Beechwood is an historic estate complex located just east of the Hudson River shoreline in the hamlet of Scarborough in Westchester County, NY. Since its original construction in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, it has had several owners and numerous additions, some designed by prominent architects, including Robert H. Robertson and William Welles Bosworth. From the 1850s to the 1890s, Beechwood was the summer home of the Remsen family, whose patriarch, Henry Remsen, along with his son, Henry Rutgers Remsen, had been respected New York City businessmen. Through connections by marriage, Beechwood was afterwards acquired by Henry Walter Webb, vice president of the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad. In 1906, it was purchased by Frank Vanderlip, who three years later became president of the National City Bank of New York, the largest bank in the country at the time. The Vanderlip family was responsible for expanding the Beechwood property to125 acres, ultimately selling much of it off in the 1980s. As of 2022, Beechwood serves as a 37-unit condominium complex. Beechwood is included in the Scarborough Historic District, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1984.

During the early nineteenth century, Beechwood belonged to Benjamin Folger, a wealthy New York City businessman. For a time, Folger, and his wife, Ann, shared the home, which they called “Heart Place,” with "Matthias the Prophet," an unconventional evangelical preacher who attracted a number of disciples, including Isabella Van Wagener, later known as Sojourner Truth, to the Folger estate, which Matthias preferred to call “Mount Zion.” Numerous scandals, accusations of infidelity, and even a murder trial ultimately brought the Folger-Matthias relationship to an end, leaving Folger bankrupt. The property was then purchased by the Remsen family, whose patriarch, Henry Remsen, had been an officer of the Manhattan Bank. The Remsen family spent summers here from the 1850s to the 1890s. 

In 1895, the Remsens sold the property to Henry Walter Webb, a vice president of the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad. Webb, who lived here until his death in 1904, was responsible for both enlarging the estate by piecing together a number of smaller properties, and giving it the name “Beechwood.” Webb hired New York City architect Robert H. Robertson to renovate and expand the original residence, a late-eighteenth-century Federal-style house that was two stories high, three bays wide, and four bays deep. Robertson was well regarded for his design of a number of architecturally important buildings in New York City, New Jersey, Long Island, Newport, and elsewhere. One of these was the Park Row Building in Manhattan, which from 1899 to 1908 was the world’s tallest office building. For Beechwood, Robertson designed a clapboard addition to the south of the original house. He incorporated classical motifs of the original Federal style with more elaborate entablature. The (unfluted) Doric columned portico has Doric pilasters at the wall of the main façade and a recessed first-level entrance (framed by Tuscan columns). Four bays wide in the central section, the addition included two bays north of, and four bays south of, the portico. 

After Webb’s death, his widow, Leila Howard Griswold Webb, sold Beechwood to the Vanderlip family, contents included. Frank Vanderlip was a self-made millionaire; his wife, Narcissa Cox Vanderlip, was a social feminist, philanthropist, and suffragist. The couple raised their six children at Beechwood, and purchased surrounding land to grow the size of their property, even acquiring acreage from William Rockefeller, brother of John D. Rockefeller, who was a large landowner in Scarborough. They engaged distinguished Beaux Arts architect William Welles Bosworth to design an addition to the main residence. His work included the AT&T Building in New York City, the MIT Cambridge campus, the gardens and house at the Rockefeller Kykuit estate in Pocantico Hills, and the Untermyer gardens in Yonkers. He extended the house with two-story additions to the north, incorporating a library wing with a large pedimented clerestory space and an octagonal rotunda. Frederick Law Olmsted, who had co-designed Central Park in New York City, was hired to design the nearby private parkland.

Over the decades the mansion and the grounds at Beechwood remained largely intact. In 1979, the estate was sold to an environmentally sensitive developer, who saved the original residence and surrounding buildings, including the garage, the gardener’s house, the gatehouse, the Benedict House, and multiple formal landscape elements. Eventually, additional buildings were added and, as of 2022, the estate contains thirty seven condominiums.

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