You enter the door from the right side of the building (into what was formerly the basement). Admission is free and there is a small gift shop near the counter. This floor is comprised of one small display area and a media room with chairs and a large television. The display areas are all plaques detailing highlights of Hamilton’s life and The Grange. ile we were here, two groups of school kids were also taking a tour.

I especially liked this plaque.

The media room shows a 20-minute educational video on the life of Alexander Hamilton. It’s geared toward schoolchildren and for people unfamiliar with Hamilton. After the video, a park ranger, Mr. L. Strain, fielded questions from the school kids. The questions were very poignant, such as “Why did Hamilton purposely turn his gun away from Burr during the duel?”

After the kids had gone, we were treated to a nice little tour of the upstairs. This is what I was waiting for– as a fond admirer of architecture and history, I love wandering through old homes and seeing how everything once was “in the old says.”

Hamilton’s house is very small (HOW he and Eliza ever squeezed eight kids and their adopted orphans in here is quite the mystery) but very elegant. When you go up the stairs, you enter the original entry hall to the house. The floors are rather moderne, painted canvas tiles in a cosmopolitan style. A large painting of a young Hamilton looms over the hall (Hamilton did not display a portrait of himself, however).

Two formal rooms flank the hall: the parlor and the dining room. Both are magnificent with enormous windows and cheery colors.

Very few of Hamilton’s belongings are here. Many of his articles were given to family members after his and Eliza’s deaths. This pianoforte, however, was Hamilton’s.

The museum had a reproduction of the lovely silver wine cooler that George Washington gave to Hamilton in 1797. The original belongs to a private collector.

I found it sad that so few of Hamilton’s personal mementos are here. They all seen to be scattered and haphazard, which is indicative of the honor due Hamilton as a brilliant and sacrificing founding father.

Hamilton saw clients in this house (he practiced law after the Revolution, or, as he called it, “the art of fleecing my neighbors.”). He had a small study off the formal rooms. The vibrant green color is the same color Hamilton chose for this room. It’s quite a sensory experience! The color is reminiscent of his early years in the West Indies and must have been a very cheerful room during gloomy, cold New York days.

We stayed and chatted for quite some time with Mr. Strain who was delightfully knowledgeable of Hamilton’s life. He even knew of Hercules Mulligan, one of our favorite characters from the Revolutionary days! Mr. Strain showed us a video of how the Park Service moved The Grange from its old location on Convent Avenue to here. The house was elevated 30 feet in the air and rolled down 141st Street! The video and learning about the move was perhaps my favorite part of the visit.

Thus ended our visit. It was so short and brilliant, much like Hamilton’s life. I hope the museum continues to grow and is able to acquire more of Hamilton’s possessions.

Admission is free and the paths outside the house are very pleasant.

The gate leads to another gate, this time it’s a portal through a brick wall. A long time ago, gardens were often walled to denote boundaries and to protect the plants and other things inside from intruders. This wall reminded my husband of the many walled gardens he saw when he lived in Tehran, Iran.

The flowers inside the garden shimmered in the intense summer sunshine.

A cool alcove against one portion of the wall was a welcome respite from the heat. It is also so beautifully done– I loved it!

The garden is immense and is kept up wonderfully.

As we followed the path and drew nearer to the house at the other end, I realized that the house is in great disrepair and is closed to the public. This is the old Pell home, named The Pavilion. It reminds me of a southern plantation house, not something usually seen in rugged Adirondack country.

I did a little research into the Pell family and their quest to restore the ruined fort to its original splendor. You can read my findings on my post A Visit to Fort Ticonderoga Part 2.

Apparently, the Fort Ticonderoga association wants to restore the home and eventually open it to the public. How wonderful! I hope they are able to do so.

We freely walked the grounds, going around to the front of the house. The place oozes history.

According to the plaques and an historical marker nearby, Samuel de Champlain and his Canadian Indian friends battled the Iroquois tribe that had settled here, in 1609.

I peeked inside the windows. Looks like the house is currently used to store extra supplies for the fort. Oh how I would love to meander the rooms! The house does resemble a southern house, with the floor-to-ceiling windows, large shutters and open, airy rooms. I wonder how difficult it was to keep the house warm in the winter.

Further beyond the house is a marvelous view of Lake Champlain. The green hills of Vermont lie beyond.

The house and grounds are so lovely. I love this style of architecture.

The history of the fallen home reflects the history of her builders.

A wealthy importer from New York City, William Ferris Pell, purchased the land and constructed a summer home nearby, naming it The Pavilion. The elegant house still stands but is in terrible disrepair. The home was abandoned by William Ferris Pell after a tragic accident that killed his eldest son. The story is taken from the official Fort Ticonderoga website:

It was customary for the cannon at The Pavilion to be fired in honor of Pell’s return to The Pavilion at the beginning of spring. In 1839, Pell’s eldest son, 35 year-old Archibald, was killed when the cannon exploded while he fired it to honor his father’s return to Ticonderoga. Pell was so devastated by his son’s death that he never returned to The Pavilion and, according to family legend, died from a broken heart the following year.

Later family members held on to the land and decided to restore the ruins of the old fort behind the house. Construction began in 1909. This was one of the first such historic restoration projects in the United States. Its grand opening was attended by President William Howard Taft on the 300th anniversary of the European discovery of Lake Champlain.

This melancholic plaque hangs above the exit gate on the brick wall leading back to Fort Ticonderoga. It was installed by the woman who built the gardens.

The words are difficult for me to construe. My husband and I worked at it until we think we perceived the words:

“Marvel that the great(?) men
Of the earth prefer to reap
The iron harvest of war
To the rich gifts of Ceres.
-Mrs Montagu

It is a telling testament of human nature. Despite the peaceful delights of the garden, men seem to prefer the “iron harvest” of war. Very sobering in such a sober garden and home.

The visitor’s center is very modern inside, with dozens of hands-on displays for curious schoolchildren and adults. We perused the labyrinth of hallways, stopping to flip switches, push buttons and learn about hydroelectricity.

The plant uses the force of running water to spin magnetic turbines and generate electricity. I wondered how this can be, seeing the Schoharie Creek is so languid and sluggish? One of the ladies overseeing our visit said that the water from the creek is pumped up into a large reservoir at the top of Brown Mountain. There are enormous pipes within the mountain that channel the water from the creek. When energy is needed, the reservoir is drained. The rushing water that spills down through those pipes spins the turbines and creates the electricity.

Wow! I was astonished by the pipes inside the mountain. The idea of using up energy to make more energy seemed counter-intuitive to me, though. And it is. According to the information I saw, the Blenheim-Gilboa plant is an “emergency” power station. It provides energy only when electricity generation levels are low elsewhere, and helps to prevent brownouts and blackouts.

All the power generated at this plant is sent to New York City.

The visitor’s center also has many displays about the surrounding land. I loved the history! The center has an open sunroom type of room filled with stuffed animals native to New York State and other displays. This is a portion of an ancient tree fern. In it are bits of branches and seeds! These stumps were discovered in the 1920s when the land was cleared for the Schoharie Reservoir.

The view is beautiful.

Admission to the visitor’s center is free. It’s a wonderfully educational experience and the ladies we chatted with were so hospitable. We had a great time.

Venturing outside again, I was quite taken in by the view. Even though it was cold and windy, we spent some time exploring the grounds.

Next to the visitor’s center is a beautiful home and a yard filled with curiously-wrapped arbor vitae.

This is Lansing Manor! Sadly, the house was not open for visitors today. I was sorely disappointed. Curtains hung across the windows so I couldn’t even get a peep inside.

The view from the front porch is beautiful.

Lansing Manor is named for John Lansing, Jr., who represented New York State at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and also at the state’s Ratification Convention in 1788. He was a contemporary of Alexander Hamilton. Lansing built this house in 1819 for his daughter, Mrs. Jacob Livingston Sutherland. The house is in excellent shape. It has been owned by only four families from 1819 to 1972, when the last private owner donated the house and grounds to the Blenheim-Gilboa Visitor’s Center.

We roamed the grounds, reading the many informational plaques in the yard.

Look! John Lansing’s air conditioners! They are in excellent condition.

One of the most interesting plaques told the story of the Anti-Rent wars that roiled through Upstate New York in the mid 1800s. Before the American War for Independence, New York State was a royal colony, ruled much like England with “feudal lords.” With such a system, one very wealthy family owned and controlled large swaths of land. Small tracts of land were parceled out into farms, maintained by tenants. These tenants had very few rights and were practically enslaved to the land on which they worked. They were required to pay taxes on the land they worked. They had no rights to any of the land’s natural resources such as lumber or minerals.

Even after the War for Independence, New York State still held to this strange, European feudal system. By the early 1800s, the impoverished farmers had endured enough. They organized into protest groups, storming farms about to be confiscated and electing sympathetic politicians. The protests led to violence. Stephen Van Rensselaer, a very wealthy landowner in the Albany area, was murdered in 1839.

Photo courtesy of College of Oneonta, New York

The angry farmers dressed up like “Indians” when they went on their tirades. This kind of disguise was declared illegal in 1845.

In 1846, incumbent Governor Silas Wright lost his election to a newcomer, John Young, because Young had promised to pardon all farmers imprisoned for their Anti-Rent activities. The New York State Legislature eventually forbid landowners from taxing their farmers’ rental income and also forbid the confiscation of farmers’ possession to pay rent. This led to a tremendous increase in individual land ownership, as many farmers purchased the land their worked. Feudalism had been eradicated from New York… well, at least in name. The entire “rent” system is strikingly familiar in this day and age. Today, landowners “own” their land but it is ownership in name only, because if the landowner does not pay his exorbitant property taxes, the government can confiscate the land and all the equity with it. Very unjust, in my opinion.

You can read more about the Anti-Rent Wars at the College of Oneonta website. It’s very enlightening.

John Lansing never lived at this house and his death is shrouded in mystery. On December 12, 1829, he left his New York City hotel to mail a letter. He never returned. No one ever found his body nor knew what became of him, and his disappearance was described as similar to the fate of William Morgan, that same year. Morgan was probably kidnapped by Freemasons in Upstate New York, as he threatened to reveal the secrets of the cultic order. As for Lansing, it was later suspected that he was murdered by some political opponents who felt he was “in the way.”

According to Wikipedia:

There has been only one major clue to Lansing’s disappearance that has appeared since his death. After his death in 1882 the memoirs of Thurlow Weed, former Republican political leader in New York State, were published by Weed’s grandson T.W. Barnes. Weed wrote that Lansing had been murdered by several prominent political and social figures who found he was in the way of their projects.

Weed was told this by an unnamed individual, who showed him papers to prove it, but begged Weed not to publish these until all the individuals had died. Weed said they were all dead by 1870, but he found that their families were all highly respected, and upon advice of two friends he decided not to reveal the truth because it would hurt innocent people. And that was the last anyone ever heard of a possible resolution to the mystery. It is unknown if Weed actually received the truth.

Good heavens. Who knew what sordid stories we’d encounter, just visiting a hydroelectric plant in rural Upstate New York!

Dumb truck!

Oh, this is better.

Fraunces Tavern is where George Washington said his farewell to his officers in 1783 after years of military service in the Continental Army. It is said that many men openly cried while Washington gave his speech. Little did they know that the Great American Experiment was just beginning. Washington would be back in a few years, inaugurated as President of the United States at nearby Federal Hall on Wall Street.

The original building is gone, having suffered a series of fires and renovations so that no one knows exactly what the building looked like before 1890. Originally, on this site a house was built in 1671 as a residence for wealthy New York Mayor New York Mayor Stephanus van Cortlandt. It was replaced with another residence in 1719. Samuel Fraunces purchased the building in 1792. He converted it into a tavern and named it The Queen’s Head.

The New York Sons of Liberty secretly met at the tavern before and during the American Revolution. Did you know that New York had its own little version of the Boston Tea Party? In 1765, fed up with taxes and encroaching liberties from England, a handful of patriots dressed as American Indians infiltrated a British cargo ship carrying the dreaded British tea. They forced the captain to apologize for the cargo, and promptly dumped the tea into New York Harbor. And thus our love for coffee was begun.

We lunched in the dining room before perusing the museum upstairs. Our lunch experience was so-so; read my review of lunch at Fraunces Tavern at my other blog, WowChowCooking. Admission to the museum upstairs is free if you purchase a meal in the dining room. That was a pleasant surprise.

The upstairs is filled with paraphernalia. We watched a brief movie about the history of Fraunces Tavern and then wandered the rooms at our own leisure.

This is a photo of the Clinton Dining Room, so named because Governor George Clinton dined here.

I love the Federal style architecture and decor.

This is the bowl that held the turtle soup reincorporating the New York Chamber of Commerce at the Clinton dinner. Turtle meat seemed to be a delicacy for such occasions (according to menus of the past that served it regularly for important functions). I have never had it. I doubt anyone would eat anything lugged from the Hudson anymore.

We saw many amazing pieces of odd paraphernalia, including a portion of Washington’s wooden coffin, some of Washington’s hair and his dentures! Rome may have dozens of nails that pierced Christ’s limbs but we have Washington’s hair!

Assorted relics of pre-modern warfare littered the display cases. Some treasures were discovered by little boys digging in their back yards. 

Fraunces Tavern Museum also keeps the precious original diary of Colonel Benjamin Talmadge. We have read some of his memoirs and find his accounts of the Revolutionary War fascinating!

The tavern museum also had some very interesting paperwork regarding the history of the building. After the Revolution, the Treasury, War and Foreign Affairs departments were based here while New York City served as our first capital of the country. Everything was later moved to Philadelphia when the capital was there, and now to Washington, DC.

By 1900, the tavern was poised for demolition, to make way for “progress.” The Sons of the American Revolution wanted to buy the building, but the tavern owner refused all offers. The Daughters of the American Revolution begged the owner to sell, but all offers were refused again. I found it very odd that the owner was so determined to see the building destroyed, despite the monetary offers and knowing about the incredible history of the site.

The City intervened and created the Hewitt Act, enabling the Sons of the American Revolution to purchase the property and restore it for posterity. The building opened on December 4, 1907, the 124th anniversary of Washington’s farewell speech.

Did you know that there was a terrorist act at the Fraunces Tavern? On January 24, 1975, at 1:35pm, a bomb exploded at the entrance door to the tavern’s Angler’s and Tarpon Club. The bomb exploded in the middle of lunch hour, killing four people and injuring 53. A Puerto Rican nationalist group, F.A.L.N. (Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Nacional) cliamed responsibility for the bombing. The FALN said that the bombing was retaliation for “the CIA-ordered bomb that murdered Angel Luis Chavonnier and Eddie Ramos, two innocent young workers who supoorted [sic] Puerto Rican independence” and the “maiming of ten innocent persons…in a Mayaguez, Puerto Rico dining place on Saturday the eleventh of January, 1975.” No one was ever arrested or convicted for the crime.

New visitors are strongly urged to visit the visitor’s hall and view a movie about the fort. Even though we are very familiar with Fort Ticonderoga history and importance in battles, we sat and enjoyed the video. I was especially intrigued with the history of its restoration. You can read about that in my previous post, A Visit to Fort Ticonderoga, Part 2.

There is SO much to see inside the buildings that I cannot possibly do it justice here. I only highlight what I found interesting, and even then I must condense it. I highly recommend that you visit the Fort, there’s something for everyone there.

Both stories of the buildings are loaded with fort memorabilia and quite a number of breathtaking archaeological finds. I was awed by this: one of the old metal armor breastplates presumably made by the first French soldiers here in the 1750s. The plaque card says the armor was discovered in 1941, built into the wall. Because of its unusual position in the wall construction, archaeologists believe the armor is a votive offering by the French masons, for “good luck.”

There were many such artifacts to be seen:

This blew me away. A piece of her wedding dress?!

A watch key was a small metal device. With it, the watch owner could wind the watch. Amazing!

George Washington had good ol’ snuff. Well, at least the snuff BOX.

I loved this.

There were many, many such engraved powder horns like this. Even Ethan Allen and Philip Schuyler had scrawled on theirs! This is one of Schuyler’s horns given to him from Paul Revere. The engraving is a verse from Proverbs.

Here is Ethan Allen’s powder horn. Ethan Allen is the famed hero of Fort Ticonderoga. He easily took the fort from the British in 1775, confiscating the stores of ammunition for the needy American army.

This is Ethan Allen’s sword. Click the image to go to the Flickr site. From there, you can view larger images.

Ethan Allen’s gun, engraved with his name.

There were quite a few personal artifacts from the Schuyler family. Alexander Hamilton married Eliza Schuyler, daughter of the great general Philip Schuyler from nearby Albany, NY. This is a four-leafed clover in a locket that had belonged to Angelica Schuyler Church, Eliza’s sister and Alexander Hamilton’s good friend.

Angelica’s wax seal. The town “Angelica, NY” in western New York State is named for Angelica Schuyler Church.

Alexander Hamilton’s sword is here!

Rosary beads, probably dating before the British and American ownership of the fort. The Brits and Americans were definitely and overwhelmingly Protestant, so the beads probably belonged to a French occupant.

This is an imposing display. Looks to be a Mohawk Indian. Mohawks were the fiercest of the Iroquois Indian tribes, probably as fierce as the Canadian Hurons.

Interesting chair. Looks to me to be something from the 1890s, perhaps.

Cool bull’s eye glass.

All in all, it was a terrific visit. I really recommend this place, just go see it!