Ichabod Crane Schoolhouse

The Ichabod Crane Schoolhouse is a 19th-century building that served as a local single-room public school into the 1940s. Recently awarded a 'Legends & Lore' marker by the New York Folklore Society & William G. Pomeroy Foundation honoring Washington Irving's "Sleepy Hollow" character 'Ichabod Crane', who was patterned after the original Kinderhook Schoolteacher, Jesse Merwin--hence the schoolhouse name. Washington Irving was a friend of President Martin Van Buren and boarded at the Van Ness home in Kinderhook for about eight weeks in 1809 after the death of his fiancée. Schoolteacher, Jesse Merwin, was also a boarder at the Van Ness home, and the two twenty-something bachelors went fishing and otherwise socialized with the small colony of intellectuals in the otherwise agrarian community. Known as a "classic of American literature", Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow's greatest character was conceived right here.