Six on History: New York
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"In 2017 the Hillsdale Historians wrote about Hudson River School artist John Bunyan Bristol (1826-1909) and we included an image of his Hillsdale birthplace. The 1900 postcard shows a rundown farmhouse on Old Town Road, boarded up and covered with vines. It is a sad image of disuse and disrepair and made us wonder, why put a dwelling in such bad shape on a postcard?
The Bristol House on Old Town Road as it appeared in 1900.
It’s 2021 and today we’re writing about that same house, but for an entirely different reason. In the process of renovating the building the owners made a startling discovery: the house turns out to be a Dutch structure dating to 1760. To the best of our knowledge, it is the oldest house in Hillsdale.
Historic Preservationist Michael Rebic of Austerlitz was certain of it the moment he crossed the threshold. “The owner asked me to take a look at a deteriorating building on the property. We assumed it was a 19th century tenant building. It was in really bad shape — there was even a tree growing through the front porch! We walked carefully across the rotting porch floorboards, opened the door, and I immediately said, ‘This is a Dutch house.’ Structurally, it had the bones of a Dutch house. You can’t change the bones. Where I live, in Austerlitz, most of the settlers were English, but it was clear to me the house was not built by an English carpenter. As a historic preservationist, I knew right away it was one of the rare Dutch houses in eastern Columbia County.”
Dutch colonists started buying land as early as 1649 along the eastern bank of the Hudson River, where the soil was fertile and river access provided an avenue for commerce with New York City, but they found the hilly terrain and rocky soil of Columbia County’s eastern edge much less attractive.
We can’t be sure that the little house was built by a Dutch craftsman, but we can be sure that it follows Dutch building styles. Hillsdale was a transitional area in the mid-18th century, a jumble of national origins and cultures. English Yankees from Connecticut and Massachusetts, priced out of farmland in those colonies, crossed the Berkshire Mountains to settle in the untamed hill towns straddling the MA/NY border and brought with them English building styles.
In 1710, German refugees from the economically and politically unstable Palatine area arrived in southern Columbia County indentured to work at Livingston Manor “camps” manufacturing naval stores (e.g., pitch, resin, and turpentine) for the British Navy. The project failed almost immediately, and the camps were broken up. The Palatines spread throughout the Hudson and Mohawk River Valleys. Some of them became tenant farmers, leasing land from the Van Rensselaers and Livingstons and building homes in the Dutch manner, although on a more modest scale.
The house’s deed history can be traced back only as far as 1822, when Andrew A. and Elizabeth Sharts sold their farm to David Wheeler, a miller, of Amenia. The Sharts descended from Palatine families arriving in East Camp (today’s Germantown) in 1710. They were part of an enclave of Palatine families, many of them with the Sharts surname, that settled in Hillsdale by the mid-1700s. (Source: Neil Larson, Hudson Mohawk Vernacular Architecture) Whippoorwill Road was previously named Sharts Street, and it appears as such on maps as recent as 1958.
Rebic’s ability to identify the house as Dutch was helped by the house’s interior renovation, which had stripped all 20th century alterations down to its wall framing. “If you look at the structural beams, they are about four feet apart,” he said. “In an English house, all the structural columns would have been on the corners. In the Netherlands, because the ground was so boggy, they had to distribute the weight of the house evenly or the house could sink. And even though this area doesn’t have the same boggy ground, those building techniques persisted in the New World with the Dutch builders.”
Dutch Vernacular Architecture in North America 1640-1830 (The Society for the Preservation of Hudson Valley Vernacular Architecture, 2005)
Dutch Colonial Homes in America (Rizzoli, 2002)
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© 2021 Chris Atkins and Lauren Letellier
“Aetna has long acknowledged that for several years shortly after its founding in 1853 that the company may have insured the lives of slaves,” Aetna spokesman Fred Laberge said Thursday. “We express our deep regret over any participation at all in this deplorable practice.”
Aetna’s public apology was prompted by an inquiry from Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, who contacted the Hartford, Conn.-based company this year to seek an apology and reparations. Farmer-Paellmann, whom Aetna described as a New York attorney, could not be reached for comment.
Aetna, which noted that the slave policies were legal before slavery was abolished, said it plans to make no reparations. ... "
https://www.newyorkalmanack.com/2021/07/how-new-yorks-suburbs-got-so-segregated/
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"New Yorkers have a different notion of the Bronx than most outsiders. They know it as being the only borough that is part of the American mainland, and that it is pastoral as well as urban. It got its name from the Swedish immigrant Jonas Bronck who settled a farm on Wappinger tribe land leased from the Dutch West India Company in 1639, shortly before he died.
The Bronx went from being a massive chunk of southern Westchester filled with estates and mansions to becoming a destination for waves of European immigrants in search of affordable housing and a fresh start. Those waves gathered and broke at the very beginning of the 20th century and then peaked dramatically after the First World War.
By 1901 my family, Irish on both sides, had settled in the Highbridge section of the Bronx. I spent the first 15 years of my life there. In the grim classrooms of the Irish Catholic schools I attended, you could count the number of Hispanic and African American students on one hand. I was immersed in a world of Irish and Jewish residents plus a smattering of Italian, German, Polish and Swedish families. Like Huck Finn, I lit out for the territories as soon as I could and never returned. I also learned Spanish and have spent most of the rest of my life living in another language, far from the monolingual lace curtains of my Highbridge roots.
The Bronx has a compelling and difficult history. In the South Bronx during the troubled and often violent 1960s and 70s, many descendants of those European immigrants, who by then constituted a solid middle class, abandoned ship and were replaced largely by Hispanic and African American residents who have defined much of the borough’s culture since then. Despite periods of turmoil and poverty—and despite Robert Moses and his gruesome Cross-Bronx Expressway, which decimated the urban fabric of the area—the Bronx is an adaptable survivor and has preserved its resilient character while enjoying a new glow and relative prosperity. Throughout my childhood my father was a congressman (Democrat) from the Bronx; now, we are lucky enough to have AOC.
Some years ago when I was living in Paris, a dream brought me back to Highbridge, a nightmare that haunted me for days. As I set out to trace the clues it left, it led to the discovery of a crime that took place in my grandparents’ time. A young Swedish girl was found murdered in the basement of a row house on Ogden Avenue. Through further research, including a lengthy trial document, I discovered that one of the witnesses testifying was a relative of mine; another was the father of a close family friend. The building where the girl was found and where she lived with her family was the same one where my father had lived with his brothers and my grandparents. My father and the girl were born months apart and surely knew each other. As a boy, I spent many nights sleeping there as well.
I had no recollection of anyone ever mentioning this tragedy, and yet the nightmare pointed to some childhood knowledge of it. An adult intuition made me suspect it had been hushed up. All of my family members who might have been able to shed some light had passed away. As I pored over the riveting transcript of the trial and studied other sources, it seemed clear to me that the wrong man had been prosecuted and executed. The municipal authorities had needed a fall guy.
I needed to tell this story as I saw and imagined it. This deep dive into the past became the inspiration for my novel April in Paris. Selections from the transcript are included verbatim, but names and dates have been altered and most of the story, including a contemporary romance, is pure fiction.
