The Hendrick Martin House is located on Willowbrook Lane in the town of Red Hook, New York, United States, just north of the eponymous village.
In the 19th century it passed from the Martins' ownership into others; the most recent owners have undertaken renovations that have both modernized it and brought it back to its original appearance.
The house is located on an irregularly shaped 7.49-acre (3.03 ha) parcel on unpaved Willowbrook Lane, roughly a thousand feet (300 m) northwest of North Broadway (the old Albany Post Road, also part of U.S. Route 9).
At the property, the road bends to the north, towards a dead end at a Dutch barn that was on the Martin land in the past.
[2] At the bend in Willowbrook, the driveway continues straight, curving around slightly downhill behind some large mature deciduous shade trees.
On the southwest a small garden has been added by the current owners; it is considered a non-contributing resource to the National Register listing.
Atop the house is a side-gabled roof covered in asphalt shingles, pierced by two brick chimneys in the center.
A large seam visible in the stoneworks next to the first-story entrance delineates the original section of the house from that added later on.
[2] On the south wall of the living room is a large brick Rumford fireplace with angled cheeks on the firebox.
In the south room, used for handling the house's modern heating and electrical systems, there is another fireplace with an original brick bake oven next to it.
A slight break in the height of the floorboards corresponds with the masonry seam on the west wall, showing where the original house was added to.
Ultimately 30,000 residents of the area made their way to London, and the Crown dealt with this growing population of the displaced in 1710 by resettling some of them elsewhere in the nascent British Empire.
[2] One such plan put the refugees to work in lands in the Hudson Valley, acquired from the Dutch a few decades earlier, producing naval stores.
However the mostly tropical plants that produced tar, rosin and pitch did not endure well in the region's harsh winters, and after a year or two the plan was abandoned.
They met and married while living in West Camp, across the Hudson from Red Hook, in what is today the Ulster County town of Saugerties.
[4] But records show that all four of Hendrick Martin's children were baptized in Kaatsbaan, the last by 1743, suggesting the family had not moved across the river before that year.
[2] As originally constructed, the house was the section to the north of the current main entrance, with a single room on each story.
The original stacked hearths, necessitated by the jambless fireplaces in place at that time, are also found on the Jan Van Hoesen House in the Columbia County town of Claverack and the Abraham Hasbrouck House, a contributing property to the Huguenot Street National Historic Landmark District across the river in New Paltz, in southern Ulster County.
At the end of the 20th century it was bought by its current owners, who spent a decade renovating and restoring before its listing on the Register.