Richmond Hill (Manhattan)
Richmond Hill was a colonial estate in Manhattan, New York City, that was built on a 26-acre (110,000 m2) parcel of the "King's Farm" obtained on a 99-year lease in 1767 from Trinity Church by Major Abraham Mortier, paymaster of the British army in the colony. Part of the site is now the Charlton-King-Vandam Historic District of Manhattan.
The house stood southeast of the modern intersection of Varick and Charlton Streets and some 100 to 150 yards west of the informal footpath that crossed the ditch in Lispenard's Meadows with a plank, and connected the city with Greenwich Village, which lay north and east of Richmond Hill. The house, as it appears in a 19th-century woodblock in the Museum of the City of New York, was five bays wide, with a tetrastyle Ionic portico, and three bays deep, where there were paired dormers in the attic. It was a frame structure, with carpentered imitation quoins at the corners, raised on a high basement and approached by a flight of steps.
Sir Jeffrey Amherst, later Lord Amherst, made Mortier's house his headquarters at the close of his campaigns in the French and Indian War. The estate served for a time following 13 April 1776, as the headquarters of George Washington, until the retreat of the Continental army from New York after the battle of Long Island, 27 August. After it had been occupied by British officers, 1776–83, it served the first British ambassador to the United States, Sir John Temple; it stood empty for a time before becoming the official residence of Vice President John Adams during the first presidency. Abigail Adams was delighted with its situation:
In natural beauty it might vie with the most delicious spot I ever saw. It is a mile and a half from the city of New York. The house stands upon an eminence: at an agreeable distance flows the noble Hudson, bearing upon its bosom innumerable small vessels laden with the fruitful productions of the adjacent country. Upon my right hand are fields beautifully variegated with grass and grain, to a great extent like the valley of the Honiton in Devonshire.
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