Williams, John S., House and Farm

This farm on Shaker Museum Road near Chatham, Columbia County, New York, centers on a two-story frame house whose cellar and framing date to the Revolutionary era. Isaac Mills was likely an early occupant, and the house was enlarged to its present forty-by-forty-foot form in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, later gaining Italianate details. In 1935 John S. Williams of Long Island bought the farm and hired the New York firm Polhemus & Coffin, who redesigned the house in 1935-36 as a Colonial Revival country house, adding a south wing and a two-story rear portico. The district includes seven contributing buildings, among them a stone former smokehouse, cottages, and small barns, plus four non-contributing farm structures, including a Shaker barn moved in 1995. The house now operates as an inn and restaurant, and the land is still used for sheep dairying. The property was listed for its architecture and its record of changing rural lifestyles.