Timothy Knapp House and Milton Cemetery is a historic district at 265 Rye Beach Avenue and Milton Road in Rye, New York.The earliest part of the Timothy Knapp House was built around 1670, and the site was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.The Timothy Knapp House is considered the oldest residential property in Westchester County, New York, having been built in the 1660s. The property has been owned by only 5 families between 1663 and 1992, when it was acquired by the Rye Historical Society. The Milton Cemetery, across the Street from the Knapp House, is Rye's first public burying ground. The house, surrounding gardens and adjacent Milton Cemetery are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.HistoryThomas Studwell, one of the original settlers of the village of Rye, New York built a house on the Rye Beach Ave. property in 1663. At the time, the town of Rye was part of Connecticut. He traded houses with Timothy Knapp of Stamford, CT, who then built the foundations of the current structure as a two-room residence between 1667 and 1670. Knapp was the deputy to the General Court in Hartford, Connecticut, as a Town Constable and Tax Collector. He was also a vestryman of the Grace Episcopalian Church.Ezekiel Halsted, a wealthy landowner originally from Long Island, purchased the property from Timothy Knapp’s sons in 1746. He expanded the house, adding a second floor using "post-and-beam" construction with a sloping roof in the back containing a dining room and kitchen, which gave the house the distinctive saltbox architecture. Beams are hand-hewn, and some retain their original bark. The house has cellar walls reinforced with lime made from crushed oyster shells, 12-inch wooden nails holding floorboards together and a massive center chimney reinforced with mud mortar. The Halsted family lived in the house for the next 157 years.
