I went down from this ancient grave place eighty or ninety rods to the
site of the Van Velsor homestead, where my mother was born (1795,)
and where every spot had been familiar to me as a child and youth
(1825-'40.) Then stood there a long rambling, dark-gray, shingle-sided
house, with sheds, pens, a great barn, and much open road-space. Now of
all those not a vestige left; all had been pull'd down, erased, and the
plough and harrow pass'd over foundations, road-spaces and everything,
for many summers; fenced in at present, and grain and clover growing
like any other fine fields. Only a big hole from the cellar, with some
little heaps of broken stone, green with grass and weeds, identified
the place. Even the copious old brook and spring seem'd to have mostly
dwindled away. The whole scene, with what it arous'd, memories of
my young days there half a century ago, the vast kitchen and ample
fireplace and the sitting-room adjoining, the plain furniture, the
meals, the house full of merry people, my grandmother Amy's sweet old
face in its Quaker cap, my grandfather "the Major," jovial, red, stout,
with sonorous voice and characteristic physiognomy, with the actual
sights themselves, made the most pronounc'd half-day's experience of my
whole jaunt.
For there with all those wooded, hilly, healthy surroundings, my dearest
mother, Louisa Van Velsor, grew up--(her mother, Amy Williams, of the
Friends' or Quakers' denomination--the Williams family, seven sisters
and one brother--the father and brother sailors, both of whom met their
deaths at sea.) The Van Velsor people were noted for fine horses, which
the men bred and train'd from blooded stock. My mother, as a young
woman, was a daily and daring rider. As to the head of the family
himself, the old race of the Netherlands, so deeply grafted on Manhattan
island and in Kings and Queens counties, never yielded a more mark'd and
full Americanized specimen than Major Cornelius Van Velsor.