Union Church of Pocantico Hills is a historic church located at 555-559 Bedford Road in Pocantico Hills, New York

Pocantico Hills, New York

Pocantico Hills is a hamlet in the town of Mount Pleasant, New York, northeast of the village of Sleepy Hollow and southwest of the village of Pleasantville. The area was originally settled by native Americans of the Wecquaesgeek tribes; "Pocantico" means "running between two hills," and the name...

. The church was built by John D. Rockefeller, Jr.

John D. Rockefeller, Jr.

John Davison Rockefeller, Jr. was a major philanthropist and a pivotal member of the prominent Rockefeller family. He was the sole son among the five children of businessman and Standard Oil industrialist John D. Rockefeller and the father of the five famous Rockefeller brothers...

 in 1921, as part of his plans to develop the town of Pocantico Hills, which was below his estate Kykuit

Kykuit

Kykuit , also known as John D. Rockefeller Estate, is a 40-room National Trust house in Westchester County, New York, built by the oil businessman, philanthropist and founder of the prominent Rockefeller family, John D. Rockefeller, and his son, John D...

. Upon the death of Rockefeller's wife Abby Aldrich Rockefeller

Abby Aldrich Rockefeller

Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, , was a prominent socialite and philanthropist and the second-generation matriarch of the renowned Rockefeller family...

 in 1948, their son Nelson Rockefeller

Nelson Rockefeller

Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller was the 41st Vice President of the United States , serving under President Gerald Ford, and the 49th Governor of New York , as well as serving the Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower administrations in a variety of positions...

 had Henri Matisse

Henri Matisse

Henri Matisse was a French artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter...

 design the church's rose window in honor of her memory shortly before the artist's own death in 1954. When John D. Rockefeller, Jr. died in 1960, his children had artist Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall Art critic Robert Hughes referred to Chagall as "the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century."According to art historian Michael J...

 design a Good Samaritan window in his honor. It is a one story neo-Gothic

Gothic Revival architecture

The Gothic Revival is an architectural movement that began in the 1740s in England...

 style building with fieldstone

Fieldstone

Fieldstone is a building construction material. Strictly speaking, it is stone collected from the surface of fields where it occurs naturally...

 foundation and walls and a slate

Slate

Slate is a fine-grained, foliated, homogeneous metamorphic rock derived from an original shale-type sedimentary rock composed of clay or volcanic ash through low-grade regional metamorphism. The result is a foliated rock in which the foliation may not correspond to the original sedimentary layering...

 covered, highly pitched gable roof. In 1930-1931, a parish hall was added to the east end of the church.

On May 6, 2006, the church was listed in the National Register of Historic Places

National Register of Historic Places

The National Register of Historic Places is the United States government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects deemed worthy of preservation...

.