The Parsonage  Between Two Manors

Annals of Clover-Reach

By

Elizabeth L. Gebhard

Bryan Printing Company

Hudson, New York

1909

FORWARD

Page IX

     It is unusual for one clergyman to serve a congregation for fifty years, but it is still more exceptional that those fifty years should have begun contemporaneously with the birth of a nation, and continued over the first half century of its founding and growth.

     The position of the church which the Rev. John Gabriel Gebhard served was unique, it being within the bounds of one Manor and almost on the border of a second.  The Manor life for a hundred years or more before the Revolution, and for many years afterward, possessed features, political and social, which give it special interest.  The Lower Van Rensselaer Manor at Claverack, and the original Livingston Manor on its southern boundary, have had few chroniclers outside of magazine articles treating of individual homes or persons.  It has been said that we are a generation too late for the Manor stories, to be read between the lines of sober facts and records, are still [page x] golden threads of incident and romance, and the aim of the compiler and writer of this volume has been to gather together these tales of a by-gone day, before they have slipped away forever.

     A net-work of accurate historical fact lies under this story of fifty years of parsonage and Manor life.  Beyond that are the stories passed down through pictures and letters and family possessions, which being dumb yet speak a language of their own; and more than all, the stories told at the fire-side, and in the twilight, and along the country roads, of the men and women and children of the long ago, who were our next of kin, and whose lives bear a special interest for their descendants.

     There is still one more point which make the Claverack Church and parsonage life important in itself.  Though the parish of the Claverack covered miles of territory, and though the Church exerted an influence over a wide sweep of country, and was the mother of many churches, its early history is only recorded in its own parchment-bound books of record, for through almost a hundred years of its existence it was an independent organization.

     [page xi.] It is hope of the author, that these stories of parsonage and Manors, the sweet and uplifting memories of the past, may be like a cluster of clover-blossoms from the old homes of Clover-reach, to the men and women of to-day whose ancestors called Claverack home.

     The information contained in this volume has been gathered from many sources, that relating to the Gebhard family coming through the inheritance of letters and pictures, books and valuable papers, by various descendants of Dr. Gebhard.  Thanks are due to Mr. M. D. Raymond for data pertaining to the records of the Collegiate Dutch Reformed Church of New York, and the unpublished correspondence of George Washington; also to Rev. Herman Hageman, Mrs. Anna Van Rensselaer Barnard, Mrs. Caroline Van Rensselaer Hall, Mr. Stephen Van Cortlandt Van Rensselaer, Mrs. Harold Wilson, Mr. R. Fulton Ludlow, Mrs. Arthur T. Sutcliffe, Mrs. Edward Hoffman Lynes, and Miss Georgina Schuyler, through whose generous co-operation, records and stories of the Van Rensselaers, Livingstons, Fultons, and various Claverack families have been obtained.

     [page xii.]  The books I have consulted are:  Histories of Columbia, Greene, and Dutchess Counties; Historical Sketches of Hudson, Documents relating to the Colonial History of New York, Ecclesiastical Records of the State of New York, Albany Chronicles, Magazine of American History, Spark's Life of Gouverneur Morris, Bacon's Hudson River from Ocean to Source, Theodore Roosevelt's New York, Memoir of Rev. Richard Sluyter, Life of Washington Irving, Higginson's History of the Untied States, Manual of the Reformed Church in America, Claverack Old and New, by F. H. Webb; the Claverack Centennial, Documentary History of New York, Annals of the Van Rensselaers, Clarkson's Clermont or Livingston Manor, Church Records of Claverack, Livingston Manor, and the German Reformed Church of New York; Catalogue of Washington Seminary, The Posthumous Works of Ann Eliza Bleecker, Some Colonial Homesteads, Catherine Schuyler, by Mary Gay Humphreys, the Goede Vrouw of Mana-ha-ha, Mrs. Ellet's Women of the Revolution, Sketches of Catskill, and The Early History of Saugerties.

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