Holland and Cherryderry

Coldengham was largely self-supporting. The farm grew flax and raised sheep to produce linen and wool that was carded, spun and woven on site. The girls in the family learned to sew as well as knit and with occasional help from itinerant sewers and, I imagine, the family slaves, produced all of the everyday clothing. The ability of the farm to be self-supporting was probably also due in large part to the use of slave labor, mentioned in a letter of Alice Colden (Jane’s mother) from 1732 as “four Negro men and two wenches.”

Some fabrics were imported from abroad including Holland cloth, a fine linen sometimes striped with a colored cotton warp and named for the country where it was first manufactured. Holland was used for women’s dresses and men’s shirts and letters show that Jane’s father was sent 24 yards of Holland for that purpose by his aunt Elizabeth Hill. It has also been recorded that Governor Stuyvesant was christened in an “infant shirt, of fine Holland, edged with narrow lace.” In the Boston Records for the year 1760 “18 shifts one dozn of them very fine hollan” were listed as lost in the Boston fire attesting to the value placed on the imported fabric.

Cherryderry is a striped or checked woven cloth of silk and cotton and has various names including “charadary” and “carridary” which more closely reflect it’s origins in India than the further anglicized “cherryderry.” It was imported beginning in the late 17th c. and was used for women’s dresses and handkerchiefs. It was later manufactured in England but there are no references to it being worn at ceremonial events or mentioned much at all although it is part of a 1740 price list. There it sells for .31 per yard and is the least expensive of all the fabrics including coarse muslin. The only historical reference I find is of a runaway slave caught in Boston in 1728 while wearing a “narrow striped Cherrederry gown.”

Tin Brook

The name Tin Brook appeared in town records as early as 1774 and it has been suggested it came from an early Dutch landowner named John Tinne, Thinne or Tinbrook. If this is the case John probably would have been a neighbor of the Colden family given the dates, the length of the brook and size of the Colden property. Another possible source for the name is the combination of two Saxon words: tinn, meaning thin or small and broc meaning running water smaller than a river which seems a pretty good explanation. Whatever the origins of the name, it is still called Tin Brook and it's path is remarkably similar to that shown on early maps. I'm finding this to be very helpful as I follow it from the source in wetlands and vernal pools located to the south of current day Coldenham, making it's way past the original homestead and cemetery, on towards the houses of Cadwallader's sons and then meandering over to the Wallkill River to the west. As I navigate my way through residential developments, commercial sites and working farms to reach the brook, I find foundations, stone walls, and very old trees, some of which join Tin Brook as part of my Looking for Jane Colden collection. Although I haven't found any evidence yet, I keep an eye out for signs of the canal Jane's father built using the waters of the brook to move materials around Coldengham and establishing Tin Brook as part of the first canal in New York.

3000 Acres

So exactly where was Coldenham? There are old maps with dates of 1749, 1755 and of course Cadawaller’s own map dated 1760, that have Coldenham clearly marked but give no indication of the boundaries for the 3000 acre patent granted to Cadawallader. I asked Joe Devine from Montgomery what’s known about the property lines and he said this is a question the Coldenham Preservation and Historical Society is trying to answer.

More recently I came upon a map created by Claude Joseph Sauthier that was published in 1779. This means that the map was being created in the years shortly after Cadawallader Sr. sold the entire property to his son. This map differs from its’ predecessors in that it is very detailed and focuses on property boundaries. Coldenham and its’ neighbors are identified, as are geographic details and the roads of that time period. Tin Brook can again be clearly seen and the east/west road running through the property probably closely follows present day Route 17K. I think the road running to the south is what is now named Maple St. seeing as it is the road closest to the site of the original Colden home. All this seemed really helpful until I started comparing the 1779 map to our satellite map and began to see how the proportions don’t match which makes sense given early mapping methods but is disappointing none the less.

I gave up the idea that I would be able to trace the property lines from an old to new map and decided the boundaries would slowly reveal themselves as I found more locations known to be part of the original property. I’ve marked what I currently know. The single red square shows the site of the Cadwallader Jr. mansion ruins and the pair of squares shows the family cemetery and my best guess at the location of the original Colden home.

No. 93

The Jane Colden manuscript containing her over 300 descriptions and drawings of Hudson Valley plants is held in the collection of the British Natural History Museum. In 1963 the Garden Clubs of Dutchess and Orange counties in New York published a reproduction of Jane’s manuscript with a selection of her original entries. It’s wonderful that we have this for reference and it enables us to read her detailed entries for the approximately 60 plants selected. Unfortunately the reproductions are somewhat crude and show none of the subtlety described by Dr. Karen Reeds, a Linnaeus expert, who spent an afternoon comparing the original with the facsimile. According to Dr. Reeds the original displays a delicate line quality and watercolor washes that have been lost in the reproduction. Fortunately Jane’s text is reproduced both in her original handwriting and in transcription, allowing her careful observation and powers of description to shine through. Her entry for Pokeweed concludes with the following:

The flowers grow in Spickes upon the top, of small naked bran-

ches, set opposite to the Leaves, each flower upon a Foot Stalk

set alternately of with two or three small colour’d Leaves, set

upon the foot Stalks. They are white at first opening, and

likewise their foot Stalks & the Stalk of the spike, but

as the fruit ripens, they all turn a dark red.

Flower in July

The Phytolacca Root is very useful in the use of cancirs

some curious persons in England have endeavoured to propogate this

plant by the Seed braigth from America, but could not produce

any plant from the Seed.

The propagation from this plant is maket in America in the

Dung of birds. For this reason it may be necessary, to give

in Europe the berries to birds, & to plant the Seeds with

the Dung of the fowls, through which they pass intire

Jane’s handwriting is beautiful and the handwritten pages permit me to imagine her at work carefully recording her observations. Unfortunately, the harshness of the 1963 reproductions prevent me from following this flight of imagination very far so, using her handwritten entries, I have made new pages for Jane’s manuscript. The page here is entry No. 93. Phytolacca decandra Poke Weed.

At Home

The American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is the perfect place to look at colonial American furnishings. Besides the period rooms, there is open storage that translates into rows of glass cases filled with multiple examples of household furnishings. The computer banks allow for specific searches and when asked for what was made prior to 1800 came up with lots of examples of silver tankards and spoons, pewter plates and porrigers, all produced in New York City. There is also a decent sampling of Chinese import plates and platters and English porcelain that I would imagine Jane’s parents, being Scottish and also Royalist, might favor.

I was struck with how beautiful the objects are and realized I was responding not to the design but to the materials. Everything was metal, glass, wood, ceramic, or natural fibers. The computers were the only plastic objects to be seen.

Father Daughter Botany

Jane began identifying and describing plants at the request of her father who himself had been involved in botanical study before abandoning it for other projects. When he returned to the field in his sixties, he felt he was too old and eyesight too poor to continue and he turned to Jane to carry out the work. While it seems Cadwallader’s goals in pursuing botany had at least partly to do with securing himself a name in intellectual circles, Jane’s goals are less easy to define. Initially she seems reluctant and in her first year only described 12 plants, primarily common ones easily found nearby. This seems a weak attempt to perhaps please her ambitious father. In 1753, however, she described 140 plants, all but 8 in extensive detail and then continued to collect in swamps, woods and thickets through 1756 when the Seven Year War made in unsafe to continue. She mastered the Linnaean system and proved to have remarkable powers of observation and description surpassing her father’s efforts in both quantity and detail. In a period when gentlewomen were expected to be conversant about the new sciences primarily to provide an attentive audience, Jane took on the actual work of scientific enquiry and from all evidence, found that work thrilling.

The Orchard

The Colden family cemetery once sat in an extensive orchard located to the east of the original Colden house. According to the letters and papers of Jane’s father the orchard produced cherries, pears, nectarines, peaches and later grew plum and apricot trees that were a gift from John Bartram. The apple varieties included Spitzenberghs, Newtown Pippins, Golden Russets, Pomroy, Golden Rennet and Kentish Codlings. The full name of the Spitzenbergh was probably Esopus Spitzenbergh, an apple that was found in the early 18^th century in the Ulster County town of Esopus not very far north of Coldengham and very close to where I live.

Apple trees are grown either from seeds or by grafting. Seedlings often stray widely from their genetic origins producing an array of apple types often unusable for much besides cider of which American settlers drank a good deal. Sometimes, however, a seedling grows that produces a superior apple and that tree would be grafted to others to produce the now sought after apple. Esopus Spitzenberghs were such a type and it’s said to have been the favorite apple of Thomas Jefferson. Where this information comes from I’m not sure, but I do see the trees listed, amongst others, in his farm and garden diaries. The Colden family obtained both seedlings and apple scions for grafting from their Hudson Valley neighbors and ate the apples fresh, dried for winter, and turned into hard cider.

You won’t find Esopus Spitzenburgh or other evocatively named old varieties in your grocery store. Most commercial apples come from the same small group of parents making for uniformity in both genes and taste. This makes apples particularly vulnerable to attack, similar to the attack on the potato in Ireland in the 1840’s and eliminates the variety of tastes available from a diverse apple crop. Fortunately, there is a sea change taking place in the way we think about food and how it’s grown and distributed. In fact this sea change in many ways returns us to the way food was grown and eaten during Jane Colden’s life; producing diverse crops that are appropriate to the local climate and consuming it not far from it’s source.

It’s now possible to buy heirloom variety fruit trees in nurseries. In current nursery catalogues and foody websites the Esopus Spitzenburgh is described as aromatic, spicy and crisp, or having floral notes and hints of peach and perhaps pineapple. Sounds delicious. I wonder if Jane, having eaten this apple, would agree.