My Friends at Brook Farm | Page 2

own manners and customs, and their own habits of life,
generation after generation. As the "Old Colonie" extended its borders
and new elements were added to its population, these Dutch
characteristics were gradually modified and finally disappeared
altogether, but they resisted modern influences many years and as late
as the middle of the nineteenth century, evidences of Dutch ancestry
were still to be noticed among the people of the "Old Colonie."
My father's house, where I was born, stood on the south side of Beaver
street next to that of the Ostranders where the last Walloon Civil Chief
was said to have lived. As a child I heard Dutch spoken in the street, in
the stores and the market. We spoke Dutch, more or less, at home, and
no other language at my grandfather's farm. The Sears family came
from Cape Cod, but my mother was a Van Der Zee, and although the
first Van Der Zee came from Holland in 1642, the family was as Dutch
as ever in 1842, two centuries later. Mother learned English, at school
but spoke it very little until after her marriage, and then crooned
nursery rhymes in Dutch to her children; "Trip a trop a tronches," "Wat
zegt Mynhur Papa," etc.
My father's store was "on the Pier," which is equivalent to saying he
was a flour merchant. The Pier was a sort of bulkhead between the
canal basin and the river, and it was occupied by a single row of
buildings, all of which were flour stores. The Genesee Valley was a
famous wheat growing country in the first half of the nineteenth
century, and the grain was ground in Rochester and shipped down the

Erie Canal to Albany, the receiving and distributing center for the trade.
My father made business trips to New York, and, sometimes, as far east
as Boston, in those days a long journey. He usually arranged to go
"down the river" in the Spring, having, beside his own affairs,
commissions to fill as delegate to one or more of the May Conventions.
The May Conventions were annual gatherings of religious bodies,
philanthropic organizations, reform associations, literary associations,
educational associations and all sorts of associations for the
improvement of the human race in general and the American people in
particular. The Friends yearly Meeting, the Conference of the American
Anti-Slavery societies, the Grahamites or Vegetarians, the Temperance
advocates and other upholders of beneficent, benevolent, and Utopian
ideals assembled on these occasions, and with much eloquence, made it
clear to the meanest understanding that the universal adoption of the
principles especially professed by each would do away with all evil in
the world and bring about a return of the Golden Age.
My mother did not always attend the May Conventions, but whenever
she went, she took one of us children with her. My first visit to New
York was made as an unqualified member of the Albany delegation to
something or other, I forget what. One thing I do not forget, however,
and that is hearing Horace Greeley make an address, and afterward
being puffed up with pride when the orator chatted familiarly with his
small admirer at dinner in our hotel on Barclay Street.
When my mother was absent from home, the family was left in charge
of our courtesy Aunt Catholina Van Olinda who kept the house with
my elder sister Althea, while I was dispatched for the time to my
grandfather's farm. I was very much at home on the farm and spent
many happy days there in early childhood, being regarded as a sort of
heir apparent by the principal personages there, namely, my grandfather,
John Van Der Zee the elder, and Tone and Cleo. The last named,
Antony and Cleopatra, to speak properly, were ancient negroes born
and brought up on the farm and rarely leaving it in all their long lives.
They were slaves, inasmuch as they disdained to be emancipated, and
"free niggers" they looked down on with contempt. They belonged to

the Van Der Zee place and the place belonged to them, and not to
belong to anybody or to any place was, to their apprehension, very like
being a houseless and homeless pauper. As I was John Van Zee the
younger, according to their genealogy the natural successor of Baas
Hans, they extended to me assurances of their most distinguished
consideration. My father, Charles Sears, was not in the line of
succession, he being English or in other words a foreigner. They
tolerated him, partly because he spoke to them in Dutch, the only
language they knew or cared anything about, and partly because he was,
after all, a member of the family by marriage. As he always brought a
book in hand when visiting the farm, they made sure he