Lindenwald

Martin Van Buren bought the 137-acre farm he would call Lindenwald in 1839, while still serving as president — an unusual arrangement in which a sitting president purchased his own future retirement home a full term before he needed it. The property already held a plain Federal-style farmhouse built in 1797. Van Buren moved in permanently in March 1841, immediately after losing his reelection bid to William Henry Harrison, and began what became a 21-year retirement, among the longest of any president up to that point in American history.

In 1849 Van Buren hired architect Richard Upjohn to remodel the farmhouse into the fashionable Italianate style, adding a four-story tower, ornate bracketed eaves, and a roofline that transformed a plain Hudson Valley farmhouse into a genuine architectural showpiece. Retirement did not mean withdrawal from politics: Van Buren ran for president a third time in 1848 as the candidate of the breakaway Free Soil Party while living at Lindenwald, and continued entertaining a steady stream of political visitors and offering informal commentary on national affairs from the estate for the rest of his life.

Van Buren died at Lindenwald in July 1862, at 79. The property passed through a series of private owners over the following century, with long stretches of neglect, before the National Park Service acquired it in 1974 and restored it as the Martin Van Buren National Historic Site. Unlike most presidential homes, which trace a president's rise, Lindenwald documents something rarer: a full, deliberately chosen presidential retirement, planned and purchased before Van Buren even knew he would need it.