New Paltz is a monument to the Dutch, English and French Huguenot enslavers and their enslaved and post-emancipation indentured workforce. Reckoning is an ongoing process, both nationally and locally. The two cellar windows of the restored Abraham Hasbrouck House on Huguenot Street, for example, vented the below-ground kitchen where the slaves worked and slept.
The restoration was paid for by the extant Hasbrouck family. Like other Huguenot descendants, they have a family association. Though their historical roots in France are modest, and they were persecuted and massacred as Protestants in a Catholic country, by 1760 the settlers were already wealthy and prominent. Their property ledgers included slaves.
Centuries later, they commissioned what seems to be a fabricated coat of arms, an emblem of status we associate more with the Old World than the New. Colin Powell did the same when he retired from government. In fact, anyone can do it.
“Museums are fundamentally conservative,” Kate Eagen Johnson, a history consultant, told us at a webinar during the pandemic. She specializes in material artifacts, all of which tell a story. She investigates, reconstructs, and sometimes commissions replicas.
All such restoration is a very long process requiring patience, she says. “The past is past, and they [the museums that hire her] want it to stay that way.”
She went on to explain that the slaves, who lived in the cellar kitchens in the Hasbrouck House, were referred to as “the kitchen family,” a euphemism. So, too, is any illusion that the slaves were welcomed into the family as equals, or that having only two, three or four slaves in a household was any different than enslaving humans on a southern plantation.
Neil Larson, an architectural historian well known in Ulster County for the documentation and restoration of stone houses, revealed that the doors leading from the main house to the kitchen cellars in the Abraham Hasbrouck House were often kept locked at night. “Much that is said about how humanely white families treated their slaves, there still was a need for security .… Kitchens were a space of isolation,” he explained. Slave uprisings and slave runaways were feared by the enslavers for good reason, there were many — in Haiti, in Jamaica, in New York City in 1741.
The process of re-interpretation of the historical narrative has been slow — albeit steady — at Historic Huguenot Street, perhaps because the individual families must sign off on changes. There is no evidence of re-interpretation in the temporary sign tipping on its post outside the Abraham Hasbrouck house, which only describes the architectural history of restoration. And there is no mention of the two cellar windows venting the below-ground kitchen where the slaves worked and slept. The words slave and enslaver are entirely absent from the text.
Descendants of the enslaved population in New Paltz are hard to find and therefore cannot participate in this discussion, although the new Dr. Margaret Wade-Lewis Black History Research and Cultural Center on Broadhead Avenue will most certainly weigh in, as will the SUNY New Paltz Black Studies Department.
Carol Bergman is a well-known journalist and blogger who resides in New Paltz.
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