The above notice followed the dissolution of the estate of Lawrence Van Alen, son of Luykas Van Alen, following probate of his estate in 1813. Missing from the sale announcement is any mention of the enslaved people who helped to create, maintain, and make prosperous this impressive farmstead. It is possible by this time the family had manumitted or sold most of the family’s slaves. Unfortunately, just like the newspaper advertisement, the historical record is largely silent concerning the fate of the many enslaved Africans who toiled at the farm. Archeology at the Luykas Van Alen farmhouse offers evidence of slave labor within the farmhouse and dramatic changes to the house in the period following gradual manumission in New York State.

In the Spring 2005 edition of de Halve Maen: The Journal of the Holland Society of New York, Sharon Palmer, former Executive Director of the Columbia County Historical Society, detailed Hartgen’s archeological fieldwork at the Luykas Van Alen House. The excavations were undertaken as part of a major restoration effort that included improvement to the drainage systems around the historic building and regrading the surrounding landscape. At the time of her writing, we had just finished washing hundreds of artifacts recovered from the digs with the help of numerous volunteers. The final report had not been completed nor had there been thorough analyses of the data collected. While the preliminary results were impressive, it was not until I delved further into the history of the house in the months following her article that a clearer and more interesting picture of the Van Alen family (and those who lived with them in the house) emerged.

The archeological record at the Van Alen House was at one time thought to be irretrievably lost after the 1960s, when the landscape was significantly altered with a bulldozer. And while our archeological excavations confirmed the damage, it also demonstrated that valuable information could still be unearthed. Artifacts from Native American settlement of the land before the time of Henry Hudson were discovered along with materials from the various Van Alen occupants and their slaves, servants and tenants from the 18th through the 20th century.

Artifacts from Native American settlement of the land before the time of Henry Hudson were discovered along with materials from the various Van Alen occupants and their slaves, servants and tenants from the 18th through the 20th century.

The Van Alens started farming the land in the early 18th century and eventually built a substantial brick farmhouse about 1737. The house was quickly expanded with a sizable addition on the north elevation sometime before the 1750s. The farmhouse swelled with family members and slaves, who assisted with both household chores and farm work.

At about this time, the need for agricultural surplus from the Hudson Valley was quickly expanding as Albany and New York City grew. With the French and Indian Wars, a large number of British troops and American militia forces, also in constant need of supplies and food, gathered in the valley. The rich farmland of the Kinderhook area helped to meet these demands; as a result the Van Alen family expanded their farm by tilling new fields and raising additional animals. Like many in the Hudson Valley, Luykas Van Alen relied on enslaved labor to take advantage of this economic opportunity. The near constant warfare of the 18th century not only drove the demand for food, but also for African slaves to replace the able-bodied men fighting and dying along the frontier.

Luykas’ son Lourens L. Van Alen inherited the house and farm circa 1759. Unlike his father’s household, he and his wife had 11 children. By the time of the 1790 census, most of these children were grown and had moved on to their own households.

The exact number of slaves that lived in the house is a matter of some speculation. According to the 1790 census, there were over 600 slaves in the town of  Kinderhook alone. The earliest-settled, rural “Dutch” towns of the Hudson Valley—Kinderhook and other agricultural towns such as Claverack and several in Ulster County—had the highest number of slaves in the state. In 1790, Lourens lived in the house that included five family members and eight slaves, by the count of the federal census-taker. It is not clear that the enumeration of slaves included children or just the adults, so the number could have been higher. In the 1800 census, David Van Alen is listed as the head of this household and his evidently widowed father, Lourens, is living with David’s young family; they still had eight slaves. By the 1810 census, there were three slaves in the household; and in 1820 only one.

The architecture of the home clearly reflects the need to accommodate a significant number of slaves within the home. The slaves would have slept in the upper chambers on the second or third floors or within the basement. The basement would also have been the location of many domestic chores  including cooking, cleaning and laundry, among other tasks. Modern evidence within the architectural fabric of the house for a basement kitchen includes remnants of the hearth and bake oven. Today, the basement kitchen is no longer plainly visible from the interior. However, as you stand on the north side of the house and look at the north wall, you can see differences in the brickwork where the chimney of the basement fireplace was removed. Since the basement hearth stood under the jambless fireplace on the first floor, two separate flues were necessary. To accommodate the large chimney mass, a portion of the lower flue once projected beyond the wall.

So what happened to the basement kitchen and its external chimney, and when did it happen? The first part of the question is a matter of some speculation, but reflects a trend seen in many houses in the Hudson Valley. With gradual abolition in New York between 1799 and 1827, houses designed to accommodate slaves were substantially altered when hired labor or household labor (usually in the form of family women and children) were utilized instead. 

Slavery continued until 1827 in the Kinderhook area. Peter Van Ness, a neighbor of the Van Alen farm, purchased a notice in the Hudson Bee offering a $10 reward for his runaway slave named “George” in the fall of 1804. Did the Van Alen family sell their slaves, manumit them, or did the slaves simply run away, as they did next door? However it happened, by the time David and his young family occupied the house, there is only one slave left in the household. Largely without slave labor, the family moved the kitchen from the basement to the first floor, likely for the sake of convenience.

This scenario fits well with the archeological data from the Van Alen House and similar structures in the Hudson Valley. Targeted excavations on the north side of the house where the chimney once stood helps to shed light on the dating and process. Beneath the upper layers of disturbed soils from the 1960s grading operations, archeologists found buried layers of debris and fill that could be dated based on the accompanying artifacts. Intact portions of the original stone foundation of the chimney lie just about two feet below the modern surface. After the basement kitchen hearth and protruding flue of the brick chimney were removed by the Van Alens, the wall was reconstructed with new brick and the resulting space filled with stone and brick rubble. Over time, the hole slumped and more soil was added. Taken together, the evidence suggests the chimney was removed around the turn of the 18th century, with several periods of repair and landscaping around the 1820s.

Combining the results of excavations in the front yard (east side) of the house, with an investigation by Hartgen in 1998 from the rear yard, provides even more insight. Although the front yard had been disturbed by the excavator in the 1960s, pockets of undisturbed and buried deposits remained. These were often filled with ceramics that predominately date from the 18th century; such as creamware, English delft, Westerwald stoneware, white salt-glazed stoneware, and the like. Or to think about it another way, the artifacts derived from the time when slaves were responsible for the majority of the household chores. Further, these deposits seemed to be aligned with the cellar entrance along the central portion of the house complex.

It is likely these ceramics were part of a sheet midden (or trash dump) that developed when food scraps and other household waste were thrown into the farmyard for the chickens and the pigs. Decidedly missing from the assemblage was a large number of later 19th-century ceramics and artifacts, or from the time when the family took over the domestic duties.

The artifacts included architectural debris, such as an original Klopperklink door handle and fragments of Delft tile that likely adorned the jambless fireplaces on the first floor. In addition, there was a wide variety of tablewares present in the archeological record from simple slipped-earthenware plates to Chinese export porcelain teacups. Food remains in the form of bones, teeth and shell were also common. Smoking tobacco was obviously a past-time of the family, and perhaps slaves, as evidenced by the large number of white-ball clay pipe stems and bowls. The Van Alen family purchased a variety of goods for the home, but the slaves were largely responsible for butchering, preparing, cooking and serving the meals on many of the platters and plates that were found. They also would have cleaned up after the meals and been charged with throwing away the scraps and broken items in the house.

Later 19th-century ceramics and household items were more commonly found in the 1998 excavations centered in the rear yard of the house. The later trash dumps originated from the western door at the back of the house, which provided access to and from the first floor 19th-century kitchen. Virtually absent were any ceramics from the 18th century.

The archeology directly evidences profound changes in the activities within the house. The disposal of kitchen waste moved from the east side of the house to the west side around 1800, the same time the kitchen fireplace was removed, and simultaneous with the likely manumission of the family slaves. When slaves were no longer part of the Van Alen household, the family found the previous architectural arrangement ill-suited to their needs. As a result, the kitchen was brought to the first floor, its chimney disassembled, the wall repaired and the cellar doorway no longer served as the primary access point. Alterations to the fabric of the house reflect the profound shift in domestic labor within the house and changing nature of society at large, as enslaved people were gradually freed.