History
Roger Morris and Mary Philipse lived in the mansion for ten years. It was from 1765 to 1775, when the war started. They got married in the parlor, which can be seen today.
Between September 14 and October 20, 1776, General George Washington used the mansion as his temporary headquarters after he and his army were forced to evacuate Brooklyn Heights following their loss to the British Army under the command of General William Howe in the Battle of Long Island.
This house is one of the major remaining landmarks of Battle of Harlem Heights, after which it became the headquarters of British Lieutenant General Sir Henry Clinton, and the Hessian commander Baron Wilhelm von Knyphausen. The Morris-Jumel Mansion later hosted many other distinguished visitors, including dinner guests John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and John Quincy Adams.
Stephen Jumel and his wife Eliza Jumel purchased the house in 1810. After Stephen's death, Eliza married the controversial ex-vice president Aaron Burr who lived at the house briefly in the 1830s. After Burr's death in 1836, Eliza lived in the house alone until she died in 1865. In 1882, the Morris heirs broke up the 115 acres (0.47 km2) of the estate into 1058 lots.
On a rocky eminence overlooking one of the rivers, Fitz-Greene Halleck wrote his famous lines on the Greek patriot “Marco Bozzaris.”
The house was purchased by New York City in 1903.
The house was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1961.
Read more about this topic: Morris-Jumel Mansion
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In front of these sinister facts, the first lesson of history is the good of evil. Good is a good doctor, but Bad is sometimes a better.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“At present cats have more purchasing power and influence than the poor of this planet. Accidents of geography and colonial history should no longer determine who gets the fish.”
—Derek Wall (b. 1965)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)