In a world where teens hang out for hours in their bedrooms playing video games and a household may have three or four computers and several TVs, consider the parlor of Jacobus Dyckman. In the early 19^th century, Dyckman’s family, servants, and one slave – up to 10 people – would likely have confined many of their activities on a cold winter evening to this parlor, seeking to stay close to the fireplace’s warmth. On a December evening, the only light was candlelight. And with no television blaring, the howl of wintry winds would sound very close indeed.

You can imagine this experience when you see the parlor of the Dyckman house in New York City’s Inwood neighborhood today. Here, near a Rite Aid pharmacy, PJ Wine store, and apartment buildings, the Dyckman home remains, at 4881 Broadway at 204^th Street. It is Manhattan’s last Dutch Colonial-style farmhouse. Open to the public as the Dyckman Farmhouse Museum, it offers a rare look at how a farm family lived in then-rural Northern Manhattan in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries.

That any dwellings in the United States from that time period survive is precious. In the case of an early farmhouse remaining in the midst of New York City it’s almost miraculous. It’s also a testament to the pluck and devotion of two Dyckman family descendants who decided the house must be preserved when rapid change came to Inwood in the early 20^th century. Today it’s a place to witness and ponder the nexus of family life, class, and slavery within one household during the nation’s earliest days.

Walking on New York City’s streets in the midst of thousands and thousands of buildings, one can easily forget that anyone ever farmed in Manhattan – much less on a large farm. The Dyckman farm covered some 250 acres stretching from the Harlem River to the Hudson River. On Manhattan’s modern street grid, that’s roughly from the “190s” to 213^th Street.

A 17^th Century Beginning

Jacobus’ ancestor, Jan Dyckman, came to New Amsterdam in the 1660s, settling in Northern Manhattan. His grandson, William, inherited the Dyckman land. As the British occupied Manhattan during the Revolutionary War, William Dyckman and his family, who were supporters of the American cause, fled their home for upstate New York.

When William returned after the war’s end, he found his family’s house destroyed, the farm fields in ruin, and the forest denuded of trees. William chose to build a new farmhouse around 1784 in a different location, along Kingsbridge Road, which is now Broadway, and he replanted crops. This house, which William’s son Jacobus inherited in the 1790s, remains today. It has the Dutch Colonial-style gambrel roof and double doors.

The Dyckman house provides an up-close sense of daily life in the rural, sparsely settled northern tip of Manhattan before the subways arrived in the early 20^th century and developers constructed big apartment buildings. In the early 19^th century, this area had a couple of farms, a smattering of houses along Kingsbridge Road, and a few establishments such as a tavern near the Harlem River. In those days, Dyckman’s farm surely was a place unto itself with Lower Manhattan worlds away.

The farm prospered under Jacobus Dyckman’s ownership, but the word “prosperity” was not one that came to mind when I walked from room to room in the basement and first floor, which capture the period of 1815-1820. At the time, according to museum records, about 10 people lived in the house: Jacobus, three of his sons, Jacobus’ grandson, his niece, an unidentified white woman, a free black woman, a free black boy, and one male slave. (Jacobus’ wife, Hannah, died in 1814.) An estimated 20 to 30 others lived within three other houses located across the farmland, including laborers and other Dyckman family members.

This is one of the most striking things about the farmhouse: 10 people shared it in very close quarters. The house is very simple, with wide-plank wood floors and leaded-glass windows. Its first floor has two parlors, where dining and socializing took place, and two small private bedrooms, with a few basic furnishings of the period. (Its second floor at the time had a large sleeping space where many in the household slept, affording little privacy. It’s also possible that the free black woman, free black boy, and male slave slept in one of the small bedrooms or in a kitchen space.)

Looking at its austere rooms – and perhaps it was because of the gray December day on which I visited – I thought about what it must’ve been like to be inside when the elements were rough and the nights long.

A Difficult Winter in New York

The winter of 1819 was one such time, a particularly harsh winter in New York City, as the museum’s literature notes. Powerful snowstorms hit New York. Unlike a 21^st century New Yorker, who could hop on the subway or shop along Broadway, the Dyckman household would have found travel very difficult, and at times impossible. In fact, the winter storms likely hampered visiting with family or friends in Lower Manhattan or Westchester County, as the Dyckman family were wont to do on a holiday such as New Year’s Day.

This knowledge gave me a whole different sense of the large furnished parlor with the fireplace, of this one room as a refuge protecting the family and its servants and slave against the elements. When cold and difficult weather struck, those living here would have spent much of their time in this room, relying not only on the fireplace’s heat but on the warmth brought about by a large number of people congregating in one room. What would such days and evenings be like? Was it more often trying than enjoyable, or vice versa? How much did activities and possessions such as stories, games, and toys provide relief and pleasure? How did the Dyckmans treat the slave who lived amongst them? These are the kinds of thoughts that walking through the farmhouse engenders.

In the cellar, the winter kitchen is another stark exhibit of how different life was then. The farmhouse contained two kitchens, winter and summer (which is closed to the public). The winter kitchen is a dark place with timbered ceiling and a huge fireplace along one wall. It would have helped keep the house warm in cold temperatures. One can picture servants working long hours here to prepare meals for the household.

After Jacobus Dyckman died in 1832, his bachelor sons and then later descendants continued to farm the land in Northern Manhattan. In the 1870s, the farmhouse left family ownership. By the early 20^th century, the farmhouse was in disrepair, a dilapidated shell left over from a seemingly distant time as the neighborhood around it changed. In 1915, two Dyckman sisters, Mary Alice Dyckman Dean and Fannie Fredericka Dyckman Welch, purchased the house as a means of preserving it. They were the daughters of the last Dyckman to grow up in the farmhouse, Isaac Michael Dyckman.

The sisters and their husbands, curator Bashford Dean and architect Alexander McMillan Welch, restored and furnished the house and sought to show in it their romanticized sense of New York’s Dutch heritage and a way of life now gone. Thus, the house has many layers of history, as the museum notes, from the simple structure of the 18^th century to changes as the farm prospered in the 19^th century to early 20^th century alterations to make it a museum. The second-floor bedroom, reflecting the 1916 period of the house’s opening as a museum, contrasts greatly with the visible first-floor bedroom from the early 19^th century. It has plush fabrics and textiles, artwork, and more furniture compared with the first floor’s sparer space with just a couple of furnishings and bare wooden floor.

“Relic Hunters”

Once they completed the restoration, the Dyckman family donated the house and the adjoining grounds to the City of New York as a museum. The house is owned by the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation and is a member of the Historic House Trust, a not-for-profit organization that works with the city to restore and promote a collection of 22 historic houses and sites within the city.

The Dyckman sisters and their husbands were hardly the only ones concerned about preserving Northern Manhattan’s earlier history as urbanization and the subways transformed the area, and the farmhouse museum tells some of this quirky story, too. Two amateur archaeologists who were both engineers, Reginald Pelham Bolton and William Calver, conducted digs in Inwood and surrounding areas in the late 19th and early 20^th centuries as they became concerned that construction of the coming subways, new streets, and residences would destroy any traces of earlier life. Known as the “relic hunters,” they found thousands of artifacts of Native Americans, Revolutionary War soldiers, and colonial-era inhabitants in New York’s Inwood and Washington Heights.

Bolton’s and Calver’s salvage efforts unearthed some 5,000 objects. Today, you can see a number of these objects in the Relic Room, created as part of the original museum. The farmhouse museum is surveying this vast collection in hopes of illuminating more of the story of the digs and the objects found.

Like its unobtrusive presence among the large stores, delis, banks, and apartment buildings of Inwood, the Dyckman Farmhouse Museum is a too-often-unseen treasure of New York City’s history. Those who visit it today range from European visitors to the city, many of them Dutch or German, to school groups or to people who live and work in the neighborhood and just decide one day to walk in and see exactly what lies inside, according to Emily Holloway, the Dyckman Museum’s education director. Among the most popular questions of visiting children: Is the house haunted? Does it have ghosts? (No.)

Though many walk right by it or may not know of it, the Dyckman Farmhouse Museum is well worth a stop in, and is an excellent addition to an exploration of Northern Manhattan that can include the Cloisters, Fort Tryon Park, and Inwood Hill Park. A good way to explore the Dyckman Farmhouse and the Historic House Trust’s 21 other similar houses and sites of cultural, historical, and archaeological significance in New York is to pick up the Trust’s “Historic House Passport” brochure, which gives information on all of them. It’s definitely a handy guide to an experience of 17^th-, 18^th-, and 19^th-century life within New York’s 21^st-century city.

Holloway is one of two full-time staffers (Susan De Vries is the museum director) whose work is not only the overseeing, promotion, and interpretation of the museum spaces but continual research, as time permits. Jacobus Dyckman and those living in the farmhouse at that time left no diaries, letters, or other written materials from which to help construct and interpret the stories of their lives. So as one works in the farmhouse, Holloway says, she can’t help but wonder about what Jacobus Dyckman and those living in the farmhouse as well as the later descendants and their spouses were really like.

It’s the kind of thought that comes easily when walking through a 224-year-old farmhouse in Manhattan.