JEFFREY DANE - INTERLUDES

The Essays of Jeffrey Dane

The Old Dutch House

The existence and reputation of historic dwellings fostered the creation of a historical petri dish in which the culture of The Early American Home grew and flourished.

Those lucky enough to see the inside of an old Dutch house may be pilgrims as much as those who disembarked from the Mayflower at Plymouth in 1620. It's more an experience per se than just an interior view, especially since sad sequels show that fewer of these historic structures remain with each passing decade.

Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln never saw the District of Colombia monuments that bear their names. While the link between those men and their memorials is small, the Wyckoff-Bennett house at 1662 East 22nd Street in Brooklyn, New York, constitutes a much stronger and personal chain of events and people who took part in them. It's where those who preceded us were born, lived, and died - including the poet, artist, author, and lifelong resident of the house, Gertrude Ryder Bennett. She's no longer with us, but her home is.

Today we have another reason for thanks-giving. It's fortunate, even providential, that the Wyckoff-Bennett house, now with landmark status, is still with us - if not in its original position, it's effectively in the same configuration and close to its original form. Unlike so many early structures modified over the years to the point of unrecognizability, we see the house now essentially as it was then, with minimal alterations.

Those who fought for Texas independence in 1836 would probably recognize the Alamo now (despite some changes to the façade), but certainly not the view from it: from the front doors of the chapel, the structure which effectively defines the Alamo in photos, we see country clothing stores and Mexican restaurants. The Alamo defenders saw countryside and the Mexican army.

The original inhabitants of the Wyckoff-Bennett house and those who followed them would easily recognize it today, though certainly not the surroundings. Today the uncaring or uninformed might see the structure, relative to those surrounding it, as a large shack, and children see it as merely an old house. The author acknowledges he was one of those children.

"The most beautiful example of Dutch colonial architecture in Brooklyn" is how the Wyckoff-Bennett house is described by Maud Esther Dilliard in "Old Dutch Houses of Brooklyn" (Richard R. Smith Publishers, New York, 1945).

Obviously we can no longer have the experience of hearing Beethoven play his own music. We can, however, hear his music performed today on his own pianos, a blessing that corresponds in a very real and personal way to the very existence of the Wyckoff-Bennett house. As there is more to the Alamo, conceptually and circumstantially, than Travis, Bowie, and Crockett, there is more to an early American home, generally, and to the Wyckoff-Bennett structure specifically, than just an old house.

As people's faces change naturally with the passage of time, an 18th-century structure's façade, even if unaltered over the years, will still appear different to us: we're seeing it through 20th-century eyes. Surroundings, too, have a bearing on our interpretation, and the impact, of what we see. The author got to know a building (now part of an interpreters' college) in Germany in which Napoleon's troops were once quartered. Though the edifice was the same after a 20-year absence, it appeared different to the author because he saw it through eyes that had benefitted by the learning, background, maturity and perspective of the intervening two decades. The experience was, in a word, a revelation.

Among the many Dutch colonial houses that dotted Brooklyn as relatively recently as 35 years ago, the Wyckoff-Bennett house is one of the handful that remain. The encroachment of modern structures has of course all but obliterated the farms and fields that once surrounded these houses, but to be thankful even for small blessings involves gratitude this building has endured. Though not the oldest such structure per se in Brooklyn, it is certainly the best preserved, is considered by many the finest remaining such architectural example, and is closer to its original form than any other such entity. It's always been a private home and isn't open to the public, notwithstanding its museum character.

Authentic of location but not of position, the structure originally faced south (away from Kings Highway), but at the turn of our century was shifted ninety degrees and now faces East 22nd Street to the west.

The house and grounds, officially known as the Wyckoff-Bennett Homestead, is a veritable oasis in a desert of 20th-century architecture in what was originally called the Gravesend section of Brooklyn; an early settler, Lady Deborah Moody, came from Gravesend, England in the mid-17th century. The year "1766" cut into a beam in the old barn clearly indicates the house existed by then.

I passed the house often, and eventually, being so drawn to it, I began mapping my route with the site as a feature of my walks around the area. Ultimately - maybe even inevitably - I resolved that an attempt should be made to see the dwelling's interior.

Before the Industrial Revolution, letter-writing involved some effort. To absorb moisture, paper sometimes had to be treated with writing sand before the quill was even used on it; quill nibs had to be hardened, cleaned and sharpened; after the letter was written, the paper had to be sprinkled with the writing sand again, as a blotting agent; for privacy, the letter had to be specially folded and sealed with wax. With all these tasks playing a role, the relatively simple act of writing a letter was by today's standards something of a chore.

The "nothing ventured, nothing gained" principle prompted the author to reproduce, at least in appearance, an 18th-century letter. Used were an inkwell and quill; textured parchment paper; and an expansive letterhand, affected but effective, with the elongated "s" and Licences For Effecte Towarde Olde English Spellinge. A further liberty was taken by juxtaposing numbers so that the year, 1979, was by intention rendered as 1797, for additional "authenticity." The letter was folded, secured with a wax seal, addressed to the inhabitants of the Wyckoff-Bennett house and brought to the post office with a request for philatelic treatment. (The same protocols were followed for another historic dwelling on a later occasion, but that's another story for another time).

Patience has its own reward. So does perseverance. The small investment of time and effort paid a large dividend: an invitation to view the dwelling's interior.

My wife, Marie, received a phonecall from a man she initially thought was one of our friends teasing us with an imitation of W.C.Fields. The caller was in fact Mrs. Bennett's husband, Reverend Williams. While not actually a duplicate of the Fields drawl, his distinctive inflection was indeed reminiscent of it. When I finally met him several days later I understood why others could get that initial impression - the difference being that while Fields' humor could be sarcastic in the extreme, Rev. Williams' was not.

Mrs. Bennett showed me the original 4" x 7" glass window panes at the front of the house. She told me that during the Revolutionary War, Hessian soldiers marched up Kings Highway and officers were quartered in the house. One of them scratched his name on one of those window panes, still carefully preserved: "M. Bach, Leutnant v Hessen Hanau Artilerie." Posterity graced us with numerous Bachs, the most dominant being the great Johann Sebastian. Though a common name in Germany at the time, it's tempting to wonder if the two were related. Conjecture is fruitless but still fascinating.

On state-of-the-art sound equipment in the most modern homes we often hear Vivaldi. No such anachronism existed here in the Wyckoff-Bennett house. My private tour was momentarily interrupted by the wonderfully suitable sounds from the parlor of a Mozart piano trio, performed by two visiting musicians and Mrs. Bennett's husband, who drew a valiant bow on his cello. The live music and the surroundings fit perfectly and made this dwelling steeped in living history even more vivid.

The horizontally-divided ("Dutch") front and back doors open to a central main-floor hallway running the width of the house with square, low-ceiling rooms on either side. The original windows at the front door's top are of bluish-green glass and are in the characteristic "bulls-eye" form. One of the pair of windows in the back door was broken long ago and both windows now have modern green glass. Much of the house's hardware is the original 18th-century iron. A narrow stairway leads to an upper level with dormer windows which were added later. Adorning walls of the main level were portraits of previous residents - Mrs. Bennett's own ancestors - and a Revolutionary-era mirror with its original glass, into which those who preceded her in that home had undoubtedly gazed.

Viewing even the exterior of the Wyckoff-Bennett house is if not actually equivalent then certainly comparable to entering what effectively amounts to a time warp. The experience is intensified when one actually enters the structure, in which modern contrivances exist minimally. The view from the porch of George Washington's home at Mount Vernon, Virginia, is the same kind Washington himself had: no modern (i.e., post-18th-century) structures are visible. Looking at the Wyckoff-Bennett house gives one the same sense, but in reverse: we're seeing only an 18th-century building. The very existence of this Colonial era home gives credence to the concept of Virtual Reality without computers.

The house's plot of land is large for the area but only a fraction of the original 100 or so acres of farmland grounds. It recalls the Alamo's fate: of the original five structures on the then-sprawling compound, only two remain. That the sidewalk surrounding part of the periphery of the Wyckoff-Bennett home was paved only within the last few years, and that the current owners utilize the original barn as storage or workshop space, reflect practical concession to modern needs.

An interesting feature of the kitchen, a later extension to the house, is the wide beams to which are applied small fork-shaped tree branches, from which muskets were once hung.

Our farewell greeting was of particular personal poignancy for me: indicative of the kind of lady she was, Mrs. Bennett extended a natural and sincere compliment I've always remembered. On a wall of her studio - the house's original kitchen - was a document in a strange and irregular script. Though I'd never before seen it, the writing had a familiar appearance. It bore little similarity to what we recognize today as Hebrew but had a strong resemblance to the ancient and angular Phoenician alphabet (roughly contemporary with the Canaanite era and written only with consonants and no vowels). The symbols closely resembled those on the stone tablets in The Ten Commandments, written for that film by Dr. Ralph Marcus of the Institute for Oriental Studies at the University of Chicago. "That looks like the Phoenician alphabet," I told Mrs. Bennett, who turned to my wife and said, "Your husband is very cultured. Of all the visitors who've seen this over the years, he's the only one who has known what it is." One can argue the state and extent of my culture but I was still frankly pleased by the compliment.

The passage and changes of time yield transformations and in some cases the metamorphoses by transfiguration are legion. According to old Alamo plans and maps, James Bowie's quarters in the Low Barracks, now long gone, were located near what is now part of the vest-pocket park facing the Alamo grounds. There's now no trace of Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts. The house at 25 Brook Street in London, where Handel lived for 36 years, wrote The Messiah in three weeks, and died in 1759 has only now been restored to its original appearance and is the first composer museum in London. The Vienna building where Brahms lived for the last 26 years of his life was demolished (but at least ceremoniously) on April 3, 1907, exactly ten years after he died there. The areas surrounding Beethoven's residences in and around Vienna would be totally unrecognizable to him today.

We live in an era where some amazing things are often taken for granted. Reactions depend not only on individual upbringing and circumstances but also on locale. Political correctness notwithstanding, differences in national and even regional outlooks do exist, and what's significant in one area may have little impact in another. In the USA, the mention of George Washington's name, for example, will from some people prompt only a disinterested shrug of the shoulders. Those with awareness of what preceded them, and of its importance, react otherwise. On display at the Whitehead Memorial Museum at Del Rio, Texas, is an unusual and very revealing artifact (first brought to my attention in 1995 by my friend Jack Broadfield and his grandson, Charles Carrero): a large, sealed jar of earth from the Alamo grounds in San Antonio. That this soil was rescued and preserved even in 1836, soon after the final siege, bespeaks a revealing degree of reverence for what occurred at dawn on Sunday March 6th of that year, and is a very clear indication of the momentous significance with which the event was seen even then, certainly by the unnamed person who salvaged and saved that soil. The Wyckoff-Bennett Homestead doesn't have the Alamo's national renown but it has the same kind of historical significance. If the Alamo is one of the wheels that brought America forward, then the Wyckoff-Bennett house and structures like it are the spokes that supported such wheels and gave them integrity and stability.

Some structures, like Poe Cottage in the Bronx, New York, the Rembrandt House in Amsterdam, Holland, and Mozart's apartment at Domgasse 5 - the only remaining Mozart dwelling in Vienna - became landmarks and even legendary after the facts. Others, like the Wyckoff-Bennett house, even before the era of mass media coverage, assumed if not the prominence certainly the character of historical and even cultural icons during their own eras. The dwelling has been around for so long that the distance of time renders some contradictions and confusion about it almost impenetrable.

Behind the otherwise ordinary objects we find the revealing historical stories, many with their specific and persuasive anecdotal richness. Remainders and reminders of the significant can affect and even inspire the devoted. Even daily accouterments, objects of no intrinsic value, are often considered sacred relics. It's because of their historic association that these tangible but inanimate objects are so revered. The Wyckoff-Bennett house is one of them.

The obvious, by it nature, often escapes our attention, so it may be worth noting that those now long gone who inhabited that home were as alive then as we are today. Most of us are just transiting history. The Wyckoff-Bennett house is history: inanimate but very much alive.

Author's Biographical Information

Jeffrey Dane is a historian, researcher, essayist and journalist whose work appears in print and online publications in the USA and abroad in several languages. His most recent book, Beethoven's Pianos, was published by New York's Museum of the American Piano. He has contributed to several other volumes, and was asked to write the Foreward for The Alamo Story: From early history to Current Conflicts by J.R. Edmondson. His essay, "James Bowie: A Historical Perspective" is awaiting publication. One manifestation of his interest in early structures and dwellings is in his use of quills, inkwells, parchment-textured writing paper, and sealing-wax for some of his personal correspondence.

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