Luis Moises Gomez

Who was Luis Moises Gomez?

Luis Moises Gomez was a Sephardic Jewish merchant and trader, whose Spanish Jewish ancestors fled to France and England to escape from the Spanish Inquisition for the New World.

Gomez came to New York in 1703. In 1705 he was granted an Act of Denization from Queen Anne of England. This certificate gave him rights to conduct business, own property, and live freely within the Colonies without an oath of allegiance to the Church of England. Gomez established himself as a prominent businessman and leader within the early Jewish community in New York and in 1714 he purchased 6,900 acres in Marlboro on the west side of the Hudson River in the then-British colony of New York. There he built a single-story fieldstone block house now called the Gomez Mill House. For some thirty years he and his sons lived there and ran a profitable fur trading post. He quarried limestone and milled timber there for the City of New York, 60 miles south.

His house on the Hudson Highlands where several Indian trails converged served as a frontier trading post for the new colonists. Other pioneers, fleeing tyranny, and the cruelties in Europe for the promise of a new life, then settled in the Hudson Valley. His house has been continuously inhabited for more than 280 years, and it is the earliest known surviving Jewish residence in the country and the oldest home in Orange County listed on the National Register of Historic Places.