A Catskills estate lists for the first time in 200-plus years

A $14 million marvel born of old American money is up for sale in the Catskill Mountains.

Descendants of the Livingston family — whose patriarch once quite literally lorded over the Catskills — are selling their 1,600-acre estate after more than two centuries.

The offering, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, marks the first time Lake Delaware Farm and its country house will change hands since the founding of the United States. 

The 7,000-square-foot lakeside home — more than three hours by car from Midtown Manhattan — is a time capsule of well-to-do colonial taste, with doric columns, coffered ceilings, glossy parquet wood floors and marble fireplace mantels.

Its founders, the heiress Gertrude Livingston and early New York Governor Morgan Lewis, built the home around 1787, just four years after the end of the American Revolution, according to the listing.

Freed from the shackles of English colonial rule and its penchant for stuffy interior design, the famous New York architect Thomas Hastings modeled the Livingstons’ summer house in the more subdued, but no less stately, Greek Revival style.

Long enjoyed as a seasonal retreat by Livingston’s descendants, the estate has recently fallen out of use, the Journal reported. Its ownership, made up of 10 cousins, is now scattered across the country. One of the owners, 68-year-old Elbridge Gerry, told the Journal that the decision to sell the property was “emotionally brutal.”

Their grief is little wonder, considering the rarefied digs. 

The eight-bedroom lakehouse, fronted by soaring columns, is a light-filled, wood-paneled vision of aristocratic country life — all in picturesque Delaware County. Despite being modified and expanded over time, the property’s large porch, entry hall and front parlors remain original, according to the listing.

The eat-in kitchen is a relatively modern upgrade to the home. The room was moved as part of a roughly $3 million renovation around the turn of the century, the Journal reported. All eight bedrooms contain ensuite bathrooms, and extra sleeping quarters can be found in an attic bunkbed room.

The home’s large windows boast period drama-worthy views of the 68-acre lake and the Catskill peaks surrounding the high mountain valley property. The firm of the iconic architect behind Central Park and the Biltmore Estate, Frederick Law Olmsted, originally landscaped the far-reaching property — but of course. 

Livingston inherited the land from her father, Robert Livingston, whose career as a Founding Father was preceded by a period of favoritism by the English crown, endowing him with lordship over a major swath of the Catskill Mountains.

The $14 million Lake Delaware Farm sale is held by Brown Harris Stevens agent Norah Burden, along with her colleagues Owen Davidson and Hall Willkie. 

Listing materials are effusive in their praise of the home’s rich legacy, waxing poetic about the tangible presence of distinguished family members, “the signers of the Declaration of Independence, the decorated military men, the Senators, Justices, and Gilded Age barons that have called this place home over the centuries.”

It’s not really an exaggeration, though. The lasting legacy of the Livingstons have ties to state governors, US presidents and all-around aristocrats of any given age. Reported family ties include the likes of the Roosevelts, the Hamiltons, the Astors, the Stuyvesants and even the Bush family.