The Old Dutch Church of Sleepy Hollow (), listed on the National Register of Historic Places as Dutch Reformed Church (Sleepy Hollow), is a 17th-century stone church located on Albany Post Road (U.S. Route 9) in Sleepy Hollow, New York, United States. The church and its churchyard, the Old Dutch Burying Ground, feature prominently in Washington Irving's 1820 short story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. The old churchyard is not to be confused, or commingled, with the contiguous but separate Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.
It is the oldest extant churchSome historical records and classifications, including its National Register entry, list it as the second-oldest (following the Old Quaker Meeting House in Flushing, Queens). The distinction comes down to the classification of the building: the Old Dutch Church holds the title of the "oldest church" in the state, while the Flushing Meeting House is considered the "oldest religious building" or "oldest house of worship," because Quakers did not refer to their buildings as "churches" at the time (and members of most Quakerism branches still refer to their buildings as Meeting Houses today). and one of the oldest extant buildings in the state of New York. The church was renovated after a 1837 fire, but some of those renovations were reversed 60 years later to restore the building’s original appearance; further work was done in 1960 to stabilize the building and protect its historical character. It was listed on the Register in 1963, among the earliest properties so recognized. It had already been designated a National Historic Landmark in 1961. It is the property of the Reformed Church of the Tarrytowns, which holds summer services there, as well as on special occasions such as Christmas Eve, Easter, and Reformation Sunday.
Building
The building was designed and funded by Frederick Philipse I, the first lord of Philipsburg Manor. It is located on the east side of Albany Post Road, opposite the Devries Road intersection, just north of downtown Sleepy Hollow. The neighborhoods to the west are residential. A wooded area to the southeast buffers the church from residential areas in that direction. Approximately 300 ft (100 m) to the south is the mill pond at Philipsburg Manor House, another National Historic Landmark. The churchyard and Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, itself listed on the Register, are to the north.
The church was constructed from fieldstone, local timber, and flat, yellow bricks shipped from the Netherlands.A few of these bricks still remain in the structure and may be seen underneath the southwest window, where the door once was. (Allen, John Knox, The old Dutch church of Sleepy Hollow, Tarrytown, N.Y. : with the story of Jacob the Roman, Tarrytown Historical Society (1918), p. 8.) The structure is rectangular, with a three-sided projecting rear apse on the east end. It has two-foot–thick (60 cm) fieldstone walls. They give way to clapboard above the roofline, within the fields of the Flemish-style gambrel roof, with its lower segments flaring outward like a bell. On the west end of the roof is an octagonal wooden open belfry. Within it is the original bell, engraved with a verse from Romans 8:31, "Si Deus Pro Nobis, Quis Contras Nos?" ("If God be for us, who can be against us") and "VF", Philipse's initials....believed to be the same one which was originally placed there by the builder of the church, Vredryck Flypse. (Allen, p. 9) The latter monogram is also on the wrought iron weathervane atop the belfry.
To the west, a stone retaining wall raises the church above grade level. A few shrubs flank the stone steps that lead up to the main entrance, paneled wooden double doors recessed within a Gothic archway. Above it is a glass transom with curved, intersecting muntins. It is set within a brick surround. The north and south side elevations have double-hung sash windows, as do the two side facets of the apse. At the roofline is a molded wooden cornice.
The interior has its wooden pews, with two side aisles, arranged so that all could focus on the pulpit. The pulpit is located on a raised platform in the rear, directly opposite the main entrance. A balustrade with turned wooden posts, open at the aisles, sets the platform off from the rest of the wide-planked floor. Behind it is a table, with a lectern on the north and an enclosed pew along the south side. The ornate wooden pulpit is raised further above the table level; access is provided by a short spiral stair. A pipe organ is located at the rear.
History Frederick Philipse, first lord of Philipsburg Manor, owned the vast stretch of land spanning from Spuyten Duyvil in the Bronx to the Croton River. After swearing allegiance to and later being granted his manorship from the English Crown, he chose to establish a wharf and an agricultural facility for his extensive shipping and trading operations in the northern part of the manor (later named the Upper Mills), where the Pocantico River flowed into the Hudson River. A small Dutch community had already been established there when he arrived in 1683, with several dozen graves in the small cemetery.
Philipse's wife, Margaret Hardenbroeck de Vries Philipse, died in 1691, and he soon remarried. His second wife, Catharine Van Cortlandt Derval, urged him to build a more permanent stone church for the manor's tenants. Later in the decade, he obliged her. Under Philipse's command, enslaved laborers erected the stone church at the cemetery's southern end. Philipse was its architect, financier, and aid in its construction (a carpenter by trade, he is said to have built the pulpit with his own hands).Edited Appletons Encyclopedia, Famous Americans: Biography of Frederick Philipse: "...He worked at the carpenter's trade for several years, aided in building the Old Dutch church, and is said to have made the pulpit with his own hands.
A marble tablet in front of the church gives its completion date as 1699. The tablet was placed in the 19th century, however. It is more likely that the church was built between 1685 (the date on its bell, cast to order in the Netherlands) and 1697, when the congregation was organized.
A plaque inside the entrance lists the names of early pastors of the church, starting with Reverend Guilliam Bertholf (1656–c. 1724), a well-known Dutch Reformed minister, who traveled from his home in New Jersey three or four times a year to perform official rites and sermons; services were led by lay leaders the rest of the year.
The early history of the church and its members was recorded by Dirck Storm in his book Het Notite Boeck der Christelyckes Kercke op de Manner of Philips Burgh. It continued to serve as the church of Philipsburg Manor through the American Revolution, when New York's revolutionary government confiscated the lands of the Philipse family, who were staunch Loyalists.
On July 2, 1781, George Washington and the Continental Army made a stop at the church (which Washington mentioned in his diary as "the Church by Tarry Town") before an attempted surprise attack on British outposts at Kingsbridge. The troops rested near the church "till dusk," before continuing their march overnight. (The attempt at surprise failed, as the American troops were spotted by the British.)Experiencing the Neutral Ground of the American Revolution / The McDonald Interviews: Timeline Guide. Westchester County Archives. pp. 36-37.
After Frederick Philipse III was officially stripped of his lordship title in 1779, the special pews for the lord of the manor were removed from the church, and the plain oak benches built for the Philipses' tenants were replaced with pine pews. Thereafter, the church continued without the manorial patronage. "The people were poor in those days and... some carried their shoes in their hands until they arrived at the Pocantico [River], when they would wash their feet, put on their shoes and enter the church."Allen, p. 16.
Washington Irving, whose Sunnyside estate was a few miles to the south, made the church famous when he gave it prominent mention in his 1820 short story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow as both a setting and a site connected with the Headless Horseman. (The church was already old when Irving first saw it as a teenager.) Irving later gave yellow bricks from the church to outline the construction date on the wall above the door at Bolton Priory in Pelham Manor.
In 1837, a fire (caused by a lightning strikeRoe, Charles Harvey (February 1932). "Historic Tarrytown Today." The Tarrytown Daily News.) damaged the church. During the repairs some significant changes were made to the building. The main entrance was moved from the south facade to its current location on the west, the windows and door entry were changed to the Gothic arches, then in style, and given brick surrounds.[The original windows] were square, small in size, and with small panes of glass... These windows were guarded by heavy iron cross-bars, which protected the people from the Indians or other enemies. (Allen, p. 12.) Inside, the north gallery was removed and the west one enlarged. The original ceiling beams and pulpit were replaced.Allen, pp. 14-15.
The church was renovated again in 1897 for its bicentennial. That work reversed the 1837 renovations, restoring the original ceiling and the original pulpit. The Tarrytown area population had significantly grown through the 19th century, and a branch church had been built in Tarrytown to minister to the expanded congregation. Eventually, that church, the Reformed Church of the Tarrytowns, became the main church, and the original building was used only for special occasions, a practice that continued until the most recent renovation in the 1990s. Currently, worship services in the Old Dutch Church (which has no electricity and can only be heated with a wood stoveFarmers came to church with foot-stoves, and with bricks, which they heated before the service began. If these became cold before the service ended, which might easily be, for the minister was never brief, they went right up to the stove, in the middle of the sermon, and heated them again. (Allen, p. 15.)) are held from June through September. It is also a popular location for weddings.
Old Dutch Burying Ground
The three-acre (1.2 ha) historical churchyard of the Old Dutch Church is contiguous with, but separate from, the 90-acre Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. It is one of America’s oldest burying grounds. Established by an early Dutch community, it predates the church. The earliest legible gravestone dates to 1755, but initial interments of settlers at this site may have occurred before 1650.
The earliest documented burials are those of the founding members of the church congregation, including the Acker (and variants like Ecker and Echert), De Revier, Van Tassel (Van Texel, Van Tessel), Martling (Martlings, Martelingh), de Younge (Yongs, Youngs), and Storm (Storms) families and their early descendants. Family plots of Swiss, German, French Huguenot, Scottish, and English Puritan and Quaker settler families include, among others, those of the Odell, Pugsley, Romer, and Requa families.
While Dirck Storm's 1715-1716 book, Het Notite Boeck, contains records of church members, deacons and elders, marriages, and baptisms, it does not contain any birth or death dates or burial records (Storm was specifically tasked with recording facts related to the members' spiritual life in the church, not their physical lives). However, over 1,700 names and burial places are documented in family Bibles, the 1926 biographical index, The Old Dutch Burying Ground of Sleepy Hollow, based on a survey of surviving pre-1800 gravestones, and William Graves Perry’s additional survey, The old Dutch burying ground of Sleepy Hollow in North Tarrytown, New York (1953).