Cherry Hill (Albany, New York)

Cherry Hill is a historic house built in 1787 on South Pearl Street in Albany, New York, constructed by Colonel Philip Kiliaen van Rensselaer as a residence for his bride Maria Sanders. The van Rensselaer family, including Solomon van Rensselaer, a member of Congress, held the estate for nearly two centuries, and the Marquis de Lafayette stayed there during his American tour in the 1820s. The house is also remembered as the scene of a murder case that led to the last public hanging in the history of Albany. It is now a historic house museum run by the Historic Cherry Hill Association, holding about 20,000 objects and 30,000 documents from the family history, and it reopened to visitors after a restoration that began in 2009 to relieve structural strain from the stored collections.