The Major Jacob Hasbrouck Jr. House is located on Huguenot Street in the Town of New Paltz, New York, United States. It was built in 1786 by Hasbrouck, grandson of Jean Hasbrouck, one of the original Huguenot settlers of the New Paltz area in the late 17th century, after he had moved out of the family home, two miles (3.2 km) to the south in what is today the Huguenot Street Historic District. A descendant of his lives in the house today, and it is believed to be the only 18th-century stone house in the New Paltz area continuously owned by the family that first built it.
Hasbrouck's house shows sophistication and refinement befitting a large landholder who served as town supervisor and later in the American Revolutionary War. It is the culmination of the Dutch/Belgian-style stone houses that had been built all over Ulster County during the preceding century. His descendants found the house somewhat confining and, over several different generations, modified it in ways that reflected the changing tastes of the 19th and 20th centuries. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999.
Property
The house is located on a lot on the west side of the street. There are several outbuildings from the former farm, no longer in use for their original purpose.
Its original section is the front block, a one-and-a-half-story with thick load-bearing stone walls. A porch covers the front entrance between two of the three pairs of windows; the upper story has two large, wooden gabled dormers added later, between the three small shed dormers remaining from the original house. In the rear is another later addition, a section called the "outlet", after the Dutch "uitlayt", a one-story stone enclosure wide across the entire rear section, with its own basement.
The interior of the main block follows the standard 18th-century center-hall plan, with the kitchen on one side and the parlor on the other. The outlet is partitioned into five rooms, three connecting to the kitchen side of the house and two to the parlor.
In the rear of the lot are three farm buildings: a granary that has since itself been converted into a house, a greatly deteriorated chicken coop, and a modern barn used for storing firewood. There is also a baseball field used for local Little League games on the southwest corner. None of those are considered contributing resources. An old well house behind the kitchen side is, as is the stone wall on the front and north side of the property.
History
The Hasbroucks in the 18th century
The land on which the house stands was originally part of Jean Hasbrouck's vast holdings in the area that is today the town and village of New Paltz and the surrounding lower Wallkill Valley. He died in 1714, thirteen years before the birth of Jacob Hasbrouck's youngest son, Jacob Jr., in 1727.
Jacob lived in the family homestead with his father, as his older brothers moved out to the land their father had already planned to divide between them in his will. Jacob Jr. was originally to receive only cash and bonds, on the assumption he would inherit the family house, but shortly after the will was drawn up in 1747 Benjamin Hasbrouck, the oldest son, died in a fall from a horse. The document was quickly revised to give the younger Jacob title to the lands between the Wallkill and the mountains known today as the Shawangunk Ridge, considered the best in the Hasbrouck tract. Jacob the elder died in 1761 and the lands and house became his son's.
The year afterward he served the first of two stretches as town supervisor. He continued to work with the other descendants of New Paltz's original Duzine ("Dozen") on the further subdivision and development of the original lands. In the early 1770s he returned as supervisor again, stepping down in 1776 when the war began as he had already been commissioned as a captain of the Second New Paltz Company of the Third Regiment of the Ulster County Militia. Three years later, he was promoted to major, and would forever after be known by that title in family histories to distinguish him from his father and his son, Jacob J. Hasbrouck.
According to Hasbrouck family tradition, Major Hasbrouck built the house in 1786 for Jacob J., the younger of his two sons, to live in after he died, while his brother Josiah lived in the old house. The Major moved in to spend his later years there, no longer extensively involved in either farming the property or land deals, although an assessment done for the 1798 federal Direct Tax, when he still owned both houses, rated him the wealthiest man in New Paltz. He died in 1806, and passed the house to Jacob J. and his growing family.