Alexander Hamilton’s country homestead, known as The Grange, was the rural retreat of his mature years. The Grange should have been the locus of quiet contemplation and graceful aging. Unfortunately, we know, the Hamiltons suffered too many tragedies for the house to fulfill that innocent purpose.

“A disappointed politician you know is very apt to take refuge in a Garden. Accordingly I have purchased about thirty acres nine miles from Town, have built a house, planted a garden, and entered upon some other simple improvements,” wrote Alexander Hamilton at the very end of 1802.

He liked the line so much he used another version of it in another letter that day.

This commodious but unpretentious country estate was the only home that Alexander Hamilton ever owned. Affording it was a challenge. But he decided to indulge in it in part because, by the turn of the 19th Century, his own political star had fallen. Not only was Hamilton personally a figure of disdain in many quarters, but his party, the Federalists, had been trounced from power and rejected by many sections of the country outside New England.

Tragically, the course of Hamilton’s life decisions allowed him only to enjoy The Grange for a few years. The Hamilton family had already been rocked by the harrowing and premature death of son Philip Hamilton, who was mortally injured in a duel on November 24, 1801. This compounded the grief that had already set in earlier that year when Margarita “Peggy” Schuyler Van Rensellaer, Elizabeth and Angelica’s sister, died in March.

Hamilton’s own eldest daughter, Angelica Hamilton, evidently grew despondent and mentally ill from the trauma. The removal to The Grange was in part justified as placing her among the wild songbirds that seemed to be her only source of comfort.

After Hamilton’s own death in 1804 it was revealed that he had essentially been impoverished. A collection had to be taken to fund his funeral. But wife Elizabeth Hamilton managed to hang on to The Grange for many years, until 1833, when she relocated to Washington, D.C., to live out the rest of her days.

The Grange—as is plain to see for any who visits or even looks it up on a map— did not remain in the country for long. As the 19th Century plowed forward, urban development encroached ever northward. But New York City land was so sought after that it demanded the most efficient possible method of planning and construction—that is, perfectly rectangular blocks with streets and avenues meeting at right angles.

The Grange, however, was set at a diagonal to all of this. Pressure mounted to demolish the building.

A wealthy Wall Street broker named Amos Coating owned The Grange and much of Hamilton’s land in 1889, and he decided that instead of demolishing the house he would donate it to St. Luke’s Episcopal Church—which was moving its base of operations north from downtown.

Coating arranged for The Grange to be moved 350 feet in 1889 and rotated sideways to conform with New York City’s grid pattern.

In ensuing years the building aged badly. Part of it was used as a school for a time.

Alexander Hamilton has not always enjoyed the popularity the historical figure currently commands, and throughout the 20th Century groups and individuals struggled to keep the house from being demolished. New York State thought so little of one its greatest sons that it refused, in 1901, to commit any funds to restore it. (An organization did, however, hold a “Centennial Commemoration” to mark a hundred years after Hamilton’s death, and they did this on the Grange site on July 12, 1804).

By the end of World War II the house was fairly much wedged between other buildings, and preservationists sought different places it could be moved and placed in a setting more like its original. At different periods it was contemplated being placed near The Cloisters, in The Bronx, or by Grant’s Tomb.

It came under the control of the federal government by way of being established as a national historical landmark in 1962. In 2006, the building was moved to its present location, not far from the original, but in a city park among grass and trees in St. Nicholas Park.