Kinderhook, one of the oldest Dutch settlements in New York > 근교여행

IN the waning days of summer, the drive through the verdant rolling hills of Columbia County is reason enough for a trip to Kinderhook, one of the oldest Dutch settlements in New York. Through a textured terrain of slate and granite outcroppings, open meadows, trees and wetland, the Taconic Parkway morphs from expressway to country road as it heads north. Take the Spencertown exit and follow Route 203 past cornfields, orchards, grazing cows and a golf course and through the villages of Chatham and Valatie, and Kinderhook awaits — some 130 miles from Manhattan.

 

In the village center, parts of which are on the National Register of Historic Places, wide streets are lined by stately trees and a mix of grand and modest Colonial, Federal and Victorian houses. Two cannons on the village green commemorate Henry Knox’s passing through in the winter of 1775-76, hauling artillery captured at Fort Ticonderoga that would be used to force the British out of Boston.

 

Hudson Street, south of the green, leads past a pretty one-story brick library, and nearby a home in a former store still bears the words “Flour, Feed, Grain & Seed.” It’s not difficult to imagine Washington Irving walking these streets as a young man; he wrote “Rip Van Winkle” while employed by a well-to-do local family as a tutor.

 

“Not much has changed in the village since I grew up here,” said Jim Dunham, 65, a former mayor of Kinderhook. “It’s still a quiet and quaint place with lots of well-preserved older homes and relatively little commercial development.”

 

Just the place for a day in the country.

 

The green is transformed on Saturday mornings into a bustling farmers’ market with baked goods, jam, milk from the Gumaer Farms nearby, cut flowers and a bounty of late summer produce like tomatoes, corn and turnips. But even on market days, there is plenty of space to park and take a self-guided tour using a brochure available on the Internet.

 

Several houses lay claim to places in history. On Broad Street, for example, John Burgoyne, the British general defeated at Saratoga, stayed in the Georgian mansion at No. 24 as a prisoner of war in 1777. Benedict Arnold recovered at No. 28 from wounds received in the same battle. The James Vanderpoel House at No. 16, dating from 1820 and owned by the Columbia County Historical Society, is open to the public in the summer and contains period furniture and art.

 

But Kinderhook’s main claim to fame is Martin Van Buren, the eighth president, who talked up his hometown so relentlessly that political colleagues in Albany and Washington called him Old Kinderhook. Van Buren’s star has faded, but Kinderhook remembers him, and so does the National Park Service, which operates Lindenwald, his house two miles outside town, as a National Historic Site, carefully restored and open to the public for a surprisingly interesting tour.

 

The catchiest story about Van Buren (though you may not hear it on the house tour) links Old Kinderhook to the all-American expression “O.K.” Van Buren cheerfully embraced his nickname, and at some point took to signing letters “O.K.” In the 1840 presidential campaign, Van Buren’s supporters formed O.K. Clubs and used O.K. as their campaign slogan. Since it was just about at this time that O.K. slipped into the language as an affirmative, it’s tempting to connect the two, and many do. The Oxford English Dictionary, however, cites evidence that O.K. was a product of casual early 19th-century spelling and stood for “oll korrect.”

 

Either way, O.K. had staying power as an expression, but the William Henry Harrison campaign’s song, “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too,” spoiled Van Buren’s bid for re-election.

 

At Lindenwald, a three-story Federal house with Italianate modifications, rangers describe Van Buren the master politician — instrumental in developing American party politics and the Democratic Party and in the rise of Andrew Jackson, whom he served as vice president; Van Buren the unlucky president slammed by a national economic collapse almost as soon as he took office; and Van Buren the self-made man and elder statesman who entertained so many dignitaries that the front door of Lindenwald opened directly into a dining room with a table for 20.

 

On the tour, Van Buren emerges as human and likable. He grew up over his father’s tavern in Kinderhook, worked hard serving wealthy law clients and eventually was able to buy Lindenwald (coincidentally, the same house where Washington Irving was employed years earlier). He was a family man whose four sons and their assorted wives and children all moved into Lindenwald at various times. When one son was ill with tuberculosis, Van Buren had him moved to an adjoining bedroom so he could care for him.

 

After Van Buren died in 1862, his son John ran into financial troubles and had to sell the house. At one point, Lindenwald was in the hands of the Jerome family (Jennie Jerome would marry an Englishman and become the mother of Winston Churchill). Later the home had lives as a teahouse, a nursing home and an antiques shop before being acquired by the National Park Service, with 22 acres of the original estate, in 1974.

 

Just 200 yards or so north of Lindenwald is a park where well-marked trails widen and narrow, traversing stands of white pine, maple, elm and birch. It’s easy and pleasant to hike all four paths.

 

Connie Nooney, 57, a special education teaching assistant and Kinderhook native, recalled regarding Van Buren as a dubious celebrity while she was growing up. “Unlike Lincoln or Washington, there was no day off or official holiday celebrating Martin Van Buren,” she said. But after the Park Service refurbished Lindenwald, Kinderhook’s pride in its native son returned, and last month, the Friends of Lindenwald, a volunteer group, donated a statue of Old Kinderhook that now sits next to the bandstand on the village green. The Dutch Reformed church he attended and two houses where he worked as a legal apprentice and lawyer are on the village tour.

 

Besides the farmers’ market, Kinderhook has several small stores: a frame shop whose artist-owner specializes in renderings of local homes, an antiques store that sells country furniture, a rock shop that specializes in polished stones and fossils, a mother-and-daughter-owned bookstore, a health food store and a wine and spirits shop.

 

Two places in the center of town sell light meals: Bagel Tyme serves sandwiches, and the pi Café, open for lunch except Mondays and for dinner Thursday through Saturday, offers sandwiches, wraps and soups and casual American fare, like margarita shrimp. There is a picnic spot, too, tucked under the bridge that crosses Kinderhook Creek. And you’ll also find a picnic table at Lindenwald.

 

 

THE Columbia County Museum (5 Albany Avenue, Kinderhook; 518-758-9265; www.cchsny.org) is open year-round 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Mondays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays and noon to 4 p.m. on Sundays. Admission is free. A walking-tour brochure for Kinderhook is available under “history & tourism” at www.kinderhookconnection.com.

 

The recently restored Van Alen House (same telephone and Web site as the museum), a 1737 Dutch settlers’ homestead just north of Lindenwald on Route 9H, is open Memorial Day to Labor Day 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays and noon to 4 p.m. on Sundays. Admission is $3.

 

The visitor center at Lindenwald (Route 9H; 518-758-9689; www.nps.gov/mava) is open daily from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. from Memorial Day weekend through Oct. 31; guided tours are $5. On the 39 acres surrounding Lindenwald is a newly installed three-quarter-mile loop trail with 10 plaques explaining life at Lindenwald and nearby in Van Buren’s lifetime.