A Garrison home that’s part of a railroad tycoon’s legacy

This 19th-century carriage-style house was once part of railroad magnate Samuel Sloan’s Garrison estate. Photographs courtesy Houlihan Lawrence.

Samuel Sloan (1817-1907) wasn’t just president of the Delaware, Lackawana and Western Railroad, a “true monarch of the land,” as one historian put it, helping to preside over the 19th century’s transportation revolution and allying himself with financier J.P. Morgan. He was a founder of Citibank and something of a residential real estate developer in the Hudson Valley, to which he moved in the 1850s.

Sloan – an Irish immigrant who worked his way up a New York importing business to lead Long Island College Hospital and the Hudson River Railroad, then become a New York state senator – built Wyndune and Walker House in Garrison for daughters Margaret and Elizabeth respectively so that they could be near his estate of Oulagisket, later Lisburne Grange.

Now a portion of that estate has come on the market, bridging past, present and future.

The 4,464-square-foot carriage-style house, which sits on 5.1 acres on Fox Hollow, was renovated from top to bottom in 2009 to blend style, comfort and functionality. All the rooms, which include three bedrooms and three bathrooms, are spacious and gracious, with a particularly expansive, airy primary suite, whose charm is underscored by a fireplace and an entire wall of skylit windows. The windows give the primary a treehouse feel, with a view onto a dogwood right outside that’s home to many songbirds.

The “treehouse’ primary suite overlooks a songbird-filled dogwood.

It’s the kind of feature Sloan might’ve relished. Here are two he surely didn’t see – a heated indoor  “endless” swimming pool with an underwater treadmill and a cedar and glass poolroom and sauna with a heated river-stone floor. 

The indoor pool contains an underwater treadmill.

Each owner adds his or her touch. The current owner has designed the orchards and flower and vegetable gardens – threaded with stone walls — to offer picturesque beauty and tranquility, describing it as a “farmden, more than a garden and less than farm.” Eleven different kinds of fruit grow there, with harvesting from May (strawberries) into December (persimmons). Some species of flowers are available for arrangements year-round. The garden is planted out to the deer fence that envelops the property.

The owner calls the orchards and flower and vegetable gardens a “farmden, more than a garden and less than a farm.”

Among the amenities are two EV chargers for the two-car garage, which would’ve no doubt tickled car collector Sloan, a man ahead of his transportation time.

The house is listed at $2,095,000. For more, call Abbie Carey at 845-661-5438.