Book, photos offer absorbing look
at history of Dutch homes
Droste, the Dutch chocolate maker, sells a chocolate apple, wrapped in majestic blue foil. When gently tapped on the table and then unwrapped, the apple falls into 20 perfectly-shaped slices of rich chocolate.
Harrison Meeske's book on the Hudson valley Dutch and colonial Dutch architecture is a lot like the Droste chocolate apple. The book's history and cope is as rich and complete as fine Dutch chocolate. Meeske's capable writing and strong organization make this slightly long book as easy to read as the apple is to unwrap and consume. The Hudson Valley Dutch and Their Houses covers every aspect of the life and architecture of Dutch settlers in the New World. It is generously illustrated with black and white photographs.
The book's first half opens with a grand, sweeping overview of the events in Europe that caused the Dutch to explore the New World. Then, Meeske uses an effective mix of statistics and stories to describe the Dutch who settled in the Hudson Valley and the New York region. The book reaches its midpoint with a discussion of how Dutch laws and practices on land ownership, tenant arming and leases were adapted to the New World.
In the book's second half, Meeske continues to offer information on colonial Dutch history and society. But he offers this information on colonial Dutch history and society. But he offers this information from the perspective of contractors and workers building a home, from the craftsmen who finished the home's interior and from the women who chose the furnishings for the completed home.
The book ends with a glossary of important building terms, a good index, references to other books on the colonial Dutch experience and a list of "Dutch colonial museums and Restorations to Visit." The Dutch settled a region of ca. 35,000 square miles: from Albany on the north and Hartford, Connecticut on the east all the way south to Delaware Bay. The territory in between included New York City, Long Island, all of New Jersey and part of Delaware and Pennsylvania. Even with this vast area filled with Dutch history and architecture, the Capital Region is generously represented in Meeske's book. Meeske uses photographs and examples from about 20 Dutch homes in the Capital Region to illustrate key points about construction or furnishings.
The book's introduction was written by Roderic Blackburn, a Kinderhook resident who designed the "Dutch Room" exhibit in the Albany Institute of History and Art. Meeske presents much material from the translations of Charles Gehring, a Voorheesville resident and Director of the New Netherland Project. He draws on the work of area-like historians Shirley Dunn, Paul Huey, Oliver Rink, and Vincent Schaefer. Meeske was inspired to write this book because he grew up in a house of Dutch design in Dutchess County. When he was an adult, he began to look for a home and his good memories of his childhood home drew him to Dutch Architecture. He wrote his book for "the history buff, homeowner and prospective restorer."
Meeske is a master of the understated, yet amazing fact or story. For example, he discovered that Dutch settlers were key to modern fire safety in America. Hudson Valley Dutch houses were initally roofed with thatch and built of wood. The prospect of such houses, built close together and catching fire, prompted the Albany Dutch to pass laws requiring the use of bricks for walls and roofing tiles.
But before Meeske explains the development of fire safety ordinances, he goes through a quick, yet fascinating discussion of thatched roofs. He suggests that "Dutch" thatching techniques may have originate in Brittany and Normandy, France. He says that in modern Europe, "thousands of buildings are still roofed in this traditional material."
Meeske gets readers coming to this book for one purpose to appreciate other aspects of colonial Dutch history or architecture. For example, I am more interested in history than home building. Yet I was beguiled by Meeske's discussions of brick making and his discussion of how lack of electrial light shaped home-design and the scheduling of work throughout the day.
This book was designed so that in each chapter the pictures follow the text, rather than appearing throughout the text. This was frustrating in places because seeing something complements the experience of reading about it. Hopefully in a future revision of the book, publisher and author will design the text and pictures to work better together.
But this concern aside, Meeske's writing made it generally easy for me, do-it-yourself klutz, to understand Dutch construction methods. I even had realized that modern local construction techniques like the practice of bracing a home frame and notching roof rafters, which my friend Rick Lemner, a local contractor, taught me for my daughter's clubhouse, came from Hudson Valley Dutch construction techniques developed over 300 years ago.
A wide variety of people will find The Hudson Valley Dutch and Their Houses an enjoyable, intriguing read. And if you prefer to see, rather than read about, Dutch architecture, Meeske suggests a visit to Schenectady's Stockade District, the Quackenbush House or Schulyer Mansion in Albany, Fort Crailo in Rensselaer or the Mabee House--near Rotterdam Junction.
Reviewed by John Rowen in The Gazette, the Schenectady daily, and reprinted in De Nieu Nederlanse Marcurius, the newsletter of the New Netherland Project, Vol. 15, No. 4, November 1999.
Another review, written by Kevin Denton, appeared in de Halve Maen: Journal of the Holland Society, Spring 2000: The dearth of books on Dutch architecture in New Netherland has often been noted in these pages. We have to go back some seventy years for Helen Wilkinson Reynold's landmark Dutch Houses in The Hudson Valley and Rosalie Fellows Bailey's Dutch Houses and Families in Northern New Jersey and Southern New York. Then, except for the occasional monograph about a particular building, nothing appeared until David Cohen's The Dutch American Farm in 1992. We are forever grateful to Reynolds and Bailey for photographing and documenting so many Dutch houses since lost, yet each author lacked an organized approach to construction details and chose her examples on the basis of who had lived in each. On the other hand, Cohen's The Dutch American Farm is a fine work, but while it discusses the construction and layout of a typical Dutch-American farmhouse, its focus is as an anthopological study. Now Harrison Meeske has written the definitive work on Dutch architecture in New Netherland. He is neither an architect nor an historian by training and is employed by the New York Times. His interest in Dutch houses is that of an amateur in the highest sense of that word-one whose work is based on pure love of the subject. Meeske tells us that his fondness for Dutch houses started as a child when his family would take summer vacations in Dutchess County, and his work bespeaks a lifetime of careful study. Meeske is a talented writer who manages to synthesize a tremendous amount of information into readable prose. His introductory chapters, an overview of Dutch settlement in the New World and in the Hudson Valley in particular, are a more concise and lucid account than I have ever read. Meeske then cleverly presents an extensive album of his own photos of Netherlandish buildings to prepare the reader's eye for the forms and details recognizable in the Hudson Valley examples his book explore. While Meeske clearly demonstrates a thorough understanding of the social and political world in which the Hudson Valley Dutch houses were built, the heart of this book is the manner in which they were constructed. In this the book is unique. It is almost a lesson on "how to build an early Dutch house." Starting with a chapter entitled "Construction Fundamentals: from the Ground up," Meeske takes us through a detailed, step-by-step study of the laying out and framing of a Dutch house. Virtually every structural member and joint is considered. This may sound dull to the non-builder reader, but it is not at all. The reason is Meeske's constant contrasting of construction details in Dutch houses with other"Dutch" houses as well as with those of "English" style. Meeske has obivously visited and carefully documents scores of Hudson Valley houses and manages to weave comparisons of house details without disturbing the flow of his narrative. A particular delight is the identification of virtually every structural member by its Dutch name. Similar treatment is then given in chapters which cover exterior and interior construction and finishes. Other writers have struggled with the definition of a Dutch house and have been troubled by the lack of a Hudson Valley Dutch house prototype in the Netherlands. For example, they have pointed out that the flying curved roof known as the "Dutch kick," as found on the Nicholas Schenck house now in the Brooklyn Museum, is unknown in Holland. Meeske's answer is that the definition of a Dutch house rests on its interior construction details and not on its visible surface; the latter, he states has been freely borrowed from other regions by Hudson Valley Dutch craftsmen whenever local climate and materials warranted. So, Dutch builders would have been familiar with the kick roof common in Flanders, even if it went unused in Holland. The same can be said of the gambrel roof. In fact, Meeske provides so many details of Dutch as opposed to English construction techniques that we begin to see the houses as purely expression of their Dutch builders, without any concern as to the nationality of their inhabitants. We understand why distinctively Dutch building went on long after the English ascendency. Far beyond basic framing differences (smooth, exposed "H-bents" versus rough, plastered-over joists), Meeske takes us through Dutch versus English measuring and scribing systems and the trademark joint techniques. The development of virtually every element and finish of the Dutch house gets comparative treatment--Dutch doors, windows, roofs (thatch was once common here), jambless fireplaces, cupboard beds (none survive as built), plaster walls, and sanded floors. Meeske refers to numerous reference sources throughout the text and includes chapter notes, bibliography, a welcome glossary, adn an appendix of Dutch sites. His frequent references to the genre paintings of Vermeer, Steen, and other masters for evidence of architectural details indicates Meeske's broad knowledge. The author's forte is plainly architecture, however, and a later chapter on Dutch furniture lacks the mastery or the rest of the book. It relies too heavily on one source--howbeit a good one--Roderick Blackburn's Remembrance of Patria. This is a minor drawback. This book's audience should not be limited to those interested in construction techniques, for it tells us as much about how our ancestors lived as what they lived in. Mr. Meeske has the talent to write about housebuilding much as author Patrick O'Brien writes about seafaring immersed in amazing details of social and historical fact.
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