Tea at Trianon: The Last Farmhouse in Manhattan

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, September 3, 2019

The Last Farmhouse in Manhattan

From Vintage News:

New York and Manhattan Island were originally settled by the Dutch and named “New Amsterdam”. The area included all of New York City and part of Long Island, New Jersey and Connecticut. Allegedly in 1626, Dutch governor Peter Minuit purchased the island from the local Native Americans, the Manhattans (an offshoot of the Algonquian tribe) for $26 of trinkets expecting the Indians to relinquish the land.

By 1664 the English and taken over New Amsterdam and in 1686 it was the first city to be awarded a charter from the Crown. According to website myinwood, Jan Dyckman arrived in the New World sometime in the 1660s and began buying land. He acquired two hundred and fifty acres and set up a working farm with a farmhouse, barns, apple and cherry orchards, a cider mill, outbuildings and livestock.

By the time of the American Revolution, his grandson William was in charge of the farm. When the British occupied Manhattan the Dyckman family was forced to flee to upstate New York. Afterwards the family returned to find their property destroyed. William immediately started building a new house for his family.

When he died in 1787 the family offered the property for sale but his son, Jacobus, took over and increased the size of the farm. He stayed until his end in 1832 when his sons Michael and Isaac inherited the farm. Isaac left a will leaving the homestead to a cousin who was required to change his name from James Frederick Smith to Isaac Michael Dyckman in order to keep the property in the Dyckman name. (Read more.)