Our most popular Discovery Center is open for private experiences!

Learn about what produce was grown here seasonally, try your hand at daily farm chores, look at historic photos of the farm, milk our mechanical cow, and ride our tractor. The building also has an interesting exhibit describing the history of farming on the property.

We offer two 90-minute exploration sessions every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, at 10am and 2pm. Each session is a private experience for your family group of up to 15 people. These experiences are free, but reservations are required.

Please leave your pets at home – only service animals are allowed in our buildings.

Our most popular Discovery Center is open for private experiences!

Learn about what produce was grown here seasonally, try your hand at daily farm chores, look at historic photos of the farm, milk our mechanical cow, and ride our tractor. The building also has an interesting exhibit describing the history of farming on the property.

We offer two 90-minute exploration sessions every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, at 10am and 2pm. Each session is a private experience for your family group of up to 15 people. These experiences are free, but reservations are required.

Please leave your pets at home – only service animals are allowed in our buildings.

Our most popular Discovery Center is open for private experiences!

Learn about what produce was grown here seasonally, try your hand at daily farm chores, look at historic photos of the farm, milk our mechanical cow, and ride our tractor. The building also has an interesting exhibit describing the history of farming on the property.

We offer two 90-minute exploration sessions every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, at 10am and 2pm. Each session is a private experience for your family group of up to 15 people. These experiences are free, but reservations are required.

Please leave your pets at home – only service animals are allowed in our buildings.

Our most popular Discovery Center is open for private experiences!

Learn about what produce was grown here seasonally, try your hand at daily farm chores, look at historic photos of the farm, milk our mechanical cow, and ride our tractor. The building also has an interesting exhibit describing the history of farming on the property.

We offer two 90-minute exploration sessions every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, at 10am and 2pm. Each session is a private experience for your family group of up to 15 people. These experiences are free, but reservations are required.

Please leave your pets at home – only service animals are allowed in our buildings.

Our most popular Discovery Center is available for private experiences!

Learn about what produce was grown here seasonally, try your hand at daily farm chores, look at historic photos of the farm, milk our mechanical cow, and ride our tractor. The building also has an interesting exhibit describing the history of farming on the property.

We offer two 90-minute exploration sessions every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, at 10am and 2pm. Each session is a private experience for your family group of up to 15 people. These experiences are free, but reservations are required.

Please leave your pets at home – only service animals are allowed in our buildings.

Founding Father John Jay was a native son of New York City, but the city he knew was not the metropolis we know today. This tour takes us along many of the same streets John Jay walked as we visit locations where he lived, worked, played, and prayed. Plan to walk approximately 2 miles during this 3-hour tour. Advance registration required. $20; $15 members Friends of John Jay Homestead.

Details on tour meeting place in lower Manhattan will be emailed to registrants a few days prior to the tour.

Slavery and the Jay Family: A 7-Generation Story

Founding Father John Jay was descended from three generations of enslavers. Jay himself is something of an enigma: he argued for abolition in the new state of New York as early as 1777 but did not abolish slavery in his own household for another four decades. His descendants include three generations who were abolitionists and civil rights activists.

This illustrated program, presented via Zoom, examines the arc of slavery through seven generations of the Jay family.  It is a story that goes back almost to the introduction of slaves into the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam and ends just months before the 13th Amendment abolished slavery.

Join us for the 24th Annual Barn Dance Saturday, September 17! Featuring pig races, music by local bands, delicious food, and a campfire, this festive fundraiser raises funds for all of Friends of John Jay Homestead’s educational work. 

This event has sold out! Merchandise is available for purchase below. Thank you for your support!

David Gellman, Liberty’s Chain: Slavery, Abolition and the Jay Family of New York

Liberty’s Chain explores the contradictions of the Jay family’s attitudes and actions toward slavery over multiple generations. Enslaved and formerly enslaved people living at Bedford experienced isolation, even as members of the Jay family took increasingly radical approaches to law, policy, politics, and advocacy. Gellman is Professor of History at DePauw University, author or co-author of three other books, as well as essays on such disparate cultural icons as James Fenimore Cooper and Bruce Springsteen.

After two years of virtual lectures, we are thrilled to announce we will be holding this lecture in-person.

David will be joining us at St. Matthew’s Church in Bedford, NY, to present his lecture in our traditional pre-COVID format, followed by a book signing.

Attendees must self-certify that they’ve been vaccinated against COVID-19 and must be masked when seated.

A live broadcast via Zoom will also be available for those of you unable to attend in person.

Pre-registration is required for either ticket.

St. Matthew’s Church

382 Cantitoe St. Bedford, NY

Check in begins at 6:30pm with light refreshments.

Join the Lecture Committee here.

Deborah Willis, The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship

Though both Union and Confederate armies excluded African American men from their initial calls to arms, many of the men who eventually served were black. With over seventy images, supplemented with handwritten captions, letters, and other personal materials, Willis depicts the lives of black soldiers and other African Americans involved with the struggle, and the importance of African American communities in the development and prosecution of the war.

Willis is University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. An art photographer as well, she is one of the nation’s leading historians of African American photography and curators of African diasporic cultures. She is a recipient of (among others) MacArthur, Cohen, Guggenheim and Alphonse Fletcher Fellowships; a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; and recipient of the Outstanding Service Award from the Royal Photographic Society in the UK.

Tickets to this virtual lecture are free but must be reserved in advance. Only registered guests will receive a link to the Zoom webinar the day before the lecture.

Support the Lecture Series by making a donation here.

Donate $250 or more to join the Lecture Committee.

Jeff Shesol, Mercury Rising: John Glenn, John Kennedy, and the New Battleground of the Cold War

Mercury Rising is a propulsive narrative of the early space race at the time of Sputnik and JFK’s young Presidency, embedded in Cold War politics domestic and international, and a very different American culture of heroes. It also an exploration of the terrors of new technologies – both space and nuclear weapons – and how they intersected in fears of the militarization of space.

A Rhodes Scholar, creator of the nationally syndicated comic strip Thatch, former Fellow at Princeton and the University of California, frequent commentator in print and on TV and radio, Presidential speechwriter and founding partner of West Wing Writers, Shesol is also author of Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt v. The Supreme Court, about which he spoke at the Homestead in 2011.

Tickets to this virtual lecture are free but must be reserved in advance. Only registered guests will receive a link to the Zoom webinar the day before the lecture.

Support the Lecture Series by making a donation here.

Donate $250 or more to join the Lecture Committee.