Vanderbilt Mansion National Historic Site ⓘ

The River Gate Lodge, situated among a verdant lawn at the park's river entrance, welcomed guests arriving by train. NPS Photo.

“The great country house as it is now understood is a new type of dwelling, a sumptuous house, built at large expense, often palatial in its dimensions, furnished in the richest manner and placed on an estate, perhaps large enough to admit of independent farming operations, and in most cases with a garden which is an integral part of the architectural scheme.”

The development of a country estate for families of great wealth was a complex process, requiring numerous architects, landscapers, engineers, and decorators. At Hyde Park, the Vanderbilts worked with no fewer than five building architects, four landscape architects, four interior decorating firms, and a “farm expert” to revitalize one of the most enduring country places in America. The house, or mansion, was of central importance, but gardens, greenhouses, a park, stables, boat houses, sporting pavilions, working farms, and guest cottages were necessary to serve a way of life made possible by vast fortunes. Hyde Park is a stately and recognizable product of America's great country house era.

The museum collections for Vanderbilt Mansion National Historic Site number approximately 6,500 artifacts and include furniture, ceramics, glassware, paintings, tapestries, sculpture, automobiles, carriages, sleighs, and personal items ranging from antiquity to the 19th centurty. About 40 percent of the collections are on permanent exhibit in the Vanderbilt Mansion. Objects in storage are available for research by appointment. For inquiries or to make a research appointment, conact the collection manager by email .

The park gratefully accepts donations to the museum collection. For inquiries and information on our collecting policy, follow the link to our Donations to the Museum Collection page.

Courtyard Scene by Jules Worms (1832-1914). Worms studied at the École des Beaux-Arts and made his debut at the Paris Salon of 1859. Worms is best known for genre scenes depicting Spanish life, painted in a highly realistic manner with many details and bright colors. In the early 1860s, Worms made his first trip to Spain, where he was immediately enchanted with Spanish culture and customs. Worms returned for six extended trips between 1860 and 1882, traveling widely, sketching and acquiring costumes for his studio in Paris. One of the leading realists of his generation, Worms' paintings were popular in both France and the United States. Worms died in Paris at the age of 91 on November 25, 1924.

Henry Dasson. A gilt-bronze green marble vase-candelabrum, one of a pair (VAMA 888 and 889). Signed “Henry Dasson et Cie. 1888.” Dasson, the son of a shoemaker, was famous in the second half of the 19th century for his copies of 18th-century French furniture and household goods, particularly for the fine execution of his gilt-bronze decorations. His workshop created desks, tables, and chests inspired by the style of Louis XIV, Louis XV, and Louis XVI, styles popular among the American millionaires at the turn of the century. Dasson was a member of the Legion of Honor. Dasson exhibited his works in the Universal Expositions of 1878 and 1889 in Paris as well as in other European expositions. The Vanderbilt Mansion collection includes numerous examples of Dasson’s work.

Paul Sormani (1817-1877), Rococo-style gilt-bronze figural inkstand (ecritoire) in the form of a reclining river god with shell-shaped, hinge-lided inkwell. Stamped "P SORMANI PARIS" on base. Born in Venice in 1817, Sormani was one of the most important French cabinetmakers of the 19th century specializing in fine luxury furniture often copied directly from well-known examples from the Louis XIV and Louis XV periods. Sormani exhibited at expositions in Paris in 1849, 1855, 1862, 1867, 1878 and 1900, and in London in 1862, winning numerous medals. Sormani’s furnishings were fashionable among European nobility and the American millionaire. His popularity soared after Empress Eugenie, wife of Napoléon III, commissioned him to decorate the royal palace. Numerous examples of Sormani’s furniture are seen throughout the Vanderbilt Mansion rooms.

It was the Great Depression, but luxury cars were still king, for those who had the means. Frederick Vanderbilt's 1933 V-16 Cadillac is a sleek, modern statement of machine age design, carefully detailed and refined. Cadillac built only 300 V-16s during 1932, a huge drop from the nearly 3,000 built in the enthusiasm of 1930. Production never recovered, making Frederick Vanderbilt's 1933 model a rare automobile. Learn more .

Hyde Park was a seasonal residence, one of a portfolio of homes the Vanderbilts owned in New York City, Bar Harbor, Newport, and the Adirondacks. The house designed for Frederick and Louise Vanderbilt by McKim, Mead, & White is a masterpiece of American architecture. Though modest compared to the grand houses of Vanderbilt’s siblings, the Hyde Park interiors spared no expense and are richly appointed with exotic wood paneling, imported marble, lush velvets, French tapestries, and, as was the custom, antique building components salvaged from the great houses of Europe.

The Vanderbilt Mansion is a home built expressly for the aristocratic lifestyle for a family whose name is the very definition of wealth and privilege. The stately house designed for Frederick and Louise Vanderbilt at Hyde Park is an understated masterpiece of American design.

A room-by-room look at some of the principal rooms in the Vanderbilt Mansion and the treausres within.

Hyde Park’s interiors illustrate the collaborative practices among Gilded Age architects, clients, and artisans.

Are you wondering if there are any secret passages in the mansion? Or maybe you are curious about how many fireplaces there are. Consult these frequently asked questions about the architecture, rooms, and details of the mansion to find out a range of trivial facts!

During the eighteenth century, riverfront property in Dutchess County was prized primarily for its good agricultural soils and ready access to the river and Post Road. The farms were initially purchased by wealthy patent owners and New York City merchants, most of whom sold or leased to families who established subsistence farms of modest size and style. Despite the utilitarian uses, some of the first-generation landowners in the area around Hyde Park appear to have appreciated aesthetic values in the landscape.

Landscape, Hyde Park, New York, 1859, by Johann Hermann Carmiencke (1810-1867), oil on canvas. Courtesy Brooklyn Museum of Art.

By the time of the Civil War, many of the riverfront farms were occupied as seasonal country residences by wealthy people from New York City. Already in 1842, a gazetteer published that the Town of Hyde Park featured “much good land, along the bank of the Hudson, which bounds it in the west, where are situated a number of delightful residences, overlooking the river.”

The natural beauty of the river estates, with their rural settings and views across the Hudson River was the primary attraction to city dwellers, who were in easy reach by river or road, and after the 1830s, by railroad. The picturesque attractions of the region were popularized in American culture during the early nineteenth century by the landscape paintings of the Hudson River School artists, who often depicted rural landscapes not unlike that of England, but set against the wild character of forests and mountains that they considered uniquely American. The combination of the two picturesque qualities—the softness of the rural countryside and the roughness of the forested mountains—became a hallmark of landscape design during the mid-nineteenth century.

"View in the Grounds at Hyde Park," in A. J. Downing, A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (Sixth edition, 1859).

Alexander Jackson Downing, the country’s foremost landscape designer of the time and a Hudson Valley native from nearby Newburgh, popularized this and other picturesque landscapes in his 1841 book, A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening . Downing extolled the virtues of the Hudson Valley, with its natural scenery and growing number of country residences:

There is no part of the Union where the taste in Landscape Gardening is so far advanced, as on the middle portion of the Hudson. The natural scenery is of the finest character, and places but a mile or two apart often possess, from the constantly varying forms of the water, shores, and distant hills, widely different kinds of home landscape and distant view. Standing in the grounds of some of the finest of these seats, the eye beholds only the soft foreground of smooth lawn, the rich groups of trees shutting out all neighboring tracts, the lake-like expanse of water, and, closing the distance, a fine range of wooded mountain. A residence here of but a hundred acres, so fortunately are these disposed by nature, seems to appropriate the whole scenery round, and to be a thousand in extent.... At the present time, our handsome villa residences are becoming every day more numerous.

In the decade following Downing’s treatise, most of the early farm landscapes bordering the Hudson River were rebuilt into fashionable country places set in picturesque landscapes organized around Italianate and Gothic Revival–style mansions. In Dutchess County, the mansions and pleasure grounds were typically on the west or river side of the road, the part of the estate often called the park, while the farm component was most often on the upland or east side of the road. One of the most renowned examples picturesque pleasure grounds in America was Hyde Park, the present Vanderbilt Mansion National Historic Site, as it was redesigned between 1828 and 1835 by the Belgian landscape gardener Andre Parmentier.

Thomas Kelah Wharton, “View of the David Hosack Estate, Hyde Park, New York, from the South” in the Hosack Album, c. 1832. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

David Hosack purchased Hyde Park from the heirs of its former owner Samuel Bard in 1828. Hosack’s ownership of the 700-acre property spanned only seven years, yet this period was one of the most influential with respect to the overall layout of the estate grounds. Hosack was an accomplished physician as well as a distinguished botanist, and founder of the Elgin Botanic Garden in New York City, the first botanic garden in the United States. Hosack invested in numerous landscape improvements and Hyde Park soon became “an obligatory stopping point on the Hudson.”

Hosack consulted with the landscape gardener Andre Parmentier to lay out the grounds Hyde Park. Parmentier came from a family of French and Belgian horticulturists. Immigrating to the United States in 1824, he established a nursery in Brooklyn and was the first in this country to call himself a landscape gardener. Parmentier brought with him to America the principles of picturesque landscape design that had become popular in Europe. These principles were first developed at the grand country estates in England in the eighteenth century, and by the late 1820s, the style had come to the United States, strongly influencing the design of private estates. Parmentier was one of the earliest practitioners of picturesque landscape design in America, and although the number of landscapes he designed in the country appears to be rather modest, he had a discernible impact on the practice of landscape design. In his book, A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Andrew Jackson Downing states, “We consider Mr. Parmenter’s labors as having effected directly far more for landscape gardening in America than any other individual whatever.”

By means of a network of walks and drives laid out in relation to the natural terrain of Hosack’s property, Parmentier created a series of vistas, with occasional seats and neoclassical pavilions positioned strategically to serve both as ornaments and as vantage points. Visitors to Hyde Park noted with approval the “almost endless variety of venerable forest trees” clustered in groups along the ridge and dotted throughout the undulating ground that sloped down to the water.

When Hosack died in 1835, Hyde Park passed to his wife and children, who retained the property for five additional years. They sold the property In 1840, to John Jacob Astor who purchased it as a gift for his daughter Dorothea Astor and her husband Walter Langdon. The Langdon’s were occasional residents at Hyde Park and spent extended periods away from the estate, sometimes staying years at a time in Europe. Improvements to the estate were apparently made sporadically when the Langdon’s were in residence. Their absentee ownership ensured the preservation of the major early nineteenth-century design. For more than fifty years, the Langdons, whether by design or default, preserved the Hosack landscape, so that it passed to the Vanderbilts fully mature and only slightly altered. The enduring quality of the property was reinforced by the mature specimen trees planted by earlier owners, which by this time framed the core of the estate, preserving the picturesque style of the landscape.

During the Vanderbilt ownership, with only two exceptions, every structure on the property was replaced. Crum Elbow Creek was partially reshaped, the formal gardens redesigned, and the drives were partially reconfigured. Most of this extensive work, however, retained the form and content of the landscape that the Vanderbilts had inherited from the Langdons, Dr. Hosack, and even Samuel Bard. In general, the Vanderbilts erected new structures as replacements on the same locations as previous ones. Gardens and boundary plantations were developed and some new plantings were undertaken, but many elements of the original circulation, the mature trees, and vistas were maintained. Today, Hyde Park reflects centuries old improvements and preserves the qualities of the picturesque landscape designed and celebrated in the early nineteenth century.

During the four decades that Frederick and Louise Vanderbilt owned Hyde Park, from 1895 to 1938, nearly every structure on the property was replaced, with the exception of the Gardener’s Cottage and Tool House. Despite the extensive modifications to the structures, the organization and circulation of the estate remained quite similar. The enduring quality of the property was reinforced by the mature specimen trees planted by earlier owners, which by this time framed the core of the estate, preserving the picturesque style of the landscape.

The Vanderbilts' modifications of the formal gardens were typical of late Gilded Age garden design. These gardens reflected the values of wealthy Americans who had benefited from the country’s rapid Western expansion and the application of new industrial technologies to the abundant natural resources of the vast country. Painters, sculptors, architects, and landscape architects encouraged their wealthy clients to envision America as the legitimate heir to the great cultural and political achievements of Classical Greece, Rome, and the Italian Renaissance. They turned to the design precedents of Classical and Renaissance antiquity as proper symbolic expressions of the achievements in science, commerce, industry, and democracy. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, technological improvements in transportation and greenhouse heating systems made it possible to import and maintain exotic plants, thereby increasing the palette for garden designers.

Traveling abroad had become popular, which meant that clients were more receptive and enthusiastic about developing gardens with a European influence. Particularly influential was the Italian style of garden layout and design. The Vanderbilts traveled extensively both in Britain and Continental Europe and like many of their contemporaries were deeply impressed by the pleasure grounds and gardens they experienced. Back at Hyde Park, the Vanderbilts incorporated many of the design elements they had seen in Europe into their gardens.

Landscape architect, architect, and artist Charles Platt, whom the Vanderbilts hired for a brief period, published his book, Italian Gardens in 1894, two years before the Vanderbilts purchased Hyde Park. In the book he set forth the design principles of Italian Renaissance and Baroque villas as the proper means of creating a setting of leisured elegance for the wealthy benefactors of the Industrial Revolution. Platt did not copy Italian villas; rather he sought to adapt them to American conditions of climate, topography, vegetation, and social use. The principal features of the Italian style advocated by Platt and many of his contemporaries included geometric patterning, axial spatial organization, and reliance on proportion and interconnection of parts by sight lines. While some designers firmly held to Downing’s principles, preferring “natural” lines as a counterpoint to what they saw as the harsh geometry of the city, other designers adhered to formal design principles, especially those evident in Italian gardens.

The Vanderbilts, like many of their contemporaries, combined elements of both the picturesque or natural style and the European formal garden style at Hyde Park. They continued in the botanical traditions and preserved the romantic landscape of previous owners, but modified the existing formal gardens to reflect the era's taste for gardens in the Italian style.

Over a period from 1901 to 1934 four noted landscape architects and horticulturists, including Charles A. Platt, James L. Greenleaf, Thomas Meehan and Sons, and Robert B. Cridland, all developed plans and oversaw construction on the formal gardens of Hyde Park. Three of these design professionals, Greenleaf, Meehan, and Cridland, altered various areas of the formal gardens. The end result was a complex of gardens that, though reasonably consistent in style by area, was the product of at least four different designers.

Sporting architecture was a unique feature of country house life in America. Playhouses, as they were generally known, were an entirely American tradition—the great houses of Europe have no equivalent. Typically, a playhouse might include a squash or tennis court, swimming pool, bowling alley, gymnasium, billiard room, or sauna. The playhouse reflects the enthusiasm for sport in America in the late nineteenth century. Embraced by the wealthy class, “manly sport” was seen as a means for combating the unhealthy environment of an office. The harder one worked, the more urgently he needed exercise. Architectural critics Harry Desmond and Herbert Croly observed in 1903 in their book Stately Homes in America :

We Americans are too officious about our diversions, and the appropriate habitation for a contemporary house-party, far from consisting of a series of well-fashioned rooms, would consist rather of a casino with billiard and card tables, bowling-alleys, a tank, and a tennis-court as the chief items of equipment. The office and the play room symbolize the two characteristic and natural extremes of American life.

Casino was a term borrowed from the Renaissance meaning “pleasure house” and often applied to the playhouse. These buildings also included living rooms, bedrooms, dressing rooms, baths, kitchens, and servant quarters. McKim, Mead and White were the leading architects of such buildings and designed the sporting pavilion for the Vanderbilts at Hyde Park.

Though modest compared to playhouses for other stately homes, the Vanderbilts’ sporting pavilion, called simply “The Pavilion,” was conceived in the same tradition. There was no accommodation for indoor sport here, but the location in proximity to the grass tennis lawn outdoors and a shower room denote the building’s intended purpose. Even the interior decoration symbolically perpetuated the idea of a sporting life.

The Pavilion was the first new structure erected at Hyde Park shortly after the Vanderbilts purchased the property in May 1895. Design and construction of the new mansion would take nearly four years. But American millionaires were not known for their patience. Frederick and Louise’s desire to make use of the property immediately and observe progress on the estate necessitated the need for a livable space. Thus, the Pavilion was designed quickly, and built in just sixty-six days, facilitated in part by cost-effective solutions architects employed in the temporary architecture of the international world’s fairs.

The Pavilion is constructed of wood, plaster, shingles, staff, and pebble dash. The structural strength of the Doric columns located at the east and west entrances of the Pavilion are actually pillars of brick concealed by fluted forms made of staff. Sometimes described as “counterfeit marble,” staff is a mixture of plaster, jute fibers, horsehair, and other ingredients. It was employed most notably to form the classical marble-like facades of the buildings at the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle and Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Charles McKim, architct of the Pavilion, was among the principal architects that oversaw the building program of the World’s Columbian Exposition. Not only does the Pavilion reflect the materials used to create the exposition buildings, but also the neo-classical revival that followed in America for decades.

The Pavilion is a compact, classical building that resides solidly on the landscape. It is composed of symmetrical east and west facades with centered projecting porticos supported by Doric columns. An open veranda was placed on the south elevation to balance the north and south wings. Later, by 1909, the veranda was enclosed with glazed panels to create a sun room. At the top of the Pavilion, the four gabled sides are united by a shingled attic surmounted by a balustrade. The exterior walls are finished in a rough course plaster called roughcast or pebbledash (lime mixed with cement, sand, small shells, and pebbles) and received a surface coating of limewash, a mixture of lime putty and water used as an architectural finish throughout the world for thousands of years.

Inside, a two-story hall is paneled in oak at the first story level and surrounded by a second story open balcony. A large fireplace dominates the center of the south wall. A large 32-light brass chandelier is suspended from the ceiling beneath a circular laylight. Large mounted trophies of elk, buffalo and a ram decorate the walls. The room has the overall feel of the gentlemen’s lodges of the late nineteenth century. Surrounding the central hall, the first floor included a living room, bedroom, kitchen, scullery, pantry, a bath room, and shower room. A staircase hall on the north side of the hall provided access to six bedrooms (three of these for servants), a linen closet, a bath room, and lavatory. An additional bath room, likely for use by the servants, was located in the basement.

Drawings for the Pavilion were completed in August 1895. Work began in September and was completed on November 24. An uncertain description of the Pavilion was published in the Poughkeepsie Sunday Courier on July 19, 1896:

A bachelor’s lodge has been constructed, built on the site of the old carriage-house of which the general outlines have been carefully followed. The broad driveway of the carriage-house has been turned into the entrance hall of the Lodge. This contains an immense fireplace, and is to be used as the general assembly room, and lounging place.

The furnishings of the lodge show traces of a feminine hand. The entrance hall is nearly covered with a large and beautiful rug. One may judge the size of the room when he learns that upon the rug stands a dining table ,a writing table, and a completely equipped card table. Around the room are scattered every variety of comfortable couch and lounging-chairs, making the hall the beau ideal of a bachelor’s headquarters. Opening off this hall on the north are small rooms, just the depth of the old stalls. On the north is the butler’s pantry, and beyond is the kitchen. Besides these there are on this floor several bath rooms, with eight curtain shower baths. The purpose of this building being to furnish free and easy accommodations for bachelor friends of Mr. Vanderbilt, the bath rooms are for their refreshment on coming in from golf or tennis, the kitchen appointments for the concoction of game suppers, and the main hall for smoking parties and story telling and gossip so dear to the masculine heart.

There will no doubt be much merriment in this snug little pavilion in the time to come, but at present it wears the aspect of quiet domesticity, since Mrs. Vanderbilt has taken up her residence there in the dismantled condition of the Hall. Her rooms on the second floor, thought small, are brightened by a variety of exquisite feminine trifles. Carpets in plain color cover the floors, and the walls are beautifully decorated. A novel arrangement in curtains drapes the doors. It has always been a problem how to retain in a room the doors, which on often wants to close and still have the graceful effect of portieres. This is managed in the Vanderbilt cottage by a jointed curtain pole, which being fastened to the door itself opens and shuts with it. Drapery on another pole above the door conceals the upper moulding, and gives a dainty finish to the whole. On the other side of the door is hung another curtain so that when the door is open you still have the draped doorway. As the curtains are of the softest and richest kind, the effect is very charming.

A gallery surrounds the large central hall, and from it opens the rooms in the second story. Above this one ascends by a narrow stairway to the roof, and here you step out through a veritable hatchway on what seems to be a veritable deck with gunwhale, canvas floor and all complete. It is easy to imagine a merry party of men gathered up here among the tops of the trees on a summer night for a comfortable smoke before turning in.

The Vanderbilts utilized the Pavilion as their primary residence at Hyde Park until April of 1899. At the end of that month, furniture was moved into the completed mansion, where on May 12, 1899, the Vanderbilts entertained their first house party. From that time, the Pavilion functioned as intended, as a playhouse and bachelors lodge. The Vanderbilts stayed at the Pavilion on occasion in winter when the mansion was “put to bed” for the season.

In 1704 four men petitioned the Governor of New York, Sir Edward Hyde, Lord Cornbury (1661–1723), for a grant of land along the east side of the Hudson River in Dutchess County. Among them was Cornbury’s secretary, the French Huguenot Peter (Pierre) Fauconnier (1659–1746), who received a 3,600-acre tract of valuable river-front property, that he named Hyde Park in his patron’s honor. The undeveloped property descended through Fauconnier’s family until 1764 when it was inherited by his granddaughter, Suzanne Valleau (1720–1784), and her husband, the surgeon John Bard (1715–1799). Dr. Bard contemplated developing Hyde Park as a country seat and settling there after retiring from his medical practice in New York City.

Persistent financial difficulties prevented Bard from pursuing such ambitious plans. Instead, he focused on the agricultural value of the property, establishing a farm and an orchard of several hundred apple trees. In 1768 he attempted to sell Hyde Park, advertising it as a good source of timber, arable fields, and convenient water transport. Of three river landings, the best was “a large flat rock, which forms a natural wharf” capable of accommodating large sloops. Known as Bard Rock, it was located near the farm at the north end of the property. Although Bard ultimately decided against selling Hyde Park, over the next three decades financial necessity required piecemeal sales of nearly half of the original 3,600 acres.

In 1890, the Bard Rock parcel was acquired by Samuel B. Sexton, where he lived until the main house was consumed by fire in 1899. In 1905, Frederick Vanderbilt purchased this tract reuniting it to Hyde Park estate grounds as it had been during earlier ownership. Vanderbilt removed numerous buildings from the area, including the Boat Captain’s cottage, a pumphouse, and several buildings along the hill to the east. Vanderbilt retained only a Boat House (removed by the National Park Service in 1953).

Millions of years of dynamic geologic forces have stimulated human encounters with the Hudson River landscape. The mountains, valleys, ridges, and plateaus framing the Hudson River create one of the most spectacular landscape settings in the world. The natural beauty inspired a mid-19th century American art movement, known as the Hudson River School, a group of landscape painters whose work often depicts the Hudson River Valley and the surrounding area, including views from Hyde Park, and the Catskill Mountains, visible to the north of Bard Rock.

The river has been known by many names. This area is claimed as the ancestral homeland of several Algonquin speaking tribes. Some indigenous people inhabiting this area called it Mahicannituck ("river that flows two ways”), relying on the river and its tributaries for transportation and fishing. The river supports a variety of fresh water fish, including striped bass, American eels, sturgeon, herring, and shad. Early Dutch explorers called it the North River. But it was later named after Henry Hudson, who explored the river in 1609 under the Dutch East India Company in his search for the Northwest Passage. The Hudson River formed the spine of the Dutch colony of New Netherland. Its strategic importance as the gateway to the American interior led to years of competition between the English and the Dutch over control of the river and colony.

The Hudson River flows 315 miles from north to south primarily through eastern New York. The river originates in the Adirondack Mountains of Upstate New York and flows southward through the Hudson Valley to the Upper New York Bay between New York City and Jersey City. It eventually drains into the Atlantic Ocean at New York Harbor. The lower half of the river is a tidal estuary—tidal waters influence the Hudson's flow from as far north as the city of Troy. There are about two high tides and two low tides per day.

The river is a central feature of The Hudson River Valley National Heritage Area, designated by Congress in 1996 and one of the now fifty-five federally-recognized National Heritage Areas throughout the United States. Today, Bard Rock is a picnic area and hiking destination and one of the only places within the park that visitors can gain such proximity to the Hudson River.

National Park Service, Hudson River Valley Special Resource Study Report (Boston: National Park Service, New England System Support Office, 1996).

Patricia M. O’Donnell, Charles A. Birnbaum, and Cynthia Zaitzevsky, Cultural Landscape Report for Vanderbilt Mansion National Historic Site , Volume I: Site History, Existing Conditions, and Analysis (Boston: U.S. Department of the Interior. National Park Service, 1992).

Abraham Ernest Helffenstein, Pierre Fauconnier and His Descendants: With Some Account of the Allied Valleaux (Philadelphia: Press of S. H. Burbank & Company, 1911).

Frederick E. Hoxie, ed., Encyclopedia of North American Indians: Native American History, Culture, and Life from Paleo-Indians to the Present (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1996).

The park gratefully accepts donations to the museum collection. Our collecting policy focuses on the Vanderbilt Hyde Park property and all aspects of the estate history. We collect documents, photographs, textiles, artworks, furnishings, and other objects owned by the Vanderbilts, especially those with a substantial connection to Hyde Park.

All proposed gifts to the museum collection must be recommended by the curatorial staff and approved by the Collections Advisory Committee and the Superintendent in accordance with the provisions of National Park Service Management Policies. In determining whether to accept a proposed donation, the park considers (1) whether the proposed gift is related to the park's mission, (2) the costs associated with receiving and maintaining the proposed donation (including costs of shipping, storage, and preservation), and (3) any restrictions on the use of the proposed gift.

Please contact the park's curator with the subject line Object Donation Inquiry and include the following information:

Do not send any items to the Museum without first speaking to our museum collection staff to make appropriate arrangements.

The park shall acknowledge all gifts in writing and, upon a donor’s request, the completion of the donee statement of IRS Form 8283. Donors are responsible for obtaining appraisals of gifts where required for the donor s tax return. The park does not select the appraiser, hire the appraiser, or pay for such appraisals. Donors are responsible for seeking independent legal and tax advice in advance of making a gift to the park.

Although we preserve the buildings and gardens at Vanderbilt Mansion National Historic Site, we also work every day to maintain and improve the health of the diverse ecological communities around us. Hyde Park is located within the temperate deciduous forest biome. Temperate deciduous forests are located in the mid-latitude areas between the polar regions and the tropic areas of the Earth. Deciduous forest regions are exposed to warm and cold air masses, which cause this area to have four distinct seasons. Temperature varies widely from season to season with cold winters and hot, wet summers. The average yearly temperature is about 10° C. The areas in which deciduous forests are located get about 750 to 1,500 mm of precipitation spread fairly evenly throughout the year. The temperate deciduous forest biome in North America occupies most of the eastern part of the United States and a small strip of southern Ontario. Dominant trees are broadleaf trees such as oak, maple, beech, hickory and chestnut.

Get more in-depth and up-close details about some of the plants and animals we monitor, learn how the science gets done, and meet some park scientists as they do their work to help keep parks healthy.