Wind the clock back 350 years, however, and place the same conversation in a dimly lit colonial tavern, a cold breeze blowing through rough-hewn boards. The meaning of what you heard might not be so clear. The person could be saying they had a meal at the well-appointed estate of Jonas Bronck, a successful merchant based in what’s now the Mott Haven neighborhood. People started calling it the Broncks’ Land—over time, that got shortened to “The Bronx.”
But this tavern-goer might also have been referring to a very different place: the far humbler home of Pieter Bronck, Jonas’ younger cousin, 120 miles to the north. By 1663, Pieter had carved out a clearing and built a home in the forested upper reaches of the Hudson Valley, in present-day Coxsackie. It’s now the oldest extant dwelling in upstate New York. If someone stopped there while traveling through the area, they could also fairly say they went for dinner to the Broncks’.
Though more often associated with New York City’s northernmost borough, the Bronck family’s legacy in the Hudson Valley stretches from the earliest years of colonial New Netherland to today. The Bronck Museum in Coxsackie isn’t just an old residence with original family furniture and charmingly warped wooden floors. It’s a living repository of stories, a testament to the family’s enduring connection to the land and its evolution over the centuries.
The Bronck family’s American story begins with the cousins Jonas and Pieter Bronck floating on a raft on the North Sea. (The journalist Ian Frazier, in his new book Paradise Bronx, describes the pair as father and son, but Robert Hallack, president of the Greene County Historical Society and a descendant of early colonial settlers, rejects this as implausible, noting Pieter’s absence from Jonas’ will.) They may have floated from their native Sweden to Amsterdam on a bundle of logs sent down from Scandinavia to supply the Dutch shipbuilding industry. Jonas decided to move to America, but Pieter stayed in Amsterdam and married a Dutch woman named Hilletje. By 1652, the couple decided to follow their older relative to the New World.
Jonas Bronck had died a few years after settling on the land that would bear his name, near the Harlem River. Pieter and Hilletje chose to continue up the Hudson to the booming frontier town of Beverwyck (now Albany), then thriving on profits from the fur trade. There, they opened a brewery and tavern with sleeping space set aside for indigenous traders. One of these visitors, likely a Mohican, told Pieter about some promising hunting grounds twenty miles south. Intrigued, Pieter went to take a look.
Squeezed by English and French colonies that surrounded it, Dutch New Netherland wouldn’t last much longer. As the economy faltered, Pieter’s ventures in Beverwyck started to fail. He decided to move permanently to the hunting grounds. Purchasing some 1,900 acres from the Mohicans for just two beaver pelts, Pieter, Hilletje, and their son Jans packed up and walked a narrow woods path to the site.
The Broncks’ first home was a pit dug in the ground, covered with a canvas. They lived in it for months as they deepened the cellar and gathered stones to build walls, a process that took over a year. Then they chopped down the site’s soaring, old-growth trees, used some for floorboards and beams, and sold off the rest. Their nearest neighbor was twenty miles away in Albany.
Pieter Bronck enjoyed the fruits of his labors for only a few years before dying in 1669. The property passed to his son, who began expanding the home in the 1680s, turning it into the architecturally complex structure that still stands today.
THE BRONCK HOUSE REMAINED IN THE FAMILY FOR EIGHT GENERATIONS, SERVING AS A CENTER OF SOCIAL, POLITICAL, AND ECONOMIC LIFE.
As the Bronck family grew, so did their influence in the Hudson Valley. The house remained in the family for eight generations, serving as a center of social, political, and economic life. The Broncks were actively involved in farming, trade, and politics, shaping the local economy and the region’s growth. Every Sunday, they sat in the front-row pew at Coxsackie’s Dutch Reformed Church.
By the time the American Revolution broke out, the family had been settled on the land for over a century. Most Broncks sided with the rebels. Captain Philip Bronck fought the British in the Schoharie Valley, while Pieter’s great-great-grandson Leonard Bronk (who anglicized the family name by dropping the “c”) collected goods for the Continental Army. American leaders figured old-time Dutch residents in the Hudson Valley would be more willing to surrender their crops and livestock if the person asking for them was also of Dutch ancestry. As a judge and state representative, Leonard made the house a gathering place for local leaders and a central part of Greene County’s development.
But Leonard was also a slave owner—as were other members of the family who lived on the site. Before New York abolished the practice in 1827, the family enslaved individuals who worked in the house and on the farm, contributing to their economic success and political power. A small cemetery behind the house, past Leonard Bronk’s grave, has small, illegible stones thought to mark the places where enslaved people are buried.
Today, the Bronck House is more than a museum—it’s a center for historical education and community engagement. Also on site is the Vedder Research Library, headquarters of the Greene County Historical Society, with an exceptional collection of maps, journals, ledgers, and other documents testifying to the region’s fascinating past. There is also a rare, thirteen-sided barn housing an array of old carriages and sleighs arrayed in a semi-circle, seemingly waiting to be used again, perhaps by Bronck family ghosts.
After the death of Leonard Bronk Lampman, an eighth-generation descendant of Pieter, the property was handed over to the Greene County Historical Society in 1939 and declared a National Historic Landmark in 1967. Today, the museum’s preservation is crucial to understanding early Hudson Valley history and the complexities of the Bronck family’s legacy—both its contributions and its contradictions.
Related: 10 Inspiring Women Who Made History in the Hudson Valley
