Colonial days in old New York

by Alice Morse Earle

Occasionally a little flash of gossiping brightness shows us a picture of the every-day life of the times in the capital town. Such a bit of eighteenth-century scandal is the amusing account, from Mrs. Janet Montgomery’s unpublished Memoirs, of Lady Cornbury, wife of the Governor, Lord Cornbury. She died in New York in 1706, much eulogized, and most ostentatiously mourned for by her husband. Mrs. Montgomery’s account of her is this:—

“The lady of this very just nobleman was equally a character. He had fallen in love with her ear, which was very beautiful. The ear ceased to please and he treated her with neglect. Her pin-money was withheld and she had no resource but begging and stealing. She borrowed gowns and coats and never returned them. As hers was the only carriage in the city, the rolling of the wheels was easily distinguished, and then the cry in the house was ‘There comes my lady; hide this, hide that, take that away.’ Whatever she admired in her visit she was sure to send for next day. She had a fancy to have with her eight or ten young ladies, and make them do her sewing work, for who could refuse their daughters to my lady.”

What a picture of the times! the fashionable though impecunious Englishwoman and the score of industrious young Dutch-American seamstresses sitting daily and most unwillingly in the Governor’s parlor.

One of the most grotesque episodes in New York political history, or indeed in the life of any public official, was the extraordinary notion of this same Governor, Lord Cornbury, to dress in women’s clothes. Lord Stanhope and Agnes Strickland both assert that when Cornbury was appointed Governor and told he was to represent her Majesty Queen Anne, he fancied he must dress as a woman. Other authorities attribute his absurd masquerade to his fond belief that in that garb he resembled the Queen, who was his cousin. Mrs. Montgomery said it was in consequence of a vow, and that in a hoop and head-dress and with fan in hand he was frequently seen in the evening on the ramparts. A portrait of him owned by Lord Hampton shows him in the woman’s dress of the period, fan in hand. Truly it was, as Lewis Morris wrote of him to the Secretary of State, “a peculiar and detestable magot,” and one which must have been most odious and trying to honest, manly New Yorkers, and especially demoralizing to the soldiers before whom he paraded in petticoats. When summarily deposed by his cousin from his governorship, he was promptly thrust into a New York debtor’s prison, where he languished till the death of his father made him third Earl of Clarendon.

CHAPTER V
DUTCH TOWN HOMES

The first log houses of the settlers, with their “reeden roofs,” were soon supplanted by a more substantial form of edifice, Dutch, naturally, in outline. They were set with the gable-end to the street and were often built of Dutch brick, or, at any rate, the gable-ends were of brick.

Madam Knights’ description of the city of New York and the houses is wonderfully clear, as is every account from her graphic pen, but very short:—

“The Buildings are Brick Generaly, very stately and high though not altogether like ours in Boston. The Bricks in some of the Houses are of divers Coullers and laid in Checkers, being glazed, look very agreable. The inside of them is neat to admiration; the wooden work, for only the walls are plaster’d, and the Sumers and Gist are planed and kept very white scour’d as so is all the partitions if made of Bords.”

Albany long preserved its Dutch appearance and Dutch houses. Peter Kalm’s description of the city of Albany is a good one, and would well answer for other New York towns:—

“The houses in this town are very neat, and partly built with stones covered with shingles of the White Pine. Some are slated with tiles from Holland, because the clay of this neighborhood is not reckoned fit for tiles. Most of the houses are built in the old way, with the gable-end towards the street; the gable-end of brick and all the other walls of planks. The gutters on the roofs reach almost to the middle of the street. This preserves the walls from being damaged by the rain, but it is extremely disagreeable in rainy weather for the people in the streets, there being hardly any means of avoiding the water from the gutters.