Living with antiques: the Jesse Van Slyke house in Schenectady, New York

Magazine Antiques, August, 2003 by Roderie H. Blackburn

Nestled in a bend of the Mohawk River, Arent Van Curler (1619/20-1667) and others established a frontier trading post in 1662 called Schenectady (probably Iroquois for across the pine plains") some fifteen miles west of Beverwyck ("beaver town," now Albany New York). Here ambitious Dutchmen were able to intercept Iroquois headed to Beverwyck with furs, purchasing them first and thus initiating a commercial rivalry that still exists between Albany and Schenectady.

The frontier's benefits were offset by wartime liabilities, brought home to the stockaded village of Schenectady in 1690 when, in deep winter, a party of Canadian French and their Indian allies attacked, burning houses and capturing or killing most of the inhabitants. The burden of the rivalry for the new world between France and England was borne most heavily by settlers in the Mohawk River valley Yet Schenectady's survivors--ransomed and rescued--built again in the same place. In the late nineteenth century the region thrived as an industrial center. The Schenectady Locomotive Engine Manufactory (now ALCO Products) had been established in Schenectady in 1848, and Thomas Edison's General Electric Company was founded there in 1892. These industrial behemoths were located a mere six blocks from Front Street, the principal, if narrow, one-way street in the city's historic district, yet they never impinged on the district's old world charm.

Front Street is located on the first rise above the flood-prone Mohawk River. Not far from where the stockade stood--at an intersection now fondly called "Lawrence the Indian" for its bronze figure of a friendly Mohawk who tried to recover the captives--is the best preserved early house in the town. It was built about 1762 by Jesse Van Slyke, about whom one Edie Vrooman (b. 1789) wrote: "Old Jesse Van Slyke, who married Jacomyntje Groot [1743-1809], in 1762, built the old red brick gamb[r]eled roofed house on the corner of Front Street and North Lane.... His old red house is still standing unaltered."' She described Van Slyke as a drinker and wife abuser who was also a patriot who served as a militia captain during the Revolutionary War, was politically active, and was apparently successful at an unknown occupation, presumably farming like his neighbors. He was a fifth-generation Mohawk River settler, with one ancestor a Mohawk Indian. His long-suffering wife bore him several children before she predeceased him by six years in 1809.

Van Slyke was not the first to own this property. About 1664 one of the founders of Schenectady William Teller (1621-c. 1701), acquired a large parcel extending from the street to the river at this location. Within this lot, known as the Teller pasture lot, Petrus Van Slyke, Jesse's father (b. 1709), built a brick Dutch gable-end-to-the-street house on Front Street about 1738, when he married. Jesse received a corner portion of the Teller pasture lot on which to build a house in 1762, the year he married.

In the new Anglo-Dutch style, the gable end of Jesse Van Slyke's house does not face the street. Instead, giving it more the aspect of a farmhouse

unencumbered by the constraints of a compact village, its long street facade stretches across the double-wide lot. In nearly all outward respects it owes its style to the influence of New England Georgian architecture, with virtually the only remaining Dutch characteristic being one gable end (which nearly abuts the adjacent house and is almost out of public view) that is not brick but is merely covered with weatherboards.

Up until this period Dutch houses contained one or two rooms for habitation--eating and sleeping--on the main floor, each with a fireplace. The attic, or garret, was primarily for storage, not bedrooms. By the mid-eighteenth century English (by way of New England) ideas of privacy and comfort had percolated into the frontier communities of New York, and Van Slyke had no doubt visited such Georgian-influenced houses in the area and seen the functional advantages of the new style. As a result, he built a house that is something of a hybrid, but he compromised, and it ended up being too small, so he later expanded it, probably in the 1790s. Originally, there were two entrances on the front facade. The existing one gave access to what is now the center hall, with a balustered stairway that leads to the second floor and a door to the left opening into what is today the dining room, but was the room in which Van Slyke and his family originally did most of their living. The window to the right of the front door was originally the second doorway which gave separate access to the room that is today the living room and now opens off the center hall (see Pls. II, III). Since there was no fireplace in this room, it is likely that it originally served the same function as front rooms in conventional urban Dutch houses, that is, as a place of business or a shop. Indeed, a carved fish sign found in the cellar hints at such a use.

The center hall entrance allowed Van Slyke to protect his main room from the outside cold in winter. It also gave access to the second floor without losing the heat from the fireplace. (In Dutch houses the stairway was in a first-floor room and had to be enclosed to retain heat in the room.) Moreover, Van Slyke built an English style fireplace in his main room, with a paneled surround and brick jambs (see Pl. VI), which was a great improvement over the draftier open Dutch fireplace.