HVVA
NEWSLETTER, July 1999 Sunday, June 6, 1999 with Todd and Roger Scheff in Columbia and Dutchess Counties we visited five Dutch barns and one 1766 Dutch brick house. 1.
_/Linder/Whitney (Rhi-7) 4-bay Dutch barn with balloon
frame. The remains of this The frame is amazingly light with 4x6-inch columns and 4x9 1/2inch anchorbeams. There are no braces on the H-bents. All the beams are sawn. There are no mortise and tenon joints with pegs. The anchorbeams are joined with nailed half-lap joints and the purlin braces are toe-nailed. The frame is certainly an experiment in what is known as "balloon framing," a system that replaced timber framing by taking advantage of more efficient saw mills and cheaper wire nails.
Despite its modern frame construction the barn continued to function
as a traditional 2. _/Whitney (Rhi-16) 4-bay scribe-rule Dutch U-barn. This farm was on the Beekman Patent. The barn has a scribe-rule frame with race- knife lines and circles for marriage marks. Lines cut across the joints. There is an inscription near the center of an internal anchorbeam. It contains initials, perhaps of the owner and builder, and the numerals "81." The eight is cut with two race knife circles. This seems to indicate a 1781 construction. The anchorbeam tenons extend but are not wedged. 3. _/Nieman (Rhi-17) 4-bay Dutch barn. The present owner is restoring the house and outbuildings with metal roofs and structural repairs. The Dutch barn is made of the parts of several scribe rule frames. Some anchorbeams have three pegs. All anchorbeam tenons extend but only one wedge could be found. There are parts of longitudinal struts with holes for a stake-wall reused as studs in the front end-wall and there is one stake-wall strut in place on the cow side. Today we find plank walls separating the cows from the threshing floor in Dutch barns but originally the cows were separated by a stake wall and there were no stanchions.
Evidence indicates the frame is square-rule dating after 1815. There are chisel marriage marks on the scissor purlin-braces. The anchorbeam tenons do not extend and the purlin-braces are not pegged. There is a profuse use of braces and they are all sawn. All of the side-wall-posts are sawn and the in between studs are poles. There is an 1888 date on the end-wall but this must date the reconstruction in which a new roof was built and the aisle in three bays on the horse side was extended out about 3-feet. This last alteration is rare. Normally when deeper horse-stalls were needed or desired the manger was moved into the nave. Another rare feature of the barn is the 20 foot bay with interior posts that created a 12-foot nave flanked by 3 1/2-foot high mowstead-walls. This created a very Anglo-American system for hay storage while the other three bays kept their Dutch uses. Aside from two examples of Dutch barns in Vermont, according to Jan Lewandoski, this newly discovered barn in Craryville, township of Taghkanic, is perhaps the most eastern of the approximately 600 surviving Dutch barns in New York and New Jersey, taking the place of the 3-bay Hamm/Woods (PP-1) Dutch barn in Pine Plains. Perhaps because of their location on the fringe of Dutch-American culture, both of these barns show features that have been adopted from New England. The Woods barn makes extensive use of wedged dovetail tenons, a rarity in Dutch timber framing.
5.
Tishauser/Northrop (Cla-5) 4 bay Dutch barn. This
barn is "being used for a dairy 6. _/Sheldon (Cla-6) two-story center-hall brick house with gambrel roof and earlier stone wing. This brick house is dated 1766 and contains many original features. The house and 150 acres are for sale. Some notable features are the steep original ladder-stairs in the stone wing and the stairs and balustrade in the center-hall of the brick house. There is a wall of paneling that may have been moved when the fireplaces were replaced with stoves. Part of the paneling might be a wall-bed. There is evidence in the cellar that the original 1766 house had end-wall jambless fireplaces, one of which had later been converted to a jambed fireplace. This house makes an interesting comparison with the Wyncoop/Lonsbury house (Mar-13), a two-story stone house of a similar date in Marbletown, Ulster County, that is a more refined Georgian style, while the Sheldon house retains many traditional Dutch country features. It was evidently a house of the Rensselaer family. Friday, June 11, 1999 with Roger & Todd Scheff and John Stevens we met with Bill Reinhart and measured the 1727 Kiersted stone house (Sau-23) in Saugerties, Ulster County, NY. Roger found a fragment of leaded glass with attached iron guard-bar in a small compartment on the side of the parlor fireplace paneling and a piece of molding for an early door frame, with an original red stain finish, nailed to a cellar beam. All Dutch houses had leaded glass windows before 1740 but none remain in place and only a few fragments and evidence of their use survive. Vertically sliding sash windows with wood mullians, as we know them today, replaced the leaded windows that were casement or hinged sashes. Iron guard bars were necessary for support because the lead was soft. The Kiersted example was originally a six-pane window. The 2 x 5 inch glass panes differ from the 4 x 6 inch standard pane.
Saturday,
June 19,1999 about 13 people attended a meeting at the circa
1776 The Brush house was recently acquired by the local historical society, the Little Nine Partners, and was soon after damaged by an arson fire. This was especially sad because of the very original condition of the house. Work is now underway to restore it. There is an historic marker that says the house was built as a blockhouse in association with the Revolution but recent research by Neil Larson has uncovered a different story. It seems Graham came from Westchester County where the British had burned his house. He. came to this place of refuge and built a one-room log cabin without a cellar to which he soon added a center hall with stairs to the loft and another room with a fireplace, all of logs. The log addition was built over a cellar with an outside entrance. The simple lap joining of logs, without dovetails, relates its construction methods to the military garrisons being built at that time to house troops. Graham came to Pine Plains because his father had been one of the Little Nine Partners in the local land patent.
Bob Hedges gave a slide show and talked about local barns, some of
which no longer stand. About eight people took a tour of two Pine
Plains buildings. The Grange Hall (PP-6), now an antique store, was
visited. It has an exposed king-post truss rafter system. A small
side entrance barn (PP-7) of about 1840, presently owned by a veterinarian,
was visited. It has a five-sided ridge pole into which the hewn rafters
are joined and pegged. The square-rule frame is built with girts for
vertical siding and there is an abundance of bracing, both ascending
and descending and some short ones on the rafters. I have seen two
similar, highly structured frames of this type. One of a water-powered
saw mill in Palenville and the other at a water mill site in Gardner.
Alvin, Roger, Myself and John Stevens drove to Stuyvesant, Columbia County, and visited the Andries Witbeck (Stu-1) house visited. May 22, 1999 with Roger and Todd. This is an early 18th century two-room center-hailstone house It is undergoing restoration by its owner who has a good understanding of the evidence he is uncovering and of the building's many changes from a Medieval Survival into a Greek Revival with a few later touches of Victorian. The story-and-ahalf house originally had jambless fireplaces on its end-walls and its center hall had an encased stairway to the loft.
July 1999 Newsletter, part two Copyright © 2004. Hudson Valley Vernacular Architecture. All rights reserved. All items on the site are copyrighted. While we welcome you to use the information provided on this web site by copying it, or downloading it; this information is copyrighted and not to be reproduced for distribution, sale, or profit. |
