OLD CATSKILL
Written by Henry Brace
from
Harper's New Monthly Magazine
No. 360
May 1880
Pages 810 to 826
Published by
Harper & Brothers,
Franklin Square, New York
Kindly Contributed by Linda Van Deusen-Kintzing
10 March 2004
transcribed by Susan Stalker Mulvey
Continued from Page 821
[page 822] of Catskill. Among them was Herman Schuneman, a man of mark among his brethren. And to him, at East Camp, in August, 1812, was born Johannes Schuneman.
Who were the teachers of the son, under what influences this Lutheran by birth, baptism, and early training became a Calvinist, what chance brought him to Catskill--these things are no longer known. He studied theology under the ill-fated Domine Theodorus Frielinghuysen, at Albany, and in 1751 was chosen pastor of the united churches of Catskill and Coxsackie. But it was then the custom, if it was not the law, that ordination into the ministry should proceed from the Classis of Amsterdam. It was therefore made the condition of Schuneman's appointment that he should go to Holland, study in her theological schools for a year, and receive due ordination. The condition was performed; he went to Amsterdam in 1752.
No account of the student life of Domine Schuneman in Amsterdam has been preserved. The tradition, however is that during his sojourn in Holland he was so disfigured by the small-pox that upon his return home not even his sweetheart, Anna Maria Van Bergen, knew him. It is also said that sometimes upon festal occasions of a christening or a marriage, when the Canary wine had been passed around, and the long clay pipes had been lighted, the domine would speak of the glass of Hollands, which the good wife of the foremost divine in the Classis of Amsterdam used to give to him after his return form Sunday morning service.
Marten Van Bergen, the son of Marten Gerritsen, had three daughters. To these maidens, renowned for their beauty, and known to have a rich father, suitors from all the country round, from Kingston to Coxsackie, were not wanting. The sisters seem to have chosen wisely. Catharine and Nelly became the wives of young yeomen in the neighborhood; Anna Maria, the youngest, married Domine Schuneman, soon after his return from Holland, he being forty-two years old, and she twenty-six.
During the year in which he was married, and in anticipation thereof, the house which to this day is known as the Parsonage was built for him by his sweetheart's father and by the church. It stands on the southeastern edge of the terrace of which I have spoken, and is approached through an orchard of venerable apple trees, old enough, apparently, to have been planted by Domine Schuneman himself. The house is of gray sandstone, and is a story and a half high. A hall on the ground-floor from east to west gives access to two rooms on one side, and to a larger room on the other. The studeer kamer of Domine Schuneman, or his study, as the New England ministers would have called it, was the southeastern room. Here he kept his scanty library; here he wrote his sermons; here he received his neighbors when they came to him for friendly gossip or for advice.
I have been told that, fifty years ago, the diary of Domine Schuneman was in existence. It was a large book, and contained a record in Dutch of his husbandry, his journeys, his expenses, with brief meditations upon his daily reading of the Scriptures. My informant was able to remember one entry. I have somewhat softened the unconscious incongruity of the lines, which ran after this manner: "Attended the funeral of Johannes Diedrich at the Katerskill; also sold my lame mare. All flesh is grass, Isaiah, xl. 6."
The ministry of Domine Schuneman was a faithful service of forty years. It as his habit to preach on one Sunday at Catskill and on the next at Coxsackie, travelling in summer on horseback, and in the winter in a sleigh, through the unbroken and solitary forest which lay between the two hamlets. The texts of a few of his sermons have been preserved, and from them I infer that his preaching was of a practical rather than of a doctrinal character. His voice was deep and strong, his gestures were many and earnest, his enthusiasm was great and contagious. As for the manuscripts of his sermons, I once asked his granddaughter what had become of them. She answered that in her girlhood, before she was old enough to know their value, they were used by the negro servants in the kitchen of her father's house in lighting the fires and in cleaning the smoked outsides of iron pots and frying-pans.
During the war of the Revolution, Domine Schuneman was an ardent Whig. All his zeal and superabounding energy flamed out in behalf of his country. On Sundays he preached the high duty of strenuous defense; on week-days exhorted and advised with his neighbors and [page 823] parishioners in behalf of the good cause, became a member of the local Committee of Safety, made his house a shelter for the soldiers who passed by on their way northward to Skeenesborough and Saratoga, and a hospital when they came back sick with fever. His enthusiasm aroused the wrath of the few Tories in the neighborhood, who would gladly have set the Mohawks upon him. But he went about armed by day, and slept, his men-servants also, with his gun by side, and his precaution and his well-known courage kept him from the fate of the Abeels.
The congregation of Domine Schuneman were in full sympathy with his high-wrought patriotism. They were slow-witted men, cautious and not a whit sentimental. But during the Revolution their ardor glowed against Great Britain in some degree as two hundred years before the ardor of their ancestors had glowed against Spain and Alva. One in six of the men of Catskill became soldiers. Some received commissions in the battalions of the New york line; others enlisted as privates, and walked with their muskets upon their shoulders to Fort George and Stillwater; others became scouts with Murphy upon the Mohawk; others, through fear of the Iroquois, patrolled the roads along the Katerskill and in the valley of the Kiskatom.
During my boyhood my father often took me with him when he went to visit the sick among the farmers in the neighborhood of Catskill. A number of men who remembered the Revolution were then living. Furing the winter afternoons I usually found them sitting by the spacious fire-places in their kitchens smoking their pipes, and glad to talk to a willing listener about the things which had transpired in their youth. One recalled the day when going to the top of the hill called the Kyknit, he heard the drums beat in Vaughan's boats, and saw the smoke rising from the burning houses in Livingston Manor. John Fiero related the exploits of Gysbert Oosterhoudt against Brant and his Indians in the upper valley of the Mohawk. John Dubois told me about his drive to Newburgh upon the frozen Hudson with a load of hay for the American army, and made me happy by the gift of a few pieces of the rude paper money which he received in payment. A Salisbury who called General Philip Schuyler uncle, remembered the headlong impetuosity of Arnold at Stillwater. These things are perhaps trifles, but they served to give me a certain notion of the spirit with which the men of Catskill were animated during the war of the Revolution.
The church edifice in which Domine Schuneman preached at Catskill stood upon the edge of the terrace of which I have spoken, near an ancient burying-ground of the Indians. It was a wooden building, nearly square, with a pyramidal roof, but with the apex of the pyramid cut off. Two aisles led to the pulpit at the west end of the building opposite the door. Slips, as they were called, were placed between the two aisles, and between each [page 824] aisle and the northern and southern walls. In the winter the congregation sat without a fire, except that the women who lived near by brought foot-stoves.
