Historic Lens: Dodge House in Port Washington

Independence Day is a great time to look back at North Hempstead's heritage. Former Town Historian Joan Kent wrote this piece about the one of the most places in the area: the Dodge House in Port Washington. Read her account here.

Probably the best known of Port Washington’s historic houses is the Thomas Dodge House at 58 Harbor Road.

This brown-shingled charmer at the head of the Mill Pond is a designated Town of North Hempstead Landmark and listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and still looks pretty much as it did when built by Thomas Dodge in 1721. The papers to prove this are in the Port Washington Public Library Local History Center.

The Mill Pond did not start life as a pond but rather as an inlet from Manhasset Bay with the Thomas Dodge farmstead at its head, with direct access to the sea. Though wings have been added and subtracted during the years, the core of the house remains the same. There's a cozy kitchen with a cast iron stove, sitting room with fireplace, and hand-hewn beams held together with wooden pegs. Its original Dutch doors are in place front and back. The house is almost completely furnished with family pieces belonging to some of the seven generations of Dodges who lived there. A set of Liverpool Spode dinnerware from approximately 1815 are on display as a wedding present, and an assortment of old farm tools collected by the Dodges is mounted in the museum room.

Other structures on the grounds include two-horse barn, circa 1880, complete with ox yokes, a large fenced garden maintained by a Port Washington environmental group that donates most of its crops to hunger-fighting organizations. Completing the inventory of farm buildings are a chicken coop, a woodshed and what is probably the only genuine outhouse in the Town of North Hempstead.

The last Dodge to live in the Dutch Colonial style house was Marie Dodge Ross, a teacher. Her husband Don was an artist and illustrator who worked as one time as art director for the Boy Scouts of America national magazine. Marie’s forbearers included a weaver, a Town Councilman, a Union soldier and a bricklayer who is said to have worked on the construction of , in about 1910.  Other residents included one dozen Hessian troops quartered there during the American Revolution.

Marie sold the one-acre plus property in 1992 to the Port Washington Water Pollution Board, which bought it as a buffer zone. Because the district is prevented by law from maintaining a museum, it asked the Cow Neck Peninsula Historical Society to open the house to the public as a museum in 1993, as it has done. Marie Dodge Ross died in 1998 at the age of 90. She had no children.

A visit to the Thomas Dodge House is a very pleasant and instructive way to learn about historic Port Washington. 

Museum Hours/Tours: temporarily suspended (by appointment only). Contact The Cow Neck Peninsula Historical Society for more information at (516) 365-9074, or info@cowneck.org. Or visit thehistorical society's website.