Greeley, editor of the New-York Tribune, settled in Chappaqua shortly before the Civil War in the mid-19th century, living there with his family primarily during the summer.

The house is located on a one-third-acre (1,200 m2) lot in the corner between the two streets, at the bottom of a steep hill King descends from the east.

It is at the eastern edge of downtown Chappaqua, an unincorporated hamlet of the town of New Castle nestled in a level area of a hilly region.

The Saw Mill River, paralleled closely by the eponymous parkway and Metro-North Railroad's Harlem Line, are in a corridor 600 feet (180 m) to the west.

The local fire department headquarters are on the southeast, with New Castle's community center across Senter Street buffering the baseball fields beyond.

The windows are all set with six-over-six double-hung sash protected by a layer of storm glass, with minimal wooden sills and lintels.

At the east gable apex, split by the chimney, are two louvered lunettes; opposite there are just two more smaller six-over-six windows, with the middle bay on that facade left blind.

In the early 1850s the Haviland house was extended by a third and its exterior decorated with the piazza-style porch and balcony, Victorian mantles and French windows.

[2] While he was frequently ridiculed for this in his day, due to his own professed previous ignorance of the subject, much of the advice he published in those columns was actually correct.

His wife Mary, who like her husband was still distraught over the death of the couple's five-year-old son a year or so earlier,[8] had insisted that any such property had to have a spring-fed babbling brook, evergreen forest and be near the railroad.

Greeley's wife, however, found it shady and remote;[4] at one point, the couple invited young Spiritualist Kate Fox to live with them for four months while they attempted to contact the spirit of their dead son through seances.

A mob angered by this threatened the house, and Mary was prepared to blow it up if that happened again during the 1863 New York City draft riots.

[10] The next year, he bowed to her complaints and bought the Haviland house, conspicuously located on the main road, from the estate of Caleb Sands, its later owner.

Later that year, on a hillside corner of the farm, now expanded to a hundred acres (40 ha), he built the first concrete barn in the nation.

[12] Greeley began planning and building a new family home, Hillside House, located a short distance down the entrance road to the farm (which has since been extended and paved as Senter Street).

It was completed in 1872, but before moving in he accepted the nomination of the Democratic and Liberal Republican parties to run against incumbent Ulysses S. Grant in that year's presidential election.

The combination of those two events had a deleterious effect on Greeley's own health, and he died a few weeks later, before all the votes had been counted, the only time that has happened to a major presidential candidate.

Frank Glendenin, pastor of St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Manhattan, hired Ralph Adams Cram to remodel Rehoboth into a house.

They commissioned architect Morgan O'Brien to build a memorial chapel to her based on a medieval English church, Saint Mary the Virgin, outside London.

Eight years later the memorial sculpture to Horace Greeley was installed in the small park across from the train station; in 1916 the Glendenins transferred the chapel to the Episcopal Diocese of New York, again with some stipulations, including one that they and their children be buried behind the church.

The rest of the farm was sold to a developer the next year, and subdivided into the commercial downtown it is now, completing the transformation of Chappaqua from the quiet country place to which Horace Greeley had escaped to practice farming into a modern suburb whose residents still lived in natural surroundings on large lots but commuted daily to jobs in the city.

[4] In 1959 a local family bought it and expanded the gift shop to use the entire house, remodeling the interior for that purpose and adding the flat-roofed south addition.