History, Natural History & the Arts
The city of New Rochelle has a relevant place in the founding history of the United States. It was here that in 1689 a small community of French Protestant refugees would settle.
Known as Huguenots, they exercised considerable influence on America’s course towards self-determination. George Washington descended from a Huguenot refugee on his mother’s side. [Read more…] about Huguenots & New Rochelle’s Spirit of Liberty
Historic Huguenot Street (HHS) has been awarded a $500,000 Save America’s Treasures (SAT) grant support much-needed major repairs and restoration work at the Bevier-Elting House (ca. 1700, 1735, and 1760) in New Paltz.
The project, expected to start in 2022 and continue over the next five years, is one of 49 projects in 29 states funded by the SAT program this year. [Read more…] about New Paltz Bevier-Elting House Restoration Project Planned
Huguenots were followers of Jean Calvin’s teachings for which they were persecuted in Catholic France. Many were forced to leave the country and settled in the Netherlands, Switzerland, England, and South Africa.
Nicolas Martiau was one of a number of refugees who made their way to America (Virginia) via England. A surveyor and engineer in the service of Henry Hastings, 5th Earl of Huntington, he was an ancestor of George Washington. [Read more…] about Huguenot Pirates on the Barbary Coast and the Mapping of New Amsterdam
As part of a $59,966 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Humanities Collections and Reference Resources planning grant for the preservation and digitization of collections awarded to Historic Huguenot Street (HHS) in April, historians and authors Firth Haring Fabend and David William Voorhees have begun a scholarly evaluation of historical New Paltz documents at HHS and partner institutions: the Town of New Paltz, the Reformed Church of New Paltz, and the Haviland-Heidgerd Historical Collection at the Elting Memorial Library. [Read more…] about Scholars Assessing Historical New Paltz Documents
Tim O’Brien’s short story collection, The Things They Carried (1990), is in part about the culture and life experience American soldiers brought with them to Vietnam, and how this past helped shape identity and action in a foreign environment. And though many have heard of the Huguenots, being French and protestant as a prerequisite, few know their story until they became one of the largest groups of emigrants in European history.
The Huguenot diaspora would spread to lands considered old and new, and would go on to found communities across the Atlantic like New Paltz and New Rochelle most prominently in the colony of New York. This unique people and their pre-refugee history are treated with clarity and depth in The Huguenots (Yale University Press, 2013) by Geoffrey Treasure. Treasure, who has written book length biographies on Louis XIV and Cardinal Mazarin, brings his expertise on the history of France to bear on this often overlooked and underrepresented early modern French community. [Read more…] about What the Huguenots Carried
The Open Space Institute (OSI), Historic Huguenot Street (HHS) and the Thomas and Corinne Nyquist Foundation have announced the preservation in perpetuity of the Harcourt Wildlife Sanctuary, a 56-acre nature preserve located on Huguenot Street in the town and village of New Paltz.
OSI, through its land acquisition affiliate, the Open Space Conservancy, acquired the Sanctuary for $110,000 on June 21st from Historic Huguenot Street. HHS owns and maintains a National Historic Landmark District which includes a number of historic houses dating to the early 18th century set on ten acres in downtown New Paltz. [Read more…] about Historic Huguenot Land: The Harcourt Wildlife Sanctuary