Mill Neck Manor

Lillian Sefton Dodge, president of the cosmetics company Harriet Hubbard Ayer, and her husband, Robert Leftwich Dodge, built this country house at Mill Neck in the 1920s and called it Sefton Manor. In 1923 they hired the architectural firm Clinton & Russell, Wells, Holton & George; the National Register record gives the architect as Clinton & Russell. Charles Leavitt designed the landscape. The two-story Tudor Revival house is faced in rusticated Westchester granite with limestone trim. The owners describe it as a 34-room mansion with 16 bathrooms plus guest and service rooms, and they say it cost more than $2 million to build. Its solid oak front doorway is reported to be 400 to 500 years old and carries iron hardware by Samuel Yellin. The estate's farm buildings were built in 1929.

In 1949 Lutheran Friends of the Deaf, an organization founded by Lutheran pastors, bought Sefton Manor and all 86 acres from Lillian Sefton Dodge for $216,000, intending to open a school in the house. About 3,500 people attended the dedication of the renamed Mill Neck Manor on September 23, 1951, and the Mill Neck Manor School for the Deaf opened on September 26 with 19 students. Enrollment reached 40 within three years. The farm buildings became classrooms in 1957, the John of Beverley Chapel was dedicated inside the manor in 1958, and a library opened on the third floor in 1962.

The house served first as a residential school for deaf students and then as a day elementary school until 2001, when a new Deaf Education Center opened on the grounds. After years of standing largely empty and serving other purposes, the manor began opening to the public for monthly tours in 2011, and an ongoing program of restoration and preservation began in 2016. The estate had been listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979 as the Lillian Sefton Dodge Estate.

Today the manor is owned by Lutheran Friends of the Deaf, the founding organization of the Mill Neck Family of Organizations. It hosts fundraising events, private events, photography and film and television work, and the proceeds support Mill Neck's programs and the care of the house and grounds. Guided tours are offered periodically by appointment. When the tours page was checked in October 2026 it listed no scheduled tours and invited visitors to join a mailing list for future dates.