CHARACTERISTIC OLD DUTCH HOUSE, KINGSTON-ON-HUDSON, N. Y.
select a striking concrete example—discloses the style in its earliest form. Although Hurley was not settled until about 1660, the houses erected there showed practically no departure from the styles with which the settlers were familiar in Holland before their emigration. To show their absolute fidelity to the traditional type of Dutch house, we may refer to the amazement created in the mind of a Dutch diplomat who, when taken to visit Hurley two or three years ago, declared that it was more Dutch than almost anything left in Holland. Ever since its foundation, Hurley has slumbered peacefully on, disturbed only at times by Indian raids and the alarums of war. Physically it has changed scarcely at all since the founders settled on the rich lands by the Esopus. It is one of the backwaters of our civilisation that has preserved intact the exterior aspect and much of the inward character of the date of its settlement. The lapse of time has wrought little change in its fabric and the swirling eddies of feverish American progress have raced past it, heedless of its presence, so that it has preserved for us a refreshing bit of the days and ways of the New Netherlands of Peter Stuyvesant and his sturdy colleagues.
Old Hurley is just as Dutch as Dutch can be; Dutch in its people, Dutch in its houses, Dutch in its looks, Dutch in everything but name, and that was Dutch for the first few years of its history when it was known as Nieuw Dorp, that is, New Village. To understand, therefore, the mode of life and the comfortable, easy-going informality with which the architectural style fitted in, we cannot do better than take a brief survey of this picturesque community.
Hurley cheeses and Kingston refugees have given Hurley most of its renown in the outside world. So plentiful and so famous, at one time, were the former, that Hurley was popularly credited with having “cheese mines.” The following old Dutch jingle, done into English by a local antiquary, tells of plenty at Hurley, not only of cheese but of many other kinds of foodstuffs as well:
What shall we with the wheat bread do?
Eat it with the cheese from Hurley.
What shall we with the pancakes do?
Dip them in the syrup of Hurley.
What shall we with the cornmeal do
That comes from round about Hurley?
Johnnycake bake, both sweet and brown,
With green cream cheese from Hurley.
Does not this reflect the reign of peace, plenty and contentment? The old Dutch, indeed, is truly realistic as the question comes “Wat zullen wij met die pannekoeken doen?”, and at the answer, “Doop het met die stroop van Horley,” one involuntarily licks his chops over the dripping sweetness of “die stroop.” The very mention of cheese and cheese making brings to the mind visions of fat farming country with sleek kine feeding, knee-deep in pastures of heavy-matted clover, from whose blossoms the bees are distilling their next winter’s store. Such a mental picture for Hurley town is not far amiss. Lying in comfortable contentment in the rich bottoms along the banks of the Esopus, its horizons both near and far bounded by the Catskills and their foot-hills, it approaches the ideal of bucolic felicity, and one freely admits that “Nieuw Dorp exists a pastoral or else Nieuw Dorp is not.”
Comfort, solid comfort, is the keynote of Hurley, indoors and out. Its houses, built along the one village street, their farm lands stretching back beyond them, have an aspect of substantial prosperity and cheer. Long, low buildings they are, with thick stone walls, whose roofs jutting just above the windows of the first floor, begin their climb to the ridge pole, enclosing with their shingled sides great, roomy garrets that seem like very Noah’s arks, with everything under the sun stowed away in their recesses. Such portion of this second floor as the old Dutchmen saw fit to spare from storage purposes, they made into chambers for their families, and pierced the roof slope with tiny dormers. Oftentimes, however, the only light came in at the gable ends, through windows on each side of the massive chimneys. It was not at all unusual to give over the whole upper floor to the storage of grain and other food supplies, while the family lived altogether below on the ground floor. The cellars were not one whit behind the garrets in holding supplies. The people of New Netherland were valiant trenchermen before whose eyes the pleasures of the table loomed large, and they used up an amazing lot of victuals. Such overflowing store of potatoes and carrots, turnips, pumpkins and apples as went into those cavernous bins! Rolliches and headcheeses were there a-many, with sausages, scrapple, pickles and preserves, to say nothing of barrels of cyder. These all contributed their share to the odour of plenty that rose up through the chinks and pervaded the rooms above. Only those who have met them face to face, in all their substantial corporeality, can realise the indescribable cellar smells of old Dutch farmhouses. Everywhere economy of space was practised, and things were tucked away in all sorts of odd corners. Some of the bedchambers were scarcely as large as a steamer stateroom, and these ofttimes had little pantry closets beside the bed—a truly convenient arrangement for those disposed to midnight pantry raids. Tradition says that the good people of Hurley even took their cheeses to bed with them that the heat of their bodies might help to ripen them.
Hurley’s gardens were, and are, a source of genuine delight. They are charmingly inconsequent and unconventional. There is not a jot of plan or pretence about them. Hurley vegetables grow side by side with gentle flowers in a most democratic promiscuity. Cabbages and cucumbers rub elbows with roses and lilies. Plebeian sunflowers and four-o’clocks stand unabashed beside patrician boxwood and blooms of high degree, while onions and lavender, in sweet accord, send their roots into the common ground within a foot of each other. The Dutch gardens, if not grand, are, at least, comfortable and useful, and have an air of sociability about them that puts one immediately at ease.
What the people were in Holland, that were they in New Netherland, and what they were elsewhere in New Netherland, that were they in Hurley only, perhaps, somewhat more conservative and tenacious of old customs and ideas, as is apt to be the case in places remote from the active scene of events. The Dutch of the Hudson were not the slow, stupid, fat-witted louts that Washington Irving and his copyists pourtray, although, to us of English blood, many of their ways seem strange, and some amusing. They were broad-minded, alert, wholesome, human people who took life pleasantly and got whole-souled enjoyment in their frequent festivals. They were incapable of stiff formality, and the architecture of their houses was exactly suited to their mode of life.