A 1999 article in the Dutch Barn Preservation Society newsletter detailed a house likely built in about 1720 by Peter Daniel Winne. "It retains features of a distinct type of Dutch house," wrote Roderic Blackburn, "worthy of preservation and rehabilitation if a right new owner can be found."

Passion for old houses
Brian Parker is the "right new owner" with a passion for old houses. As a youngster he watched the archeological excavation of Fort Orange, the first permanent settlement of New Netherland built as a fur trading post on the Hudson River in 1624 by the Dutch West India Company.

Parker has been buying and restoring old properties since 1984. Within days of hearing about the Winne house, he went to see it and decided to buy it.

"It was a very important, rare type of house," he explains. "But it was in very bad condition - close to being lost when I got a hold of it."

Original material
After a couple of years of emergency stabilization work, he began painstakingly restoring the house.

 "Anything that was original to the house was preserved," Parker says. For the rest, he learned what he could from evidence left in fragments or historical documents.

"It gives you a completely different understanding of what it was like to build a house like this in the early 18th century."

Pieter the immigrant
Local residents Peter and Florence Christof have researched the Winne family genealogy. The original Pieter Winne was born in 1609, the same year Henry Hudson sailed his Dutch ship up the river where the Winne family would eventually put down roots.

Pieter the Immigrant, as he became known, grew up in Ghent, moved to Amsterdam and then crossed the ocean to Curacao where he lived for some time before settling in New Netherland in 1652.

A year later Pieter Winne married Tanneke Adams from Friesland and the couple had twelve children. Their youngest son, Daniel Pietersz Winne, inherited the family farmstead. Before his death, Daniel Pietersz granted nearby land to his eldest son Peter Daniel. Five years after his marriage to Rachel van Alan, he built the house now owned by Brian Parker.

Moving house
Like his father, Peter Daniel settled his eldest son on land about a half mile away. Daniel Peter Winne married Jannetje de Forest in 1744 and six years later built a house almost exactly like his father's. Their descendents lived in the house for the next two hundred years.

The Daniel Peter Winne house was "rediscovered" and purchased in 2002 by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Under the watchful eye of Michael Kelley, another local historic preservation contractor, it has been meticulously dismantled, moved to New York City and reassembled inside the third floor of the museum's American Wing.