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Leonard
Gansevoort
 Leonard Gansevoort was born in July 1751. He was the son of Albany mainstays Harman and Magdalena Douw Gansevoort. He learned the elements of business and trade growing up in his father's house across from the Albany Market. By the early 1770s, he also began to practice law.
He
married Hester Cuyler in 1770. Over the next two
decades, their children were baptized in the Albany
Dutch church where he was a church officer and regular
baptism sponsor.
Elected
to the city council while still living in his father's
third ward home, by the outbreak of the war, he had
moved his family to a more spacious home on lower
State Street where they would live for the next two
decades.
A
committed revolutionary, he served on the Albany
Committee of Correspondence, was elected to the Provincial
Congress - where he served as president in 1777,
was appointed Albany County clerk in 1778, and served
for many years in both houses of the New York State
Legislature.
As
he grew in wealth and stature, Gansevoort invested
in real estate within and beyond Albany. During that
time, his State Street home was an Albany landmark.
In
1789, he purchased the farm called Whitehall from
the son of General Philip Schuyler. Following the
fire of 1793, he moved out to Whitehall and began
to add more rooms to accommodate his growing
family. The Whitehall property technically was just
inside the new town (district) called Bethlehem.
The census for 1800 shows his Bethlehem property
was attended by thirteen slaves.
Leonard
Gansevoort died unexpectedly in August of 1810. He
had just passed his fifty-ninth birthday! His will
passed probate four months later.
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Sources: The
life of Leonard Gansevoort is CAP biography number
4666. This profile is derived chiefly from family
and community-based resources.
Portrait is probably by Gilbert Stuart, as printed in The
Gansevoorts of Albany - the source of much qualitative information
on the subject.
By Stefan Bielinski, Colonial Albany Social History Project [http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/albany]
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