Gerard Crane House

The Gerard Crane House is a stone Greek Revival residence on U.S. Route 202 in Somers, New York, built in 1849 on a 25-acre property by Gerard Crane, an early American circus entrepreneur, after his marriage to Roxana Purdy. Crane and his brother Thaddeus, descendants of a Revolutionary War officer, had settled in Somers in 1823 and built a menagerie and touring exhibition business on land bought from Hachaliah Bailey, whose own elephant exhibit is credited with starting the American circus tradition, before the Panic of 1837 hurt their Zoological Institute. The house, notable for English Renaissance style interior plasterwork unusual for a rural home, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1985 as the northernmost such listing in Westchester County.