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.
When we remember how tenaciously the English settlers clung to tradition in selecting the materials for their houses, those in New England holding by the timber tradition while the stone and brick tradition prevailed in the Middle Colonies and the South, one might expect to find among the Dutch colonists the same adherence to Dutch traditions in the case of materials, especially as the early Dutch houses so closely followed their prototypes in Holland. In this respect, however, the Dutchman made a virtue of necessity and quickly learned to be governed by expediency, using with good effect whatever materials the locality most readily provided. Although brick was in most cases the hereditary material which Dutchmen might have been expected to prefer, with natural thrift and common sense they used stone when bricks were not to be had, or wood when they could not get stone. Thus, for instance, we find the early Dutch houses of the Hudson Valley built of stone. Those in northern New Jersey were likewise built of stone of different colour and character from that found in the Hudson region. Again, in Long Island, where stone was not available, they built of wood and covered their houses with shingles, often leaving as much as fourteen inches to the weather. Dutch quickness in utilising readily available material is also seen in the willingness to use field stone for walls, while the New Englander, despite the abundance of the same material, merely used it for the divisions between his fields.
Furthermore, the Dutchman did not restrict himself to any one material for the whole fabric of his house. He was not in the least averse to using a variety of materials in the same building and this he often did with excellent effect. It is no unusual thing to find two or three materials used for several parts of the same small building, and it is not a hard matter to find instances in which stone, brick, stucco, clapboards and shingles all occur in the one structure and the result is usually felicitous, possibly, perhaps, because of the naïveté with which the several materials are employed, necessity and common sense being obviously the causes dictating their presence.
The stone used was sometimes carefully squared and dressed and, at others, the walls were of rubble construction without any attempt at careful arrangement. Occasionally the front of the house would be of dressed stone laid in orderly courses while the sides and back showed rubble walls. Then, again, where circumstances permitted, brick quoins and window and door trims, as in the Manor House at Croton-on-Hudson, might be used while the body of the walls was rubble. In this connexion it should be stated that the walls were carefully laid so that the stonework would hold together without much dependence being placed on the mortar, for the earliest mortar was of rather poor quality. In this respect the masonwork approached the ideal of a good wall construction.
When stucco was used it was generally plastered over a rough stone surface and whitewashed or washed with some colour. When this stucco is removed it will often be found that the wall underneath is of admirable rubble construction and that the stucco coating was apparently added as a ground work for white or coloured wash. Some years ago, the stucco coat was removed from the walls of the Manor House at Croton-on-Hudson, and the stone walls beneath presented a far more interesting surface than the plaster, which seems to have been added at a date considerably subsequent to that of original construction.
An examination in detail of the characteristics of the earliest Dutch houses discloses the following features of importance. As previously stated, almost all the houses were low, the eaves coming down to within a few feet of the tops
ACKERMAN (BRINCKERHOFF) HOUSE, HACKENSACK, N. J. 1704.
Local adaptations have begun to develop.