Mount Gulian

Mount Gulian is a 12.71-acre site north of Beacon, New York, on the Hudson River, where the Verplanck family lived for roughly two centuries. Gulian Verplanck II most likely built the one-and-a-half-story stone house around 1740. A large Federal-style addition followed in 1804, and a fire in 1931 gutted the building. Between 1967 and 1975 the older portion was rebuilt on its original foundation and surviving walls, guided by an eighteenth-century engraving and family photographs. The grounds also hold a Dutch barn built by Philip Verplanck I, moved from Fishkill Plains and reassembled in the 1970s. It is among the earliest Dutch barns surviving in the country and has unusual projecting gables. Baron von Steuben used the house as headquarters during the last winter of the Revolution, and it is linked to the founding of the Society of the Cincinnati. Archaeological testing in 1978 found eighteenth-century deposits, a domestic midden and a probable prehistoric hearth.