now the New York University medical school, came to Cold Spring in 1850 to serve as the surgeon at the West Point Foundry. His father-in-law, William Kemble, had been one of the founding members of the Foundry Association. At that time the foundry was the largest maker of iron and brass in the country. Located along the banks of a small cove where a small brook flowed into the Hudson River on the south side of the village, it made both military and civilian products, from cannon to the pipes that were laid to open the Croton Aqueduct and bring clean water to Manhattan. In 1852, the Foundry Association sold Lente the four-and-a-half-acre () parcel where the house and Grove Court now stand. He soon commissioned Richard Upjohn to design the house he wanted to live in. Upjohn, an English immigrant had made his reputation popularizing the Gothic Revival mode for stone churches such as New York's Trinity Church. But he had also pioneered the Italianate-styled house during the same period with the Edward King House, a National Historic Landmark in Newport, Rhode Island. Closer to Cold Spring, he built the James and Mary Forsyth House up the Hudson in Kingston in 1850. This was the type of house that Lente wanted, and he had specifics. His correspondence with Upjohn reflects his desire for features like the French windows on the west that slide into their casement. At one point he tells the architect that the upper floor's bedroom was "unnecessarily large" and should be reduced by a foot (30 cm). The finished house is typical of Upjohn's Italian villas from that period. Its plan is basically rectangular, and it is built of masonry faced in painted brick, with arched windows set with multi-pane sash. The northwest wing is found on his other houses in the Hudson Valley, not only the Forsyth House but former President Martin van Buren's Lindenwald near Kinderhook. Lente made the house his principal residence for the rest of his life. Before his death in 1883, he published many papers in medical journals. He was a member of many professional societies, and helped found the American Academy of Medicine, an early organization devoted to raising educational standards in the profession. During the 1870s, it is believed, he made a major alteration in the house. Sometime during that decade, the original hipped roof in Upjohn's design was