Jans Martense Schenck house

Believed to be one of New York City's oldest houses, the structure was later moved to the Brooklyn Museum, where it is used as a public exhibit.

In 1675, Schenck bought a parcel of land on Molen Eylandt (Mill Island) in the Dutch town of Nieuw Amersfoort (now Flatlands), and his family owned the house for over a century.

[2]: 12 [3] The gristmill was purchased from Elbert Elbertse Stoothoff who had arrived in Nieuw Amsterdam in 1637 aboard the Vrede (Peace).

Beginning in the 1920s, as real-estate development increased, a number of preservation plans that might have maintained the house on site were put forward but were never realized.

Its framework is composed of a dozen heavy so-called H-bents, visible on the interior of the house, that resemble goal posts with diagonal braces.

This is an ancient northern European method of construction that contrasts with the boxlike house frames that evolved in England.

About 1730, when Martin Schenck, Jan’s eldest son, owned the house, it underwent several changes to accommodate his growing family.

On the interior, the location of the staircase to the loft and the form of the large open hearths and built-in bed box also involved conjecture, but were based on historical precedent.

The curators have assembled the interior-decorating scheme utilizing objects from the collection to typify an interior of a prosperous family of Dutch descent living in colonial English Flatlands.

Period paintings help answer questions concerning the disposition of furniture about the room, possible color schemes, and the sort of textiles that might have been used.

Through paintings, for example, visitors learn that mid-Eastern carpets were too valuable to place on the floor but rather were displayed on tabletops and then in turn covered with white linen cloths during meals.

The house and a small parcel of land it sat on was eventually inherited by Franklin Crooke who sold to the Atlantic, Gulf and Pacific Company in 1909.

During the American Revolution, the house was occupied by British Major James Moncrief, an engineer with the 7th Regiment of Foot.

On June 18, 1778 an American raiding party under Captain William Marriner formerly a private in the Continental Army, who became a privateer, along with Lieutenant John Schenck of the New Jersey Militia landed on the shore of New Utrecht with 28 militia-men from Middletown Point, N. J. in two whaleboats as part of the informal Whaleboat War.

A white house with green shutters and red brick chimneys, it stands in a little hollow back of Public School 236, surrounded by old pine trees.