Cedarmere, Roslyn Harbor, New York

William Cullen Bryant (1794 – 1878) was an American romantic poet, journalist, and long-time editor of the New York Evening Post.  Bryant bought a small house first built by Joseph Moulton in 1843 with the intent of establishing a retreat for himself from his job in the city as editor of the New York Evening Post, where he could contemplate nature and write his poetry.  He expanded both the land and the house through the 1850s and 1860s into the present structure, following the then-popular principles of Andrew Jackson Downing and disciples like Calvert Vaux, who supposedly designed the mill house, calling for small Gothic Revival cottages, sometimes in a Picturesque mode, that maintained harmony with their rural surroundings. At Cedarmere, as he later named the property, he received not only Vaux and his sometime collaborator Frederick Law Olmsted, but other cultural notables of the era such as painter Thomas Cole, James Fenimore Cooper and actor Edwin Booth.

The Mill (Gothic Revival)