Abraham Glen House
The Abraham Glen House is a former residential home on Mohawk Avenue ( NY 5 ) in Scotia , New York . It is an 18th-century white wooden house that now houses a branch of the Schenectady County Public Library .
The house, built in the 1730s, is one of the few remaining examples of the heavy timber frame constructions of the Dutch colonists . It was extensively modernized at the beginning of the 20th century, whereby the basic shape and the original materials were largely retained. In 2004 the house was added to the National Register of Historic Places .
building
The house is located in Collins Park, on the north side of State Route 5, just west of the Western Gateway Bridge , which crosses the Mohawk River into nearby Schenectady . It is aligned in a north-south direction and is therefore diagonal to the street. Tall trees stand on different sides of the house; There is a small parking lot to the north, accessible from Collins Street. A baseball field is to the northeast.
The main wing is a two-and-a-half-storey, rectangular timber frame house with a steep pitched roof , the six by ten-meter basement of which is built from mortared field stones. Two wings, created later, extend at the northern end. The larger wing has one and a half floors and has a basement, the smaller wing has only one floor.
The individual half-timbered beams were connected to one another by slots and tenons . Rafters support the shingle roof covered with slate , which is broken through at both ends by brick chimneys and three bay windows on both sides to the east and west. A wraparound porch on the first floor has turned posts; it is closed in the east. The façade is made of different materials, with weather strips attached early and later shingles.
Inside, the ground floor consists of two large rooms with open fireplaces in their original position. The upstairs bedrooms were divided in the 1980s to create space for offices. The larger of the two northern wings has three rooms on the ground floor and five on the upper floor, which are accessible via a narrow hallway, the smaller side wing has only one room.
history
Scotia owes its name to Alexander Lindsey, the only one of the original founders of Schenectady who was not Dutch. Lindsey was a Scot who emigrated to Nieuw Nederland after he fled to the Netherlands . There he received land on the north bank of the Mohawk River.
After his death, his three sons divided up the property, which was named Scotia after Lindsey's country of birth , and changed their family name to Glen in honor of Scotland (this resulted in the town of which the area is a part being named Glenville ). One of these three sons later stated in his own will that a house should be built on his property, which his son Abraham received.
This house, the main part of the current structure, was built around 1730. Its anonymous architecture in the Dutch half-timbered house style ensured the steeply erect roof. Wall fragments in the basement indicate that at the time of its construction it probably had the usual open fire pits in the Dutch style.
The larger of the northern wings was added towards the end of the 18th century at a date that has not yet been determined. Glen's descendants owned the house until 1842 when it was sold to Charles and James Collins. They continued to farm on the property and broke ice from the nearby lake for cooling.
In 1880, James Collins converted the land around the house into a garden and parkland. When the last member of the family died in 1924, the Village acquired ownership of the property and five years later a public library was opened there. This has been part of the county's public library system since 1948. The interior of the building was renovated in the 1980s and the room layout was changed on the upper floors.
See also
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ A b c d e Raymond Smith: National Register of Historic Places nomination, Abraham Glen House ( English ) New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation . February 2004. Retrieved on September 21, 2009. ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )
Coordinates: 42 ° 49 ′ 27 " N , 73 ° 57 ′ 34" W.