Winyah Park (later known as Lathers Hill) was the 300-acre country estate of Colonel Richard Lathers, located in the village of New Rochelle, Westchester County, New York, upon which a number of 19th-century Gothic villas and cottages designed by Alexander Jackson Davis were built. It was in 1848, after a brief but successful business career in New York, that, attracted by the accessibility and the natural environment of New Rochelle, Colonel Richard Lathers purchased a large country estate and farm along the New Rochelle and Pelham border. Three years later, in 1851, Lathers employed his personal friend and renowned architect Alexander Jackson Davis to design him a more seemly and dignified residence than the old farmhouse which existed.[1] Revolutionizing the traditional single-house form that dominated colonial and early 19th-century domestic architecture, Davis was creating many of the country's finest villas and cottages in an entirely new, purely American style. The residence designed for Lathers was the landmark brick and marble Italian villa "Winyah", named for Lathers former estate in Winyah Parish, South Carolina.[2]