Rehoboth (Greeley Concrete Barn)

Rehoboth, formerly referred to as Greeley’s Concrete Barn, is a three-story concrete structure located on the former farm of the Horace Greeley family in Chappaqua, New York, in northern Westchester County. The original building served as a dairy barn that was later converted into a Neo-Gothic style private residence, designed by Ralph Adams Cram in 1892. Despite the Greeley farm being divided, Rehoboth still stands and maintains a high degree of architectural integrity. Rehoboth, which is included in The Greeley Heritage Landmarks in Chappaqua (Thematic Group), was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in April 1979.

A decade after its founding in 1841, the New-York Tribune was successful enough that Horace Greeley could afford a summer home in the country. Starting in 1852, he assembled a property of about 78 acres near the village of Chappaqua and convenient to its railroad station. There he established a home for his family and carried out experiments in scientific farming. 

One of the most successful of these was his weather- and fire-resistant barn, completed in 1857. Its walls were constructed of stone rubble and lime mortar, molded to form solid and durable concrete. It contained three levels: a main floor with stalls for cattle, a large hayloft above, and a basement below for the collection of manure and soiled bedding.

“Building with concrete is still a novelty,” Horace Greeley wrote in 1868, “and was far more so ten years ago when I built my barn...I calculate that this barn will be abidingly useful long after I shall have been utterly forgotten.”

In 1891, Greeley’s daughter Gabrielle, the last of his surviving children, married Episcopal minister the Reverend Dr. Frank M. Clendenin, rector of St. Peter’s Church in the Bronx. Within the year, the Clendenins began to remodel the concrete barn that Horace Greeley had proudly built some 35 years earlier. They bored additional doors and windows through the 16-inch-thick walls and inserted an additional upper story into what had been the hayloft. They then divided the internal space into individual rooms, installed fireplaces and central heating, and transformed the old building into a substantial and comfortable home. It was initially occupied only during the warmer months, but after Dr. Clendenin’s retirement in 1917, it became their permanent residence. They gave it the biblical name Rehoboth.

Gabrielle made the house a virtual shrine to the memory of her parents. It contained all the furnishings and mementos that she had salvaged from an earlier home when it burned. Most of the Greeley items now in the collections of the historical society and on display at the Horace Greeley House were once at Rehoboth.

It has remained a private house with little alteration ever since the Clendenins lived there, and shows every sign of enduring well into the future.

1. Chappaqua History Committee and Gray Williams. New Castle: Chappaqua and Millwood. “Images of America” series. Charleston, SC: Acadia Publishing, 2006.
2. Greeley, Horace. Recollections of a Busy Life. New York: J.B. Ford & Co., 1868.
3. New Castle Historical Society. “Stop 11: Greeley’s Concrete Barn (now the Rehoboth House), https://www.newcastlehs.org/walkinghoracegreeleysfarm/stop-11/
4. “Rehoboth (Horace Greeley Thematic District), 79003214.” National Register of Historic Places. United States Department of the Interior/National Park Service. 1974. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/75315465 
5. Williams, Gray. Horace Greeley and the Greeley Family in Chappaqua. New Castle Historical Society, 2016.
6. Williams, Gray. Picturing Our Past: National Register Sites in Westchester County. Westchester County Historical Society. 2003.