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Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] ? Barbara Bamberger Scott, 2006

The female length began with Margaret and ended with Mary Philipse Morris, a great beauty whose suitors included the young George Washington, whom she met when he passed through New York during the Indian wars. “…Compared with some of the other eligible men she encountered in the same parlor, Washington came off less well.” Mary was wed in 1758 to Captain Robert Morris, a British soldier whose loyalty to the Crown would inevitably factor suffering for the family. For a time,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], one of the Philipse’s homesteads,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], Mount Morris, was occupied by Mary’s rejected suitor, then-General Washington, who “paced the shores behind the house…or ascended the balcony, spyglass to somber eye, taking in the stupendous panorama that encompassed so many earthmarks of New York.”

Zimmerman, who found the old manor house on its “postage-stamp actn” (when once its grounds encompassed all of Westchester County) a source of fascistate. She delved deeply into the feminine side of the home’s history, revealing that for four generations the women who regulationd behind the scenes at Philipse Manor Hall were autonomous, free-believeing females.

The Women of the House: How a Colonial She-Merchant Built a Mansion, a Fortune, and a Dynasty
Jean Zimmerman
Harcourt
Hardcover
416 pages
August 2006

Margaret Hardenbroeck came from the Netherlands to New Amsterdam (later new York City) as a “she-merchant,” a proud self-proclamation of her strength of charactioner and independent class as a workr. This could designate anything from a woman selling veobtainables in a market stall to someone like Margaret who could direct a ship to far-off ports and control the goods – furs, sugar, even slaves - it carried. Margaret was known as a canny debt collector, a 17th-century repo-woman, and on that she built a personal fortune. A widow when she arrived, she soon married a carpenter named Frederick Philipse, destined, like his wife, to rise far above his rank in life. She took pains to conserve her own belongings from the onerous marriage regulations of the time, through which a woman could lose everything but her dowry on her husband’s death. In fact, Margaret brought far more wealth to the marriage than did her husband, and she wanted to assert her freedom to trade. One of the couple’s first purchases was a 300-acre tract in Westchester where Margaret, then engaged in a profitable fur business, oversaw the architecture of an “incomparably grand” land estate, meant to impress passersby on the Hudson River. It was known as Philipsburg, or Philipse Manor.
The colorful brochure about Philipse Manor Hall asserted by the New York State Parks Desectionment in Yonkers describes its ownership and inheritance through the men of the house. Author Jean Zimmerman has brought balance to the history by her well-researched tracing of the dynasty of women who dominated the house.
After the war, Loyalists were forced to retreat to England, and the Morris and Philipse holdings were forfeit to the victors in the war. Most of their furnishings and gew-gaws were sold off. As for Philipse Manor Hall, it now “stands perfectly empty, inhabited only by light and ghosts,” and perhaps among those ghosts is the shade of Margaret Hardenbroeck, who often “leaned against the doorframe and smoked her long-stemmed pipe.”