Bethlehem House
a.k.a. Rensselaer Nicoll House
E of Bethlehem off NY 144, Bethlehem, NYThe Rensselaer Nicoll House, also known as the Bethlehem House, represents, as Helen Wilkinson Reynolds puts it, an architectural "growth not a type." In its multiple additions lie the building's immense historical interest as the expression of changing needs and life-styles of one family throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Located within the Van Rensselaer Patent, the building site was determined by its proximity to the falls in the Vlaumanskill where a sawmill was built in the mid-seventeenth century. A farmhouse must have been built beside the mill because when Rensselaer Nicoll, the fourth patroon's nephew, built his house there in 1736 records show that he demolished a farmhouse which was by then nearly a hundred years old.
The house was built at the time of Rensselaer Nicoll's marriage to Elizabeth Salisbury, and its scale and elegance shows a marked resemblance to her father's house in Leeds near Catskill. The building had no windows on the north wall apparently to afford better protection against prevailing winter winds.
Just over sixty years after the house was built, Francis Nicoll made the southern addition to his father's house. The event that prompted this addition was the return of his daughter, Elizabeth Nicoll Sill Nicoll who brought with her three step-daughters after the death of their father, her second husband. Her two sons by the previous marriage were already living at Bethlehem with their grandparents. Francis Nicoll's addition which solved the subsequent shortage of space, reflects architectural originality and sensitivity to the most modern building innovations. The window sash is constructed with a new kind of inside shutter, and the ceilings of a different height necessitating stairs on the second floor and in the attic. The woodwork of the southern addition is also different from that of the original 1736 house.
Bibliography
Reynolds, Helen Wilkinson. Dutch Houses in the Hudson Valley Before 1776. Dover Publications, Inc. N.Y.: 1965.
Sill, Dunkin. Letter to Mr. Dinmore. April 26th 1934 on file at Division of Historic Preservation.
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1973.
The National Register of Historic Places is the official list of the Nation’s historic places worthy of preservation. Authorized by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, the National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places is part of a national program to coordinate and support public and private efforts to identify, evaluate, and protect America’s historic and archeological resources.