The Old Stone House, also known as the Vechte-Cortelyou House, is a reconstruction of a Dutch farmhouse built by the Vechte family in 1699. They prospered, farming the rich bottomland beneath the hills of what is now Park Slope, harvesting oysters in the Gowanus Creek (now Canal), and ferrying produce to market in Manhattan. While the house stood within the old Town of Breuckelen, it was still half a day by ox cart from Fulton Landing. By the 1850’s urbanization surrounded it. For a time, it was used as a neighborhood club house, during the winter as warming and changing space for skaters, and during the summer as the field house for a major league baseball team, the precursors of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Eventually, in the late 1890’s it was buried.

During the Battle of Brooklyn, Long Island, on August 27, 1776, the sturdy house and its strategic position at a cross-roads made it the focus of the most dramatic event of the day. Taken in the morning by an estimated two thousand British soldiers, it blocked the retreat of the out-manned American army in the field. Turning against the stronghold, some four hundred soldiers from Maryland and Delaware, led by General William Alexander, Lord Stirling, attacked it five times and regained the house twice, but were finally repulsed. Watching from Brooklyn Heights, General George Washington and 8000 troops were heartened by the valor they witnessed, and it hardened their resolve to fight on. The unit lost 256 men, a significant part of the over 1000 American casualties that day.