Queenswalk: The Vander Ende-Onderdonk House in Ridgewood

The peaceful quiet of Gravesend Bay was broken forever on September 3, 1609, when Henry Hudson, sailing for the Dutch East India Company, dropped anchor near modern day Coney Island. Hudson met and traded with the native Canarsee people, and then had to take off when one of his men went exploring along Coney Island, where they were specifically told not to go, and got himself killed. Packing up and leaving the area, Hudson began his historic voyage up the river that now bears his name, and got all the way to where Albany would be established, before turning back, and sailing back to Europe. He took back furs, and other traded goods, along with maps of the new lands.

When he told his employers about the mighty river and fertile and beautiful lands and natural harbors, the Dutch East India Company sent men to build forts and trading posts, and then towns, farms and villages up the Hudson River to Albany, in 1614, and back down to New Amsterdam and the six original towns of Kings County, and further out onto Long Island by 1624. They also claimed parts of Connecticut, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. It wasn’t the spice and silk cities of Asia, which is what Hudson was looking for, but it wasn’t bad. Not bad at all. New Netherlands was the New World’s first company town, founded not by people seeking a new nation, but by businessmen looking for new resources and new markets. And it has ever been thus, here in New York.

Pieter Stuyvesant was chosen to be Governor of New Amsterdam in 1647. He was a very efficient governor; the last Dutch governor before New Amsterdam was won by the English, and became New York. We’ve named neighborhoods, schools, and any number of things in his honor, but history tells us that he was in fact, a very unlikable, intolerant, racist, anti-Semite, and generally an awful and stubborn person. In spite of his many faults, he loved the colony he would call home for the rest of his life, and he could be very helpful and generous to Dutch farmers and townsmen who were looking for land to settle down on. The land the Vander Ende-Onderdonk House sits on was granted to a man named Hendrick Barentze Smidt in 1662, the deed signed by “Old Silver Leg” himself. Smidt was a silversmith as well as a prosperous landowner. One wonders if he worked on Stuyvesant’s prosthetic limb, a wooden peg wrapped in silver bands.

At any rate, after the British won New Amsterdam from the Dutch in 1664, Stuyvesant went back to his beloved Bouwerie farm, where he died 1672. The Smidt house was on land that was on the disputed border between Dutch Boswijk and English Middleburgh, later Newtown. The former was in Breukelen, the latter in Queens County. This will be important to our story, so don’t forget that. The Smidt property had a small house on it, built before 1660, but it wasn’t until 1700 that Paulus and Jannetje Vander Ende family purchased the property, and set about building the a more permanent house, on the footprint and foundation of the old house.

The Vander Ende family had slaves, so they more than likely had a great deal to do with the building of a vernacular stone house with a wooden Dutch gambrel roof. The style is actually a hybrid of English and Dutch building styles, as represented by the very symmetrical English Georgian central hall with a room on each side. The Dutch contribution was the steep gambrel roofline with overhanging eaves, creating a new style, uniquely American, and a rare survivor within New York City’s borders.

The Vander Ende house was smack in the middle of what was called “The Disputed Territory;” a strip of land that was claimed by both Dutch Bushwick and English Newtown. Between 1661 and 1769, the two towns fought over the dividing line, each claiming the territory, and thus the Vander Ende property was on its tax rolls. Sometimes it was on both. In 1769, they finally straightened it out, and a large boulder on the property, known as Arbitration Rock, marks the place where a compromise was finally reached. The Vander Ende house, along the old Ancient Highway, now Flushing Avenue, was the line, and it was, at least then, in the county of Queens.

The Vander Ende house was passed from the parents on to a daughter also named Jennetje, who married a Long Island-born man of French Huguenot heritage named Moses Beadle. He died during the American Revolution, and the house then passed to his son. He had married a Remsen, one of the oldest families in the former New Amsterdam colony. By 1805, some of the land had been sold off, and the house passed out of the family. It was bought by the Adrian Onderdonk and his wife Ann Wyckoff in 1821. Onderdonk came from a fifth generation Dutch family out on Long Island, and Ann Wyckoff was from another old Dutch family as venerable in Brooklyn history as the Remsen’s. They owned several other properties nearby, including farms and houses in the town.

The Onderdonks probably added the frame addition to the house, and put in the interior woodwork and fireplace, and other decorative interior additions, turning it from a rural cottage to a Colonial era suburban house. Ann Wyckoff Onderdonk lived here until her death in 1863. Upon the parent’s deaths, the children were the ones who subdivided the land and began selling off lots. Gertrude Onderdonk Schoonmaker, the eldest daughter, was the last Onderdonk to live here, and she sold the property, which by now was only the house and the very large yard around it, in 1912. She died in 1915.

By the 20th century, this part of Ridgewood was no longer suburban, it was industrial, and the house was now in the middle of Flushing Avenue’s busy corridor of small businesses. Amazingly enough, there was still a cluster of 18th century farmhouses along Flushing Avenue, a group that included the Onderdonk house. Between 1912 and 1924, the house belonged to Louis Gmelin who had a stable and a glass scrapworks here, where he collected and resold scrap glass, including the waste pieces from the manufacture of Tiffany-style glass, which was all sorted and shipped to Pittsburgh to be melted down and re-used. The dormers on the house were added during Gmelin’s ownership of the property.

During the 1930s and ‘40s, there was a lot of attention paid to the old farmhouses on Flushing Avenue, and the Onderdonk house was photographed and studied by several organizations and individuals, including the Historic American House Survey and the Federal Writer’s Project. The house was included in “Pre-Revolutionary Dutch Houses and Families” by Rosalie Fellows Bailey, and “Old Dutch Houses of Brooklyn” by Maud Esther Dilliard. It was also mentioned in the 1939 “New York City Guide.” In 1937, the State of New York did some more tweaking with the borders, and moved to border of Brooklyn back, so that the Onderdonk house now and forever would be a part of Queens. They also buried Arbitration Rock under new street pavement. It would be lost for another sixty years.

In 1924, Louis Gmelin sold the property to the American Moninger Greenhouse Manufacturing Company. They used it as an office and caretaker’s house. In 1944, they constructed a brick Neo-Federal addition which covered the front of the house, and destroyed the wooden addition. The rest of the property was taken up by a factory building, lumber and steel sheds and an open storage yard. The property remained in industrial use after that, and among the companies there was one that made spacecraft parts for the Suisse-O-Matic Company.

In 1973, all of the other factory buildings on the property were torn down, leaving only the house. Local residents rallied to save the house from being torn down as well, by now it was the only old farmhouse left on Flushing Avenue. The others, recorded in the 1930s, were all gone. The house was saved, but in 1975, it burned almost to the ground in a suspicious fire. The stone walls were intact, but the fire had burned the wooden upper structure and interior, and the roof had collapsed. While it was still a ruin, it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, in 1977, and the property was deeded to the Ridgewood Historical Society.

Fortunately, those surveys and photographs from the 1930s and ‘40s proved invaluable to recreating the house. The firm of Giorgio Cavaglieri prepared a Historic Structure Survey in 1979, and reconstructed the house between 1980 and 1981. He took the house back to its residential state, getting rid of the 20th century dormers and the other changes made to the house after the Onderdonk’s residency. The stone walls are the original house, but the rest of the building, including the interior, has been re-created, thanks to detailed historical records.

The land around the house was allowed to resemble the farmland it once was, with grass, trees and flowers. In the 1990s, after a seven year archeological search, Arbitration Rock was found under the ground beneath Onderdonk Avenue. In December of 2001, a large crane lifted it out of the ground and placed it in the yard of the Onderdonk House, where it remains today, only a few hundred feet from its original site. The Vander Ende-Onderdonk house was now complete. Federal, state and city funds paid for it, as did fundraising by the Historical Society, preservation organizations, and the Ridgewood community. Today, it is open for individuals and groups, with plenty of educational programs for children, teaching them about 17th and 18th century life on Long Island. The Vander Ende-Onderdonk House is now a beautiful and quite picturesque house museum; a bit of country in busy Ridgewood, Queens.

The Vander Ende-Onderdonk house is located at 1820-1836 Flushing Avenue, in Ridgewood. The website, with visiting hours and programs, as well as other photographs, is here: www.onderdonkhouse.org. Please support our house museums with your attendance and donations. Our history depends on it. GMAP

(Photo:Jim Henderson for Wikimedia)