In a letter to his sister in 1832 he wrote: 11 I am more and more in the notion of having that, little cottage below Oscar's house, and wish you to tell him to endeavor to get it for me." This cottage was a small stone Dutch dwelling, the identical "Wolfert's Roost" of his well-known sketch, built in early times by a member of the Acker family, and at the period of the Revolution occupied by Jacob Van Tassel as a tenant of Frederick Philipse. Irving purchased it, with about fifteen acres of land, in June, 1835. During that year and 1836 he had extensive alterations made, giving the name of Sunnyside to the place as then remodeled. Over the south entrance he placed a Dutch tablet, whose translation is as follows : " Erected in the year 1656.1 Reconstructed by Washington Irving in the year 1835. Geo. Harvey. Architect." In October, 1836, he moved in. Ever afterward Sunnyside was his home. There he wrote his " Life of Washington." He was constantly visited by men of distinction. During the first year of his residence he entertained Prince Louis Napoleon, afterward Napoleon III. Interesting reminiscences of his Sunnyside years appear in Scharf's History.2 He was " a regular worshipper at Christ's Church, Tarrytown. . . . Mr. Irving was rarely absent from his pew at the morning service. . . . He was 1 This date was purely presumptive. There are sufficient reasons for believing that the house was not built until many years later. Irving always inclined to the opinion that Tarrytown was settled previously to 1650, and he even concluded that some of the graves in the Sleepy Hollow cemetery went back to that year. But Irving was entirely unacquainted with the early chronology of Westchester County. His historical studies, confined mostly to the immediate purposes of his own profitable writings on subjects of universal interest, did not descend to such local minutiae.