his kinswoman, Fannie Blackwell Brown, daughter of Benjamin and Hannah (Odell) Brown, of Yonkers, and great-granddaughter of Jacobus Dyckman, and built the home still standing on 218th Street, west of Broadway, where he lived the greater part of the time until his death in 1899. With Mrs. Dyckman he devoted himself largely to religious and charitable affairs. He was for a long time Ruling Elder and treasurer in the Mount Washington Presbyterian Church, which still stands on the corner of Dyckman Street, and he was a constant attendant at the meetings of the New York Presbytery, of which he was a member. He was greatly interested in historical and educational matters, acting as trustee to the old Dyckman Library and founding in Columbia University a research fund in memory of his uncles, Jacob and Jacobus, Columbia, 1810, 1811. Mrs. Dyckman survived her husband fifteen years, dying in 1914, and at her death, leaving no male issue, the family name in the region of Kingsbridge became extinct, after having been identified with the locality for about two and a half centuries. Mrs. Dyckman, it may be mentioned, followed sympathetically her husband's interests; she gave generously to benevolent societies, missions and churches.

IV

THE DYCKMAN HOUSE:

DETAILS

The Dyckman house stands on what is now the northwest corner of 204th Street and Broadway. The avenue in front of it has been lowered about fifteen feet, leaving the house on a knoll. Even in early days, however, it was situated on a rise of land which looked southeastward over the wide-spread apple orchards towards the Harlem River and Fordham (where now the New York University forms a landmark); to the south rose the heights of Fort George and Fort Washington, on the west was the ridge of Inwood, early known as Mount Washington, and through the notch at the west end of Dyckman Street one had a glimpse of the Palisades. In the spring it overlooked a fair country, with a foreground of green meadows and browsing herds, a middle distance of flowering orchards of apple, peach and cherry. Its owner might have long sat on this wide front porch, settled comfortably in a deep slatbacked armchair, soothed by the hum of bees in the blossoms nearby, and watching lazily through the rings of smoke from a long-stemmed pipe the post-rider as he passed the thirteenth milestone, which was nearly in front of the old house.

The house itself has basement, parlor floor, bedroom floor and attic (plate 11). It is well built. Its stone walls are twenty inches thick, and are continued up to the window ledges of the sleeping-room floor; above them heavy, hand-hewn white oak beams. covered with wide clapboards fill in the space to the peak of the gambrel roof, which, incidentally, has an exceptionally graceful

curve.

The house had two extensions. The one to the south contained the summer kitchen and will later be described. The one to the north was relatively new, dating about 1830, built to provide additional room for servants. This has now been removed.

There are two rare features in the construction of the old house. It had a front of brick instead of field-stone, and it had also a basement. The latter was a feature which possibly arose from the situation of the house, for it was built against a ledge of rock, which supports the entire rear wall, and permitted, therefore, an unusual depth below.

In the basement was a winter kitchen, having a large brick fireplace; beside this room, at the north, was a roomy and dry cellar, which no doubt was well provisioned in its days with winter vegetables and pans of milk resting on swinging shelves, the supports of which are still preserved. Into this cellar one might enter from without, from an inclined passageway, down a couple of steps, and through sloping cellar doors, in the ancient Dutch fashion.

The parlor floor is margined cast and west by wide porches continued the full length of the house. It has the usual broad hall extending through the middle of the house from front to back, opening right and left into the main rooms. Here stands a tall Dutch clock. On the right as we enter the front door one looks into the parlor, at the left into the dining-room, which was just above the winter kitchen. In front is the narrow staircase, margined primly with a straight cherry rail, and below the turn of the stairs one sees through the opened half-door the trees on the slope of Inwood Ridge. Behind the parlor and also opening into the hall was a smaller room, known as Isaac Dyckman's room, and across the hall, opening by a doorway under the staircase, one could descend to the winter kitchen, or could enter through a small, dark passageway up and down three steps into a small back room, and thence into the rear of the dining-room. This room was known as Grandfather Dyckman's, and here, we believe, died William Dyckman in 1787.

The sleeping-room floor includes five rooms. Of two small bedrooms at the rear only one opens into the hall this is called Isaac Michael Dyckman's room. The two main rooms north and south are known, respectively, as the uncles' room and Jacobus Dyckman's room; into the latter opened the second rear room, which is believed to have been occupied by the youngest children. The front of the hall was enclosed as a dark, servant's or nurse's bedroom, from which passed curious low storage spaces, "like secret passageways," north and south, formed by the overhanging eaves and lighted by small bull's-eyes at either end of the house. A stepladder leads to the garret, in which one may see the handhewn timber of the old house reaching upward to the gable and roofing a space which was invaluable in the domestic economy of olden times. Here stood disused bedsteads, ancient hide-covered

trunks, supernumerary band-boxes, spinning-wheels and the like. This great space was again lighted by bull's-eyes at either end of the house.

The southern addition contains, as we have said, a summer kitchen (plate 14), and above it was a large servants' room. This addition, we believe, was really of earlier date than the house itself, having probably been built prior to the American Revolution. For we know that the main building was erected in or about 1783, the year when William Dyckman returned to his home after the evacuation of the city by the British. His old house had been burned and he probably lived in the present addition, which served earlier as a foreman's cottage, or was possibly part of his first house, from 210th Street. This is evidenced by the character of the ceiling of its main room, which shows open rafters with beaded edges, also an early type of fireplace. Another reason for its greater age is that its north wall is covered with clapboards, although it faced the stone wall of the main house, thus showing conclusively that the stone wall must either have been built against the clapboards or that the small addition must subsequently have been moved up against the house. During the first half of the nineteenth century this addition was occupied by the cook, black Hannah, who had been born on the place as the daughter of a slave who was partly of Indian blood. Tradition describes her with a bright-colored headgear, face black as ebony, temper decidedly irregular, and a strong leaning toward a corncob pipe. Her kitchen, with its white floor strewn with sand in patterns, did not open into the house itself, but on a porch from which one had also access to the winter kitchen.

In arranging the interior of the house, the effort has been made to preserve the appearance of each room in its original condition. The old pieces of furniture taken from the house when Isaac Dyckman moved away have been carefully collected and put back, so far as possible, in their original position. Where objects from the homestead were not preserved their place is filled with similar pieces which, with but few exceptions,* were in the possession of other members of the Dyckman family or of its connections.

The house is interesting, therefore, as exhibiting with considerable accuracy the indoor surroundings of a well-to-do family We except also kitchen utensils in large part.

about the year 1800. And they are the more interesting since the conditions of those simpler days are rapidly fading from memory. How many to-day, for example, even those of us who pride ourselves on our housekeeping and cookery, could go into one of the old kitchens of the present house and make use of the apparatus there? How many of us could start a kitchen fire without the use of matches? some of us do not know a tinder-box when we see one, far less the practical use of flint and steel. The art of such primitive fire-making is well-nigh forgotten. Even such an expert in Colonial matters as Alice Morse Earle, who has written delightfully of ancient customs, confesses that she has never learned the trick of the tinder-box, which probably any Dyckman child of six could have shown her! How many of us could build a wood fire which would last, fix a back log, or bank embers so they would keep like vestal fire or use convincingly the curious trammels or pot hooks for the huge kettles, or skillets, or skimmers, or waffle-irons, or a Dutch oven or a bake oven? The former oven is the contrivance in tin which stands in front of the open fireplace in the present winter kitchen to collect the heat and reflect it upon an object which was slowly rotated on a spit, sometimes with the aid of a trained "turnspit" dog. Of bake ovens, we have two excellent specimens in the summer kitchen (plate 14), so large that they appear on the outside of the house, projecting behind the chimney like buttresses, and indicating the size of the farm and the number of its slaves and helpers to be provided for. These were by no means as convenient in use as the modern kitchen oven; they required special fuel, which was laid in a definite way so as to produce a rapid, hot fire, a flue connecting the oven with the kitchen chimney. When the brick walls of the oven were hot, the ashes were removed, the oven floor cleaned, and the pies, bread and cake introduced, all at the same time, and all on the bare floor. The oven door was then closed and baking began. At the end the objects would be taken out by the aid of the wooden shovel, or "peel."

In those days there were no convenient shops at which housekeeping supplies, including the commonest dry goods, could be purchased. Even candles, the only means of lighting the house, were made at home: the tallow was hoarded and tried out, wicks were made and candles fashioned in moulds like the ones seen