Captain Moses W. Collyer House
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Capt. Moses W. Collyer House | ||
MPS Chelsea MRA | | |
NRHP reference No. | 87001370 | |
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Added to NRHP | 1987 |
The Captain Moses W. Collyer House, also Driftwood, is located on River Road South in Chelsea, New York, United States. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1987.
It was the home of Collyer, a riverboat captain on the nearby Hudson, from 1899 until his death on September 22, 1942, as noted by New York Times. A few years after moving in, he cowrote The Sloops of the Hudson, a memoir and history of the years when sailboats were the primary means of getting up and down the river. An exhaustive and complete work that drew on Collyer's background in a riverfaring family, it is today considered the definitive history of that era and its boats.
The house itself, built just before the turn of the 20th century, is an eclectic mixture of Late Victorian styles reflecting Collyer's experience traveling the river and its port communities. It is still a private residence, and not open to the public.
Property
The house overlooks the Hudson River across River Road and the
It is
The porch columns are the original woodwork, tapered and
There are several outbuildings, all considered contributing resources to the historic character of the property. A large clapboard garden shed with frontal cross-gable was built along with the house and follows its general design and decoration, as does a nearby wooden privy. The garage was built around 1932 by Collyer as a wedding present to his daughter, and has a wooden plaque noting this event.[1]
History
Collyer was born around 1850 in Red Hook, further upriver in Dutchess County. His father, John L. Collyer, had started out on the river from his native Ossining (then known as Sing Sing) in the 1830s. Soon John Collyer became captain and owner of a North River packet sloop that sailed from upper Red Hook Landing, now known as Tivoli, to New York City in the 1830s,[2] and continued sailing commercially in some capacity until his death in 1889. Collyer's uncles went into the shipbuilding business and also grew wealthy.[1]
John Collyer sailed the sloop Benjamin Franklin out of Poughkeepsie in 1865. Moses joined the sloop that year as a cabin boy. The "Benjamin Franklin" carried crockery and earthenware from Foster's Dock at Poughkeepsie in the spring and fall to ports along the Hudson.
Captain Collyer also acquired the sloop Mohican, built in 1837 at Peekskill, and had her sunk in front of his house to serve as a breakwater and dock. The "spine" of the Mohican can be sometimes be seen south of the Chelsea Yacht Club, especially at low water.[3]
Members of the Collyer family, including Moses, had lived in Chelsea since 1868, although it is not known where. In 1899, nearing
A few years later, Collyer and William Verplanck, the scion of a wealthy family in the area and a boat owner himself, collaborated on The Sloops of the Hudson, a history of the sail era on the river. Collyer's detailed recollections of the ships and people he had known over the years made the book's second half, which he wrote,[2] the essential resource on the subject as there is no other record so comprehensive.[1]
Other than the construction of the garage, there have been few other alterations to the house. The porch steps have been rebuilt and a handrail added. The porch itself has been enclosed.[1]
Aesthetics
The house represents a mix of styles, waxing and waning, in a fashion popular during the last years of the 19th century. The irregular, yet compact, massing of the main forms and mixture of materials are characteristic of the
Inside, the house reflects changing tastes as well. The interior's rooms are less grand than most earlier Victorian homes, suggesting a space meant for living as opposed to entertaining, and the more open placement of the kitchen and other backrooms suggest a more egalitarian attitude than a strictly Victorian home would. The contrast between the values of the Queen Anne style and the Colonial Revival is also represented by the marbleized mantelpiece and unpainted oak stair respectively.[1]
References
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Larson, Neil (May 1987). "National Register of Historic Places nomination, Capt. Moses W. Collyer House". New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation. Archived from the original on 2012-04-20. Retrieved 2008-10-20.
- ^ a b Collyer, Moses; Verplanck, William (1908). The Sloops of the Hudson. London: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Archived from the original on 2008-09-23. Retrieved 2008-10-21.
- ^ a b c "Moses Collyer", Chelsea Yacht Club Archived March 1, 2012, at the Wayback Machine