Irving's charming home is alongside the Hudson River. Irving first visited the area in 1832 and bought a run-down farmhouse. Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote that that Sunnyside stood "next to Mount Vernon, the best known and most cherished of all the dwellings in our land." Irving died here of a heart attack in 1859. The Irving family inhabited the cottage until 1945, when John D. Rockefeller, Jr. opened it to the public.