DeJoux House

This weekend I met Bernie who has a brush hog. He came highly recommended by our tree/garden man Ryan Petit. Within 24 hours of meeting us he was on the property clearing 10 acres of brambles. Daniel was there to experience (and document it) I had to live vicariously through iphone photos. I think it looks amazing and when it grows into a meadow in the spring it will look fantastic.

Since I've been looking at Maps I found this great resource of Maps from 1875. Almost every town or village of Ulster County is catalogued in this atlas by FW Beer . The house is listed right near the boundary as H.Minard. This is one of the names on the deeds of the house when we bought it. By this time the road has switched to the other side of the house (vs. the 1790 map) as it is today. This led me to a wonderful book called The history of New Paltz and its old families which has some fantastic maps of the area and some interesting references to the Deyo House in Springtown. On page 120 of this book is our reference to the origin of the name Deyo as De Joux. Page 275 mentions Christoffel as the son of Hendricus Deyo and locates him in Springtown. It also says his son David who is the D. Deyo mentioned above. On page 95 and 97 of the same book is reference to the house being listed on the 1765 list of freeholds and inhabitants (charging 15 poounds in Tax for the property...

The previous owner gave us a map from 1790 that showed the house. In 1790 the house was identified as being owned by D. Deyo. This makes a lot of sense as Christoffel and Deborah's first child was called David and he was baptised on 19th of February 1758 in New Paltz Church. In the review of taxes and inhabitants of New Paltz in 1765 the house is also identified as having three adults living at the property. Since Davids brother Jerzok was only one year old he was likely not counted (being born in 1764) and his sister Lydia was not born until 1766 (again based on baptism records in New Paltz church). When you look at this map in comparison to the map on Bing maps it is amazing how little the river has changed course. You can still see the two little tributaries that flow to the Wall Kill river. With the Magic of Photoshop you can see how accurate this map was and how the the house marked D.Deyo is clearly our new property. It also shows how the old road originally ran closer ...

Last weekend was lightweight in comparison to what we did this weekend. We started out simply tidying up. Although the house was 'broom clean' there was still a lot of dirt/cobwebs, dust, etc so we started cleaning in the room with the beehive oven. The fun started when we opened the old cast iron stove and found the remains of three squirrels and two birds that had obviously been there for some time. (Note to self, need to put a metal guard over the top of the chimney). It was like some weird recipe/concoction/spell which was very appropriate for the day which was Halloween. After cleaning out the stove I move d on to cleaning out the beehive oven which had a lot of old bricks that had fallen out. I kept the ones that I could that looked old and vacuumed up all the dirt and dust. It looked much better. Then Daniel and I brushed all the flaking paint and wall paper off onto the floor and swept. Just this effort made it look much better. (Then in a break in the rain I we...