Thomas McDowell House
The Thomas McDowell House sits on Lake Road in the Little Britain area of the Town of New Windsor, Orange County, New York. It was built around 1770 by Thomas McDowell, an early settler, and later his descendants rented it to James Alexander, a prominent local weaver. The house was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2004.
It is one of the last surviving homes built by the Little Britain settlers, a mainly Irish group who came to the area after a long sea voyage, and it remains largely in its original form, with some later updates.
The house is a 1.5-story “half-house” with a three-bay main block. A one-story kitchen wing extends to the west, and a smaller, newer bedroom wing is to the north. It is built with heavy post-and-beam framing, clapboard siding, and a fieldstone foundation. Both roofs are medium-pitched gables; the kitchen wing has a saltbox effect at the back. Cedar shakes cover the roofs. The south-facing front has windows and a door in the westernmost bay. The main door is board-and-batten with original ironwork. A brick chimney rises from the west roof, and the east side has a three-sided projecting bay window added later. Inside, the original side-hall layout remains, though many finishes date from the early 19th century.
Two other contributing structures sit on the property: an 1870 carriage barn and a small shed known as the “garden studio.” A portion of the original stone wall around the south and west sides also survives.
Thomas McDowell is believed to have built the house around 1770; deeds show he bought 34 acres from James Humphrey that year. He was the son of James McDowell, an Irish immigrant from County Longford who survived the perilous Atlantic crossing and settled in the Hudson Valley in 1731 as part of Little Britain. The first owner of record in 1803 was Thomas B. McDowell, aged 44, who may have added some interior touches such as a Federal-style mantel. In the 1810s he rented the house to James Alexander, a noted Irish weaver; his son Joseph later described the land as about 60 acres. In 1845 Thomas B. left the house to his son Alexander, who mortgaged it to pay debts, eventually passing it to Alfred Denniston, who likely added the east bay window. Agnes Corwin bought it in 1871, and the house stayed in her family into the late 20th century.
Architecturally, the house is a typical English vernacular rural Hudson Valley home designed to retain heat. It shows some early Georgian influence, with later updates such as a Federal-era mantel and a Picturesque east bay window influenced by the designs of Andrew Jackson Downing.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 00:25 (CET).