The Palatine Farmstead
by Andrew C. Rieser, Ph.D.

In Rhinebeck, on Route 9, just north of the Route 9G intersection, sits the Palatine Farmstead. The house sits just thirty feet from the asphalt, perched along the winding road like a lighthouse on the tip of a Mississippi River oxbow. Weather-worn and a bit decrepit, it stands as a silent rebuke to modernity, patiently forbearing the steady stream of shiny BMWs outside. Passing dump trucks rumble the ancient stone foundation.

Marilyn Hatch, Chairperson of the Palatine Farmstead committee, gave me a tour of the 1727 house recently. Visiting a museum in its infancy is both disorienting and exciting. Electric drills and sawdust littered the floor and there were gaps in the walls, exposing a surprisingly sturdy skeleton of posts and beams. The apparatus that so ably markets nostalgia for the past in fully evolved museums — air conditioned gift shops, laminated brochures, inscribed captions — is but a distant dream. Moreover, the themes and storylines of the museum are still under construction. The house is only slowly revealing secrets about the people who built and lived in it. There are artifacts, like a Revolutionary War cartridge box wedged in a ceiling joist, but no clear themes; characters, like its first owner Franz Neher, but no clear story to tell. Themes and stories will come in time.

The task of the talented restorationists and historians at Palatine Homestead is made more difficult by the oddities of the Palatines themselves and the circuitous path that led them to Rhinebeck. They were Germans — of all things — from the Lower Palatinate, a region along the Rhine River near France wracked in the early 1700s by decades of war and religious strife. The winter of 1708 was reportedly so cruel that birds on the wing fell dead on the ground. England opened its doors to the "poor Palatines" and tens of thousands of these refugees were transported to London and housed in tents at government expense.

But England's motives can hardly be called altruistic. The Palatine migration was part of a wider policy of national economic development. The arrival of cheap and willing laborers would boost England's wealth, and thus, improve the crown's fortunes in its ongoing war with France. Religious motives were also in play. The ascension of the Protestants William and Mary in 1689 refocused attention on the single point of agreement among the crazy quilt of Anglicans and Puritans that comprised English Protestantism: their hatred of Catholics. Hence, Catholic Palatines were kept out (although some slipped through) while the Lutheran among them were embraced into the bosom of Protestant England.

Fair enough. But how did the Palatines end up in the colonies? The answer, I think, is disturbingly familiar to anyone who follows current debates about the outsourcing of domestic jobs to cheaper foreign or immigrant laborers. The English government sent thousands of Palatines to its New World colonies to produce naval stores for its military machine. For those who survived the Atlantic crossing — typhus broke out below decks, killing scores of children — the colonial governments would provide food and shelter.

It was a clever scheme. And a spectacular failure. Carl Neher of Birkenfeld (Germany) was among the first wave of Palatines brought in 1710 to a makeshift settlement prepared for them in what is now Germantown. Robert Livingston, at the request of Governor Robert Hunter, was asked to provide for the Palatines' welfare. But the untrained farmers received little training on how to harvest tar, and they chafed under the government's harsh military discipline and unrealistic expectations. Livingston abandoned them in 1712, prompting a Palatine diaspora to places like Scoharie and Rhinebeck.

Until this point, the Palatines had moved about like pawns in a chess game. But the end of English patronage in 1712 marked a turning point for their community. Their story prefigured that of so many millions of immigrants in the 1800s and after: first, a group is blown to sea by the mighty geopolitical winds of war, revolution, and famine; next comes the cruel exploitation of their willing labor by their hosts in the New World; finally, they struggle for autonomy, acceptance, and assimilation. The Palatines, as local historian Alvin Sheffer suggested, were early exemplars of the American dream.

Carl Neher was one of thirty-five families who settled in Rhinebeck at the behest of the Dutch land-patent owner Henry Beekman. Beekman ran his holding as if it were a feudal demesne, charging quitrent for the right to occupy and make improvements to his property. Franz Neher arrived in Rhinebeck around 1714, estimates Marilyn Hatch, and probably lived with family in the area until 1727, when he and his wife of three years Rebecca Kohl moved into their new home. A deed in the 1750s lists him as a shoemaker.

The house itself is a fascinating archive of vernacular building styles and reveals much about the gradual assimilation of its Palatine occupants to the predominantly English and Dutch customs of the area. In the 1790s, the original "jamless" fireplace was replaced with a more refined and formal English-style fireplace; in the 1840s, fancier Greek Revival touches appeared throughout the house.

Clearly, Neher and his countrymen deserve credit for helping to shape the history of the Hudson River Valley (a history dominated by the British and Dutch). But the colonial German presence here is muted somewhat by the 1712 diaspora, which ensured that no village, with the possible exception of Germantown, enjoyed a critical mass of Palatines. At any rate, the German influence does not seem as profound as that still seen in Pennsylvania, where mass German settlement had a profound impact on local folkways, language, and architecture.

That said, the Palatine Farmstead is a rich artifact that offers new insights into Rhinebeck's past, and may even throw a wrench or two into scholarly interpretations of immigration and economic relations in colonial New York. The house might not have survived the wrecking ball if it were not for Palatine Farmstead Committee, which received the 2.5-acre property from the Rhinebeck Equine in 2002 after the death of its last resident, long-time Rhinebeckian Katherine Losee. According to its brochure, Palatine Farmstead is currently working on a historic structures report and is considering turning the site into "an interpretative center for early Palatine history and of local vernacular architecture." Private tours of the site can be arranged by calling Marilyn Hatch at (845) 876-6326.