for the Greeley family. His wife Mary, who like her husband was still distraught over the death of the couple's five-year-old son a year or so earlier, had insisted that any such property had to have a spring-fed babbling brook, evergreen forest and be near the railroad. The Chappaqua property met two of those conditions, with a small bog standing in for the spring and brook. In order to maximize the benefit of living in the countryside and escaping the hot city, Greeley built what his family came to refer to as the "House in the Woods" in what is still a wooded area southeast of the Church of Saint Mary the Virgin that his daughter Gabrielle had built early in the 20th century. Greeley's wife, however, found it shady and remote; at one point, the couple invited young Spiritualist Kate Fox to live with them for four months while they attempted to contact the spirit of their dead son through seances. The Greeleys were visited there by Henry David Thoreau, who shared Greeley's interest in land conservation. The Tribune published Thoreau's essay "The Succession of Forest Trees", after he and Greeley had an extensive discussion of forestry on one visit; the relationship continued to later years, when Greeley invited Thoreau to tutor the family's  children.
  During the Civil War, Greeley continued his advocacy for abolition in the Tribune's editorial pages. A mob angered by this threatened the house, and Mary was prepared to blow it up if that happened again during the 1863 New York City draft riots. The next year, he bowed to her complaints and bought the Haviland house, conspicuously located on the main road, from the estate of Caleb Sands, its later owner. The Greeleys continued its expansion, adding a music room to the north end. Still, the family lived in the house only during summers, shipping the piano up with them every spring. Greeley himself could only enjoy the house on weekends, due to the demands of his editorial position at the Tribune.
  After the war, Greeley continued to farm the property and test new agricultural methods. In 1870, a bumper crop of apples resulted in Greeley making more cider than he was able to sell. Later that year, on a hillside corner of the farm, now expanded to a hundred acres (40 ha), he built the first concrete barn in the nation. It was later converted into a house and named Rehoboth, also listed on the National Register.
  Greeley began planning and building a new family home, Hillside House, located a short distance down the entrance road to the farm (which has since been extended and paved as Senter Street). It was completed in 1872, but before moving in he accepted the nomination of the Democratic and Liberal Republican parties to run against incumbent Ulysses S. Grant in that year's presidential election. After accepting the nominations he held a large picnic reception and luncheon on the southern portion of the farm, the land now the large lawn in front of Saint Mary. Mary Greeley died a few days before the election, in which Grant was the clear victor. The combination of those two events had a deleterious effect on Greeley's own health, and he died a few weeks later, before all the votes had been counted, the only time that has happened to a major preside
caption: Greeley around the time of his move to Chappaqua
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