Oulagisket or "Lisburne Grange," also known as the Sloan Estate, is a historic estate located in

Garrison, New York Garrison is a hamlet in Putnam County, New York, United States. It is part of the town of Philipstown, on the east side of the Hudson River, across from the United States Military Academy at West Point. The Garrison Metro-North Railroad ...

, in Putnam County. It consists of the main house and carriage house (c. 1864), superintendent's cottage (c. 1890), barns (1916), and carpenter's shop (c. 1900). The main house is a -story

stucco Stucco or render is a construction material made of aggregates, a binder, and water. Stucco is applied wet and hardens to a very dense solid. It is used as a decorative coating for walls and ceilings, exterior walls, and as a sculptural and a ...

ed masonry building in the

Italianate The Italianate style was a distinct 19th-century phase in the history of Classical architecture. Like Palladianism and Neoclassicism, the Italianate style drew its inspiration from the models and architectural vocabulary of 16th-century Italian R ...

style. It has a large 2-story service wing. The carriage house is a 2-story masonry building with a gable roof. The house was built by Samuel Sloan and his wife, Margaret Elmendorf Sloan, in Garrison, New York, as their summer estate, which they called Oulasgisket. Sloan, best known for his 32-year-long presidency of the

Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad The Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad (also known as the DL&W or Lackawanna Railroad) was a U.S. Class 1 railroad that connected Buffalo, New York, and Hoboken, New Jersey (and by ferry with New York City), a distance of . Incorporated in ...

, was a prominent 19th century railroad magnate. Now consisting of 16 acres, the original estate comprised several hundred acres, consisting of outbuildings, barns, and, ultimately, three large summer homes built as wedding presents for three of his children. The house was originally approximately 8,000 square feet and was built in the mid-nineteenth-century Gothic style then popular in the United States. His son and daughter-in-law, Katherine and Samuel Sloan, Jr., inherited the estate in 1907 and began large scale changes and modifications. The original American Indian name, Oulagiskit, was changed to Lisburne Grange, in honor of the birthplace of Samuel Sloan, Sr. in Lisburne, County Down, Ireland. The house itself was expanded by approximately 5,000 square feet and completely redesigned in the then more-popular Italianate style, largely eliminating all Gothic traces. In addition,

Fletcher Steele John Fletcher Steele (June 7, 1885 – July 16, 1971) was an American landscape architect credited with designing and creating over 700 gardens from 1915 to the time of his death. Early life Steele was born in Rochester, New York, United Sta ...

, one America's most famous landscape architects of the first half of the 20th century, was hired to redesign and expand the existing landscaping. His work was performed in the late 1920s and resulted in a series of gardens and vistas that were widely admired as examples of his work. Steele's last piece of work for the Sloans was a replacement summerhouse, completed in 1937 and inspired by Chinese architecture which Steele encountered in a 1934 trip to China. Following the death of Katherine Sloan in the early 1950s, the estate was ultimately sold to its first non-Sloan owners, who occupied the property until 2010, when it was sold again. Remarkably, Lisburne Grange was owned by only three families for almost 150 years. It was listed on the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the United States federal government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures and objects deemed worthy of preservation for their historical significance or "great artistic v ...

in 1982.

References

Houses on the National Register of Historic Places in New York (state) Italianate architecture in New York (state) Houses in Putnam County, New York National Register of Historic Places in Putnam County, New York {{PutnamCountyNY-NRHP-stub