By LORNA CHEROT LITTLEWAY
THE HUDSON AREA Library co-hosted, with the African American Archives of Columbia County (AAACC), the program “If This Old House Could Talk” about the Van Hoeson-Marriott House, located on US 66 north of Hudson, Sunday, March 9.
The featured speakers were Ed Klingler, a restoration carpenter and president of the Van Hoesen House Historical Foundation (VHHHF), who also serves as site manager; Historian Fergus Bordewich, author of nine non-fiction books including “Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America”; and AAACC’s executive director and deputy, Victoria Jimpson-Fludd and Lisa Fludd-Smith respectively. They spoke to an overflow audience.
From 1626, when 11 captive Africans arrived on a Dutch West India Company ship in New Amsterdam harbor, to the early 20th century, Columbia County had a significant Black population. According to Bordewich, “Free Blacks lived in quasi segregated communities” while the enslaved lived in the homes of their owners. Bordewich said that houses built after 1767 with “evidence of kitchens in the basement” probably housed enslaved persons and added, “root cellars served as prisons.”
Klingler, who owns a restoration company, opened the program and showed slides of the Van Hoesen House exterior and interior. The relic, located on US 66 outside of Hudson, was built circa 1740 by Jan Van Hoesen, a Dutch mariner. According to the VHHHF website, the house is sited “on a high rise of land above broad fertile creek flats and conforms to a pattern of situating houses between 1715 and 1750. The Van Hoesen House was one of the grandest built…” The property was abandoned in the 1960s and has been dubbed the “Old House.”
The building is a rare example of Dutch vernacular architecture. (Another example is the Luykas van Alen House in Kinderhook.) Vernacular architecture is a style of design based on local needs, availability of local construction materials and reflects local traditions. It relied on the skills of local builders rather than formally-schooled architects.
A metal roof added in the late 1800s and its original brick walls have protected the exterior but neglected mortar joints and footings appear to have reduced interior spaces to rubble. The website states “large homes were made with brick facades built around a timber frame set atop a fieldstone foundation, a style unique to New Netherland.” Other characteristics are a “steeply pitched roof, parapet walls, abundant doorways and light-giving windows,” which were valued by Dutch residents in the upper Hudson Valley.
The Van Hoesen House was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in August 1979. Over its 285-year history the house has had only five owners. The latest is the Cook family, who developed the grounds into what is now the Dutch Village Trailer Park. According to Klingler, the VHHHF has come to an understanding to purchase the house for surveying and transfer costs of $30K, a price Klingler called “a steal.” (The AAACC will host a virtual fundraiser on April 6 towards that goal.)
Klingler has dedicated at least a decade of his life to caring for the Van Hoesen House. Of his commitment to it, Klingler said, “This is how I give back to society.”
Historian Bordewich called the Van Hoesen-Marriott House “very special,” “really significant,” “of national significance” and deserving to be “much better known.” He added, “People should be coming to see this house.” In its current state the house “is sad and neglected.”
Bordewich called New York the largest slave-holding state in the North with significant enslaved populations in “Queens and southern Long Island.” When the issue of enfranchising African Americans came before NY voters, 90% of the Hudson Valley electorate voted against it.
Bordewich described the eastern Hudson River Valley as a south-north “vertical artery of the Underground Railroad (URR)” about which “surprisingly little” is known compared to the Pennsylvania west-east corridor. For what is known about the Hudson Valley overland corridor, Bordewich credits Charles Marriott, a Quaker Abolitionist and gentlemen farmer, who acquired the Van Hoesen house in 1800 and used it as a shelter for enslaved escapees up to his death in 1843. Marriott, a proponent of “moral radicalism” who thought slavery should be abolished, kept a diary of his activities and corresponded with New England Quaker Abolitionists in Vermont, Connecticut and Rhode Island.
Bordewich described the URR movement as a “human rights” one that “required you personally do something” and “risk your own safety.” He called the Quakers “instrumental” in the early stages of the URR, which he identified as the “first political movement of civil disobedience” as it was “always against the law to aid runaways.”
1850 marked an intensification of risk when the federal government became involved in enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law. He noted, “Most people will not break the law but will conceal those who did.” Bordewich also credited lawyers who defended runaways saying, “Without lawyers the Underground Railroad would not work.”
Bordewich stressed that the Underground Railroad was not a centralized organization with a physical headquarters. It was a localized movement of “extraordinary people – white and Black — who collaborated beyond imagination and made it happen.” They were individuals within communities providing shelter to “mostly people looking for a safe space” more than seeking freedom in far off Canada. Anyone “walking from New York City to Vermont” likely would spend the night “under a Quaker house or in a barn.”
From 1810 to 1830s, the first freedom seekers came from New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. When travel was expedited by steamboats (1807) and railroads – “the high tech of its era” (1848) — freedom seekers’ states of origination expanded to include the border states of Maryland, Virginia and Kentucky. Often the steamboats were manned primarily by African American sailors and crew. According to Bordewich some of the enslaved remained in bondage in order to facilitate their URR work.
Bordewich posed the question, “How busy was the Hudson Valley corridor?” Over 40 years 2,700 people used it; and from 1830 to 1860 nationwide, 100,000 out of 4 million enslaved found safety and freedom via the URR.
Bordewich stressed that the URR is not about “stations, houses and buildings”; it’s about “personal relationships.” Escapees told their stories, individually, to those who helped them and spoke publicly at town halls. According to Bordewich those interactions were “effective to turn Northern whites against slavery.” He, also credited the URR with giving African Americans their first experience of political organization adding that many Blacks “financed and managed” the URR.
On a contemporary note Bordewich ended his remarks saying, “We need to know this history. Not scrub it away.”
For more information visit the websites www.afamarchivecc.org and janvanhoesenhouse.org.
