AMERICAN HOMES 



AND GARDENS 



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Volume X 



August 1913 



Number 8 l 



An Old Homestead of Colonial New Jersey 



By Joseph Bernard Pearman 

 Photographs by T. C. Turner 



HE homes of the early Dutch settlers possess 

 a particular interest which is largely that 

 of their individuality. The colonists nat- 

 urally reproduced in America, as far as 

 possible, the homes they had left behind in 

 the land of dykes and windmills. The life 

 in "New Holland" was a faithful copy of the life of an 

 older Holland across the ocean, and the interior of a home 

 in early New Amsterdam might be almost as quaint as that 

 of a house of the same period in Rotterdam or Utrecht. 



Perhaps more than elsewhere in the colonies, a home in 

 early New York or New Jersey was a center of family life 

 — the Dutch colonists loved the homes they had created, 

 and clung to their customs more tenaciously than many 

 colonists elsewhere. They dispensed a bountiful hospitality 

 and nothing so pleased a Dutchman of the period as to 

 have his table crowded on a Sunday by his family and a 

 throng of guests. The building of a home by an early 

 Dutch family was not a matter lightly to be undertaken 

 — the home destined to shelter not only the builder and 



For more than two centuries the old Brinckerhoff house at Hackensack, New Jersey, has been occupied by members of one family 



