Tag: Exploring Kinderhook NY

Columbia County Historical Society 5 Albany Avenue Kinderhook, NY 12106

Columbia County Historical Society

5 Albany Avenue

Kinderhook, NY 12106

(518) 758-9265

Columbia County Historical Society

Open: Sunday 11:00am-4:00pm/Monday-Friday Closed/Saturday 11:00am-4:00pm

My review on TripAdvisor:

https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g60899-d12000596-Reviews-Columbia_County_Historical_Society_Museum_Library-Kinderhook_New_York.html

The Columbia County Historical Society Museum

The main building of the Historical Society contains an exhibition on farming. It also contains the society’s library and genealogy center.

The James Vanderpoel House Museum

The afternoon I visited the society, the Vanderpoel House was the only building open but it was interesting to visit. I saw the early American portraits.

History of the House:

One of the finest examples of Federal architecture in Columbia County, the James Vanderpoel House was constructed circa 1819–1820 for prominent Kinderhook lawyer and judge James Vanderpoel.

Trimmed with marble and built with local brick, the side-gabled structure has two stories, five bays, and rests on a fieldstone foundation. Symmetry and graceful architectural details are found throughout the home. Purchased by the Columbia County Historical Society in 1925, the property is now preserved as an exhibition space showcasing paintings and decorative arts from the CCHS permanent collection and is home to the CCHS Museum Store & Bookshop (CCHS website).

There are two exhibitions going on right now:

New York Portraits from the permanent collection:

Columbia County’s painted portraiture legacy spans more than three centuries of historically significant or artistically important works by self-taught, naïve and itinerant painters, as well as important artists of the time, and including some of the earliest works in America.

In the Portraits of the Permanent Collection shows us how the middle to upper middle class in the early years before photography was created to be remembered. Portraits were the best way to show the families wealth and prestige in the community plus keep families legacies alive. Today many of these families descendants don’t know what to do with them. This is our benefit that we can enjoy these private works of art.

Portraits from the Permanent Collection sign

The Gallery

The Gallery

The New York portraits in the collection

The New York Portrait Collection exhibition

The Portrait Collection-Children’s Portrait

Part of the Portrait and Federal Style exhibitions

Early Hand Tools & Farm Implements: the permanent collection

In the main building, there is also a permanent collection of farming equipment and the development of family farms in New York State. It shows how the agricultural profession has changed from doing everything by hand when farms catered solely to the family to the commercial farms that developed after the Civil War that found new markets for their products. Automation grew the industry but its start with equipment shows how much the process really hasn’t changed that much. It is a very thought provoking exhibit on how industries progress.

The “Early Hand Tools & Farm Implements” exhibitions

The farming equipment galleries

The farming equipment galleries

The farm equipment at the turn of last century that has not changed much to today.

The new exhibition “Dirt Road Life: Images of Rural Community” again shows how life has progressed in this country.

The description of the exhibition and collection of the artwork:

(From the museum website):

In this exhibit an extensive collection of vintage photographs provided by CCHS and Red Rock Historical Society that document what life was like along these dirt roads a century ago are complemented and contrasted with local high school students’ photos of contemporary winter scenes along Chatham’s unpaved network of roads. The students’ photographs, curated by nationally celebrated photographer Paul Lange, are drawn from a body of work that is the brainchild of Ichabod Crane art teacher Sandy Dwileski. Dwileski saw an artistic opportunity—winter road scapes rich in subtle hues, shadow contrasts and complex compositions—and set about organizing an outing with her advanced photography class to follow the system of roads mapped by the Chatham Dirt Road Coalition and photograph the journey.

The new exhibition “Dirt Road Life: Images of Rural Community”

The gallery exhibition on “Dirt Road Life”

Pictures from the exhibition

Pictures from the exhibition

The next special exhibition at the museum was the “A Farm, a Family and a Legacy”:

(from the museum website)

Farms have been the heart of Columbia County’s economy and culture throughout its history. One of these was Birge Hill Farm, established in 1785 by Hosea Birge, a Revolutionary War veteran who settled in Chatham, N.Y., in the early years of the republic.

The write up on the exhibition

The deed to the original farm

Here and on other small farms, families and neighbors worked cheek by jowl to sustain their small, tightly woven communities, until vast changes in technology, industry and society forever altered their rural way of life.

The Birge Family artifacts in this interesting exhibition of family life on a multi generational farm

The farm is currently for sale

This exhibition presents highlights from the Birge Family Collection, donated to the Columbia County Historical Society by Hosea’s fourth great-grandson, Van Calhoun, and Van’s wife, Susan Senecah. The expansive collection comprises more than 200 objects, preserved by family members with remarkable foresight and care over eight generations. In their stories, we see the evolution of farm and family life in Columbia

The family heirloms

The current farmhouse of the family’s

The exhibition was interesting in that it must be hard for a family giving up a way of life and a home that has been in the family for 200 years. It was nice of the family to let us in and see their life in this exhibition.

Federal Style: Refinement, Grace and Symmetry:

America’s newly founded nation beamed with patriotism following its victory in the Revolutionary War. The original foundations of the United States government and culture immediately following its independence is known as the Federal Era (1780–1830).

George Washington and other American icons looked toward the Classical ages of Greece and Rome in forging an identity for the young American Republic through architecture, furniture, textiles, ceramics and works of art. Neoclassical designs and motifs are distinguished through simple lines, a satisfying balance of symmetry and overall elegance that signals strength and democracy. In celebrating 200 years of the James Vanderpoel House, we present its Federal architectural excellence along with diverse material culture representing characteristics of the Federal Style and era in Columbia County and America (CCHS website).

The other buildings that are part of the Society’s museum:

Signage at the Historical Houses

The Crane Schoolhouse

This authentic, circa-1850 one-room schoolhouse served as a public school for the Town of Kinderhook into the 1940s. It replaced an earlier “log cabin-style” single-room school where a man named Jesse Merwin served as school master. Merwin, who was a longtime friend of the writer Washington Irving, is said to have been the “pattern” for Irving’s character of Ichabod Crane in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

A “Legends & Lore” historic marker, awarded by the New York Folklore Society and William G. Pomeroy Foundation, stands a few yards from the school and commemorates this literary connection. Today, the Ichabod Crane Schoolhouse is a seasonal museum. See exhibitions, period school desks and other objects relating to one-room schoolhouse education in Columbia County.

During the 1950s and ’60s, it was saved from disrepair by a group of local women who retrofitted the space to function as an ad hoc community center. In 1952, former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt visited the schoolhouse to deliver a radio address praising “the work of women” and recognizing their efforts to preserve the historic school.

In 1974, the schoolhouse was moved 200 yards down the road to the Luykas Van Alen House site. That same decade, it was restored to its 1930s appearance. It remains an excellent and intact example of a rural, one-room schoolhouse with a gable roof, clapboard siding and a single pent-roofed entrance. The interior consists of a large classroom with two adjacent cloakrooms — one for boys and one for girls. The building was never modified to have heat or hot water and still retains its original 1929 wood-burning stove, wood flooring, chalkboards and double-hung sash windows(CCHS website).

Luykas Van Alen House

Built circa 1737 and designated a National Historic Landmark in 1967, the Luykas Van Alen house is recognized as one of the best examples of fewer than a dozen historically intact Dutch Colonial houses in the Hudson Valley.

Located on rural land once used by native Mohican peoples for hunting and seasonal camping, the house was the center of a prosperous farm and home to several generations of the Van Alen family. The last Van Alen descendant to live in the house, Maria Van Alen Herrick, died in 1935. The house was purchased in 1938 by William Van Alen, a descendant of Luykas’ brother, Johannes. In 1964, unable to undertake extensive restorations himself, William generously donated the house to Columbia County Historical Society (CCHS website).

The signage by the Van Alen House

Martin Van Buren National Historic Site-Lindenwald-Martin Van Buren Home 1013 Old Post Road Kinderhook, NY 12106

Martin Van Buren National Historic Site-Lindernwald-Martin Van Buren Home

1013 Old Post Road

Kinderhook, NY 12106

(518) 758-9689 x2040

Open: Sunday-Saturday 9:00am-4:30pm

Admission: See website

https://www.nps.gov/mava/index.htm

https://www.nps.gov/mava/planyourvisit/index.htm

My review on TripAdvisor:

https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g60899-d105846-Reviews-Martin_Van_Buren_National_Historic_Site-Kinderhook_New_York.html?m=19905

Lindenwald estate of Martin Van Buren at 1013 Old Post Road

During the beginning of the Halloween season, I decided to explore the Hudson River Valley mansions while the foliage was out. I had never been as high up as Kinderhook, NY before and I wanted to visit the Martin Van Buren National Historic Site. This was the estate Lindenwald-Martin Van Buren home.

President Martin Van Buren

https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/presidents/martin-van-buren/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Van_Buren

The tour is really informative and discusses our eighth President’s life in Upstate New York. I had not released that he was not born a wealthy man. He was a barkeeper’s son to Abraham Van Buren and his wife, Maria Hoes. His mother had been married before, so he had three half siblings and four other siblings growing up.

The Lindenwald Estate

He had worked his way through Law School and joined the local political scene of Upstate New York. From the what the tour guide told us; he was a self-made man. He had won the first election but not reelection. His further attempts at Presidency were not successful so after his time in Washington DC, he retired to his home in Kinderhook, NY and remained here until he died in 1862.

President Van Buren’s son’s and daughter in law’s bedroom. Abigal Van Buren’s portrait sits prominently in the bedroom.

When we took the tour, the tour guide said that the house had many other owners after the President’s death and that was the reason why there was not much left in the house. There is period furniture from the time he lived here but not from the President himself. There are a few pieces from the family that were donated later. They even replaced the wallpaper in the dining room that was from the original French company that manufactured it (it seems that they have records going back almost 400 years).

The original Dining Room wallpaper

The grounds are beautiful with the golden and orange leaves on the trees and what is left of the crops in the back fields. There is also the graves of Peter Van Ness and his wife, the original owners of the house.

Lindenwald’s Dining Room

The house is not far from downtown Kinderhook so take time to visit the town and the historic sites of the President. There is a lot to see.

Downtown Kinderhook, NY

History of the Martin Van Buren Home & of President Van Buren:

Kinderhook is most noteworthy for its native son. Martin Van Buren, the eighth President of the United States. Van Buren was born here in 1782 and began his road to the White House as a teenager campaigning for Thomas Jefferson in 1800. Van Buren held many positions in New York State government before becoming a United States senator. in 1821. He was elected President of the United States in 1837 after serving as Secretary of State (1829) and vice-president (1833-1837) in Andrew Jackson’s administration. Van Buren was one of only two men to serve as Vice-President, Secretary of State and President. The other was Thomas Jefferson.

President Van Buren’s office at Lindenwald

Van Buren was the first President to be born as an American citizen. Previous Presidents were born prior to the American Revolution. President Van Buren was an accomplished politician, but his Presidency was characterized by the economic hardship of the time-the Panic of 1837.

The Guest Bedroom

This banking crisis occurred only five weeks into Van Buren’s Presidency and tarnished his administration. Van Buren ran for reelection in 1844 and seemed to have a advantage for the nomination. However, his opposition to the annexation of Texas contributed to his defeat at the Democratic convention. The nomination eventually went to James Polk. As the question of extending slavery into the territory captured in the Mexican War became heightened, Van Buren broke with his party and ran for the Presidency as a candidate of the Free Soil Party in 1848. Following the campaign of 1848, Van Buren returned to his farm, Lindenwald, where he remained until his death in 1862 from bronchial asthma and heart failure at age seventy-nine.

(Lindenwald-Van Buren Home pamphlet)

Lindenwald House:

The house was built in 1797. The knocker on the old front door of this famous mansion bears the date 1797. This however refers to the building of the small and much less imposing building, which was the beginning of this Mansion and was erected by Peter Van Ness. There was still an earlier house on the place when Peter Van Ness bought it about 1780. The house of 1797 was greatly improved by Judge Van Ness, a son and still more improved and enlarged by Mr. Van Buren on his return from Washington when he named it ‘Lindenwald’.

The Lindenwald Parlor for the family

Many of the most distinguished men of the period of the Van Ness and Van Buren families entertained here, among whom were Henry Clay, Washington Irving and Samuel Tilden.

The Lindenwald Living Room

Lindenwald is situated about two miles south of Kinderhook on the Old Post Road from New York City to Albany and sits about 400 to 500 feet back from the road, surrounded by old fir and pine trees. Two separate driveways lead up to the house.

The Lindenwald Kitchen

The Lindenwald kitchen in preparation for dinner

The house is brick, painted yellow and seven windows wide. The main building had two stories and a large garret. Three chimneys rise above this main or front part of the house, two to the north and a wide one to the south. The middle of the front is pedimented and there is a dormer on each side of the gable, which in the bedroom story below has a large triple central window with a curved pedimental top and two windows on each side. The two windows on the south side are in the room where Van Buren died.

President Van Buren’s bedroom

Before the center of the main story is a small, covered portico with an easy flight of steps and balusters. To the left is the living room or double parlor to the right the sitting room and dining room.

The spiral staircase to the tower

The oblong house is four windows deep on the north side. A colonnade or arched porch separates it from a domestic building, mainly kitchen and laundry. This undoubtedly was the Peter Van Ness original home. The library was added in the rear of the south side by Mr. Van Buren and next to this he built a tower, like a donjon keep with an Italian summit, the openings few and slitted, the object, stateliness and the view.

The Breakfast Room

Beyond the front door is a fine straight hall. The four doors opening off of it are of early carpentry. At the rear, nearly concealed in the side of the hall under sort of an alcove is the stairway, wide and low and long stepped. The main feature of the hall, is the foreign wallpaper in large landscapes, representing hunters on horseback and with guns and dogs breaking into Rhenish vales, where milkmaids are surprised and invite flirtation, the human figures are nearly a foot high, the mountains and woods, rocks and streams, panoramic the colors dark and loud.