Back in the mid-1800s, one of America’s most famous men had a home in Peekskill. His name was Henry Ward Beecher, and while local history buffs know about him, there is no public museum, nor any historical marker. But if you look closely as you drive along Main Street, there are remaining signs of his successful, scandal-tinged, life.
First there is a still-standing 1877 mansion, up on Beecher Drive. Once a 37-acre “gentlemen’s farm,” with one of the best views in all of Westchester County, the mansion now holds 14 private condominiums.
Before buying property in Peekskill, Beecher had lived all over the young country of America. Born in Connecticut in 1813, he was the son of Lyman Beecher, a famed Connecticut Puritan minister. (One of Henry’s sisters was Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the 1850s best seller that galvanized anti-slavery sentiment.) He followed his father “out West” to Cincinnati, Ohio, and also worked in Indiana as a pastor. In the late 1840s, he was recruited to the booming city of Brooklyn, to Plymouth Church. There, young Beecher began preaching a “Gospel of Love” that recommended love – not just obedience to God’s will – as a path to grace. He also popularized the idea that Jesus could be a seen as a friend.
Over time, Beecher became an out-and-out celebrity. Through the 1850s and ’60s, he was a regular on the “lyceum” circuit – the era’s answer to TED Talks. He wrote liberal newspaper columns on hot topics, from women’s rights to slavery’s abolition. President Abraham Lincoln – who saw Beecher preach in person at least twice – professed “profound admiration” for his “productive mind.”
But Henry Ward Beecher wasn’t perfect, as he himself often admitted in his often-lighthearted sermons. He was dogged for years by quiet rumors of extramarital romantic liaisons. When he was in his 60s, a colleague publicly accused him of an affair. The church and court trials that followed riveted the masses. But at last, a court trial ended with a judgment of “not guilty.”
Only then, in 1877, did Beecher turn wholeheartedly to his Peekskill farm, which he’d bought back in 1859 with his wife, Eunice. They spent thousands on a new mansion: “I have a pride in building the house,” he told a friend, “…after the world, the flesh, and the devil conspired to put me down.”
The house he designed was big but cozy, with nooks, window bays, wide verandas, and ornate woodwork and wallpaper. (There weren’t, his wife felt, big-enough closets.) There was a croquet court, and a “cold room” for preserving food, high tech for the era. Though he joked to a reporter that the “place has a new name every year,” he and his family mostly called it Boscobel.
Luckily for him, in Peekskill, people seemed forgiving of his foibles: After the big trial, “horse-drawn fire engines and the local militia hiked up to Beecher’s farm to offer their congratulations,” writes historian Debby Applegate in her biography of Beecher. And Beecher and his wife greeted the locals from the porch, giving an “impromptu speech.”
But hints of potential flirtations remained, for also on the porch that day was Chloe Beach, an ardent Brooklyn admirer of Beecher’s. Her own husband fretted that she and Beecher were romantically involved (and historian Applegate believes one of Chloe’s children may be Beecher’s). But Chloe’s husband nonetheless had bought her “thirty acres of the land you have so much so long coveted — adjoining that of Mr. Beecher in Peekskill.” In fact, until Henry’s death, in 1887, Chloe Beach stayed next door. And today, it’s for her family that the Beach Shopping Center – located just across from Beecher’s former mansion — is named.
Croton-on-Hudson resident Eliza McCarthy is a freelance writer specializing in museums.
