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 823

[page 824] In 1798, when the building was under-going repairs, it was proposed by certain young and  effeminate members that a stove should be placed in the room.  A stormy discussion thereupon arose, which came near rending the church.  On one side, the comfort of the congregation was urged; on the other side, the characteristic and conclusive answer was given, that their fathers had gone without a fire.  But the innovators were in a majority, and the innovation was voted.  It was a huge box of wrought iron, and stood in the centre of the room, upon a platform, which was raised upon four stout posts six or eight feet above the floor.  The floor of the platform was reached by a short ladder, and upon the floor was piled the wood for the stove.  The old men reluctantly submitted to the novelty.  It was sturdy Evert Wynkoop, I believe, who, however, refused to come to church for a whole winter, alleging as the reason that the heat brought chilblains out upon his feet.  It was his son William, I know who, in later days, when the white inner walls of the new church were colored pink, never took his seat in the elders' pew by the side of the pulpit without putting on a pair of blue spectacles.  The glare from the walls, he said (he had opposed the painting in consistory), made his eyes ache.

     But I should be sorry to give a wrong impression respecting the character of the Wynkoops, and of the class to which they belonged.  The Dutch yeomen of the better sort at Catskill were rude and unlettered men, obstinate, bent on having their own way, perverse when they did not have it, and greatly and unreasonably averse to change in their habits of life or in their mode of farming.  But they were honest, just in their dealings, hospitable, kind to the poor, and especially kind to their poor kinsfolk.

     In 1732 the number of the members of the church at Catskill was about twenty-five; in 1780 the number was about one hundred.  It was an orderly and God-fearing congregation.  On every other Sunday morning they met together--the Salisburys and the Van Bergens from the neighborhood, the Van Vechtens and the Duboises from the banks of the Catskill, the Van Ordens and the Overbaghs from the Inbogt, and the Abeels from the Bak-Oven.  Some came on horseback over the roads which had been cut through the forests, others in rude wagons.  During the Revolution all were armed.  The men wore queues and three-cornered hats of brown beaver; their knee-breeches and their long waistcoats were of homespun; their stockings, knit by their thrifty wives in the light of the open fire during the winter evenings, were of coarse blue yarn; their low shoes were of russet leather, and bore large buckles of brass or polished steel.  The women were clothed in petticoats of heavy flannel, and in gowns of linsey-woolsey, short in the waist, scanty in circumference, reaching only to the ankle, and dyed black with logwood, or brown with butternut.  A few of the richer maidens, Katharina Oothoudt, perhaps, Elizabeth Van Vechten, and Neelbje Van Bergen, wore strings of gold beads about their necks.

     The services were conducted in the method recommended in 1618 by the Synod of Dort--a method which obtains substantially, I believe, in the Church to this day.

     Hymns were not used, except on rare occasions, when the exulting prophecies of Zacharias and of Mary were sung in rude rhymes to a simple and not unpleasing melody.  But the Psalms of David were employed in all the Reformed Dutch churches.  The rhymed version which Domine Schuneman used is a translation into Dutch from the celebrated version in French of Marot.  The stanzas are not worse than Sternhold's and Hopkins's; they could not be worse than the verses of the priceless Bay State Psalm-Book.

     The morning service was over by one o'clock.  Then came an intermission of about an hour.  It was spent by the congregation in eating the dinner which each family had brought, in smoking under the red cedars, or savins, which stood on the south side of the church, and in talking over the news and the gossip of the day.  While the war of the Revolution lasted, I can readily believe what William Planck once told me, that little else was discussed than the progress of our arms.  But news came slowly and in fragments to these men.  They, of course, had no newspapers, and they seldom wrote and seldom received letters.  He who had that week taken a journey to Kingston or Albany, [page 825] or had entertained a courier, was the centre of an interested group under the savins.

Sunday in Old Catskill

     During the last century, under the preaching of great divines--divines like Edwards, Bellamy, and Hopkins--the church members of New England were being trained in one of the most rigorous theological schools the world has ever known.  Under the elms upon the green in front of the meeting-house, in the hay field, on the way to mill, in the blacksmith's shop at the cross-roads, around the fire during the long winter evenings--everywhere, in season and out of season, the farmers and tradesmen of Massachusetts and Connecticut were discussing with exact logic and with the nicest distinctions the subtle doctrines of predestination, election, man's free-will, and god's sovereignty.  These debates, our New England forefather's believed, tended to make the debaters better Christians; we, their descendants, are beginning to suspect that the effect chiefly was to sharpen the debaters; intellects.

     I can find no trace of this fondness for metaphysical discussion among the Dutch yeomen in the upper valley of the Hudson.  Nor was the first day of the week kept by the Dutch with the terrible rigor with which that day was kept by the New Englander.  The sundays on which Domine Schuneman preached in Coxsackie were spent by the members of his church at Catskill in restful idleness upon their farms, or in paying and receiving visits.  Families came together at the homestead; neighbors walked over rough paths through the forest, to the nearest house to talk and smoke; lovers sat upon the stoops, and spoke the universal language in corrupt Dutch.

     On special occasions a dinner or supper was given, and of one of these feasts the story has been handed down.  The occasion was the surrender of Cornwallis; the giver was a stanch patriot and captain in the New York line, Cornelius Dubois; the place was his stone cottage on the right bank of the Catskill, near its mouth; the time was a Sunday afternoon, late in the autumn of 1781, after the chickens and the turkeys had been fattened, the hams cured, and the cider ripened.  The house was filled; the sitting-room above with the Whigs of the neighborhood--with the Duboises, the Salisburys, the Van Ordens, and the Van Vechtens; the kitchen beneath with the uninvited but not unwelcome slaves of the yeomen.  There was [page 826] loud and hearty talking; there was fiddling by the negroes; there was a long table covered with savory food; there was an abundance of flip and toddy in bockjes, or wooden bowls.  A prominent figure in the assembled company was the figure of a repentant Tory, who went about with a large pitcher of milk punch, asking each guest to drink with him to the final success of the American arms.  The party broke up late; and it is said that a venerable elder of the united churches of Catskill and Coxsackie went home, for the first time in his life, in a state of unnatural exhilaration.

Dinner at Cornelius Dubois's

     Domine Schuneman, by the death of his father-in-law, Marten Van Bergen, in 1769, became a rich man.  When he had grown old he built a stone cottage upon a fertile portion of the devised lands in what is now know as the village of Jefferson, and moving thither form the parsonage, died there in 1794.

     Until within a few weeks past, one man, Mr. John Van Vechten, of Catskill, was living who remembered the funeral of Domine Schuneman.  The ceremony was in accordance with the customs which the Dutch, a hundred and seventy years before, had brought with them from the mother country.  A man, especially deputed for the purpose, met each male comer at the door, and offered him a glass of rum from a flask.  A woman waited in like manner upon each female comer.  The relatives of the dead sat together around the corpse; the friends and acquaintances took their seats in another part of the room, or in an adjoining chamber.  When the services were over--these were in Dutch--they who chose went up to the coffin to take their last look at the deceased.  The coffin was then closed, put upon a bier, and taken from the house to the grave, the relatives following, and after them all comers.  When the coffin had been laid in the ground, the procession returned to the house, but in inverse order-the relatives and the empty bier and its bearers coming last.  One room in the house was assigned to the bearers, another to the assembled people.  In each room a table had been set with bottles of rum, a jar of tobacco, and long clay pipes.  All the men drank and smoked, talking in the mean while of the character and virtues of their dead pastor, of their horses, of the spring planting, and of the weather.  One or two of the lower sort got tipsy, and amused themselves by singing funereal ditties out-of-doors.

     Domine Schuneman was buried in a newly cleared field, which now forms the burying-ground of Jefferson.  At the head of his grave was erected a tombstone of red sandstone, which is still standing.  It bears the simple inscription, "In memory of Rev. Johannes Schuneman, who departed this life May 16, 1794, aged 81 years 8 months and 28 days."