The Coach House and Stables

NPS Photo

FDR's father James Roosevelt built the Coach House, also known as the Stables, in 1886. Hudson Valley architect Frederick Clarke Withers (1828-1901) of Newburgh, New York, designed the Queen Anne-style building. James Roosevelt commissioned Withers after the peak of his career, during his later phase working in the Queen Anne and more academic Gothic Revival styles. At the time of the construction of the Coach House in 1886, Withers had recently been in the area, working in 1885 on the Frank Hasbrouck house on Market Street in Poughkeepsie. For the Roosevelts, Withers designed a two-story frame building featuring characteristic Queen Anne-style details, including gable roofs with bargeboards and a turreted cupola, a prominent oriel window and projecting porch, fish-scale shingles on the second story, and doors with braces recalling the pattern of half-timbering. The Coach House reflects the hallmarks of Withers' work during the period, as illustrated by his better-known commissions such as the Queen Anne-style James Dunbar House in Monmouth Beach, New Jersey (1881). The intact interior of the Coach House, complete with horse stalls and a tack room, illustrates the function of this late-nineteenth-century building type. Aside from the historic addition of a sleeping porch on the rear elevation prior to 1924, the Coach House remains largely unchanged from the original construction. The existing rifle gray and dark maroon paint scheme is historic but not original to the building.

One among the first generation of professional American architects, Withers was an English immigrant who did his initial training in Dorchester and London and then accepted a position in 1852 with Andrew Jackson Downing in Newburgh. This association was short-lived due to Downing's death in July 1852. Soon after, Withers became associated with Calvert Vaux, another English immigrant architect working in Newburgh. The partnership of Vaux & Withers continued until 1856, when Vaux left Newburgh to assist Frederick Law Olmsted with the design of Central Park. Withers subsequently built a reputation for continuing the Downing legacy of picturesque design. He became well known for his ecclesiastical work and, in particular, for introducing the High Victorian Gothic style to the United States. One of Withers' best known buildings is the Jefferson Market Courthouse in New York, a flamboyant High Victorian Gothic complex completed in 1877. James Roosevelt may have known of Withers from his commission for the massive main building complex at the Hudson River State Hospital, built on the site of the Roosevelts' former country home, Mount Hope, near Poughkeepsie. Withers prepared his initial drawings for the hospital in 1867, but construction was not completed until 1878. By the time of its completion, the High Victorian Gothic style was falling out of favor, and Withers had begun to work in late medieval styles that collectively became known in the United States as the Queen Anne style.