Legends and Lore of Sleepy Hollow and the Hudson Valley

by Jonathan Kruk

  Tulip tree at Andre’s capture place, 2009, Tarrytown/Sleepy Hollow, New York. Photo by Todd Atteberry, www.thehistorytrekker.com.

  Chapter 7

  BALT, BROM, KATRINA AND ICHABOD

  It is with infinite difficulty I have been enabled to collect these biographical anecdotes.

  —Diedrich Knickerbocker

  The difficulties Washington Irving’s storytelling alter ego faced when writing his History of New-York apply to the task of unearthing the real Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow and his ghostly cohorts. Collecting the goods on The Legend’s iconic characters of Balt, Brom, Katrina and Ichabod poses another challenge. Irving played fast and loose with fact and fiction when caricaturing the Dutch people he adored. Carl Carmer, in his definitive 1939 book The Hudson, felt the need to redefine Dutch New Netherlanders as “hard, blond traders” rather than “the fatheaded, fat-bottomed, sleepy sillily pompous folk of the Knickerbocker History.” Nevertheless, The Legend’s coquettish Katrina, roistering Brom, snug Balt and interloping Ichabod emerged from actual individuals living around 1800 in the Hudson Valley. Irving the lawyer cleverly guided Irving the writer when establishing these characters. They stand right on the edge of today’s common disclaimer: “All characters in this work are purely fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons living or dead is purely coincidental.” A verisimilitude to real people exists and animates The Legend. Incidentally, Irving’s real-life Katrina source didn’t mind modeling; neither did the two Broms. One Ichabod proudly showed proof of his role in The Legend, while another, some say, took umbrage when Irving used his name.

  Today, tourists hoping to find the actual people behind The Legend’s characters flock to Sleepy Hollow’s Old Dutch Church Cemetery. They point to the headstone of “Catriena van Tessel” and exclaim, “Here’s the real Katrina van Tassel!” They don’t know she just lent her everyday-sounding name for the story. The real source lies under the marker for Eleanor van Tassel Bush.

  The grave of Abraham Martling puts them about as near as Irving lets anyone get to Abraham “Brom Bones” van Brunt. Next they look for the Headless Horseman’s grave. Washington Irving tells us the decapitated Hessian was “buried in the church-yard.” This refers to the unmarked potter’s field in a northeast corner, where the poor and outcasts like Hulda the Witch would have been interred. Curiosity inexorably moves people to want to separate the facts on Balt, Brom, Katrina and Ichabod from Irving’s fiction. A look at the names used in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow helps in this quest.

  BALT

  Old Baltus Van Tassel was a perfect picture of a thriving, contented, liberal-hearted farmer. He seldom it is true sent either of his eyes of thoughts beyond the boundaries of his own farm; but within those everything was snug, happy, and well-conditioned. He was satisfied with his wealth, but not proud of it (TLSH, 22).

  Irving employs the moniker Baltus van Tassel to portray a farmer well off but down to earth. Seventeenth-century Dutch merchants celebrated lucrative trade at Baltic Sea ports by naming sons “Baltus.” It was rather like calling your son “Washington” right after the American Revolution. Both names reflect the values of their times. Balts were rich guys. The surname Van Tassel, however, tempers the bounty associated with Baltus. A common name even today in the Hudson Valley, Van Tassel means “of Tessel,” an isolated island in the Netherlands. So, Baltus and Katrina are at once wealthy and quaint.

  When seeking the original Baltus van Tassel farm, many just look across the road from the Old Dutch Church. There stands the venerable Philipse family’s manor house. Washington Irving’s obituary sites Philipseburg Manor as the model for Van Tassel’s house in The Legend. Frederick Philipse owned over fifty thousand acres of land in Westchester. Cultivation by hundreds of tenant farmers, indentured servants and slaves made Philipse the richest man in the colonies at the time of the Revolution. Certainly his manor proffered the mouth-watering bounty coveted by Ichabod.

  Old Balt, on the other hand, owned “a vast barn, that might have served for a church; every window and crevice of which seemed bursting forth with the treasures of the farm.” Frederick’s treasure did fill many a sloop on the Hudson for trade around the world. Philipse, then, was no mere Van Tassel.

  Henry Steiner, in The Place Names of Historic Sleepy Hollow, suggests another source for Van Tassel’s farm: “It seems that Washington Irving never wrote about Castle Philipse and its mill (though he mentions the mill fleetingly). The description of Baltus van Tassel’s farm in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow might well have been based on his Castle in the post-Revolutionary days of the Beekman ownership.”

  Philipse profited immensely with a king ruling the colonies. His ten-room place on the Pocantico served primarily as his office and shipping depot. His primary residence was a thirty-plus-room mansion in Yonkers. A staunch Loyalist, he fled to England soon after the Revolutionary War broke out. Later when Philipse’s huge estate was divided up to help pay for the war, a prosperous Patriot named Beekman took over a smaller portion of the manor. Still, Beekman’s estate remained grander than Baltus van Tassel’s farm.

  Some folks from Croton on Hudson, about ten miles north of Sleepy Hollow, proclaim Van Cortlandt Manor as the site for Van Tassel’s farm. Again, it is a large manor, not a respectable Dutch “bouwery.” The local references given in Ichabod’s famed race with the Headless Horseman to the Old Dutch Church Bridge don’t lead to Van Cortlandt’s as the Van Tassel place.

  The thriving farms around Tarrytown, a place named for the Dutch “tarwe,” or wheat, impressed Washington Irving. Yet no single place stands out in Westchester as the model for Balt’s farm. Finding Balt’s farm requires a look about 120 miles north of Sleepy Hollow. There, among the abundant fields, bright orchards and overstocked ponds of old Columbia County, New York, appears the Van Tassel bouwery.

  A heartbroken Washington Irving found the farm that would become Van Tassel’s when he visited Kinderhook. There a dear friend, William van Ness, took in the devastated lawyer/writer. Irving’s beloved Matilda Hoffman, a dark-eyed frail beauty, died of yellow fever in April 1809. His father and sister also passed away early that winter. Irving, to escape his woe, toured about the upper Hudson Valley. He noticed the sturdy high-roofed home with ample surrounding farmland of the 1734 Luycas van Alen homestead. It echoed some features found in a homestead owned by a blacksmith in Sleepy Hollow named Abraham Matlengh (later anglicized to Martling). Built in 1730, the stone farmhouse stood farther down what’s now Beekman Road, a couple miles west of Philipseburg Manor on the Hudson. “His [Van Tassel’s] stronghold was situated on the banks of the Hudson.” Martling’s house offered a gracious “stoep,” double Dutch doors, broad porches and all the accoutrements Washington Irving describes in a grand old Dutch “bouwery” on the Hudson: “It was one of those spacious farmhouses, with high-ridged but lowly sloping roofs, built in the style handed down from the first Dutch settlers; the low projecting eaves forming a piazza along the front, capable of being closed up in bad weather” (TLSH, 25).

  The Martling house first enchanted the traveling teen Irving during his Sleepy Hollow visits. The Van Alen farm impressed the vulnerable, mourning Irving in 1809. The Sleepy Hollow and Kinderhook houses provided the sensibility for The Legend’s Van Tassel house. But another piece in the Van Tassel estate puzzle remains on the table.

  THE GOBLIN RACE

  Racing a goblin from the Philipse/Beekman place to the Old Dutch Church only requires a crossing of the Albany Post Road. This manor house stands too close for a real flight from a galloping specter. Clues found in the geography noted in The Legend help locate the original Van Tassel house. Ichabod discerns a dog barking across the Hudson, placing the estate on the southeast shore of the Tappan Zee, below today’s Governor Malcolm Wilson Bridge.

  Ichabod…pursued his travel homewards, along the sides of the lofty hills which rise above Tarry Town, and which he had traversed so cheerily in the afternoon. The hour was dismal as himself. Far below him, the Tappa
n Zee spread its dusky and indistinct waste of waters, with here and there the tall mast of a sloop, riding quietly at anchor under the land. In the dead hush of midnight, he could even hear the barking of the watch dog from the opposite shore of the Hudson; but it was so vague and faint as only to give an idea of his distance from this faithful companion of man (TLSH, 58).

  The dismal schoolmaster embarks on his odyssey within earshot of the west Hudson’s west bank. Note that the river expands to over three miles at the north end of the Tappan Zee near Van Cortlandt’s at Croton on Hudson. It’s almost as wide at Philipse’s in Sleepy Hollow. It’d be tough to hear a hound from either of these locales even on a still night. The likely point on the west Hudson for the barking is now Piermont, known in Dutch days as Tappan Slote. Ichabod, after his rejection by Katrina, ascends “far above” the river toward the “lofty hills”—now called Tappan Kykuit and Hackley. The most plausible place for Ichabod to set out for his legendary race lies a couple miles south of old “Tarry Town,” where the river is not only narrower but also has the vaulting Palisades to carry out sounds.

  Ghost stories told the evening of Balt van Tassel’s “quilting frolic” carry on to haunt Ichabod. Perched on the ornery Gunpowder, his borrowed horse, the trembling Master Crane clops along a forlorn section of Old Albany Post Road. The superstitious schoolmaster feels nature conspiring to turn trees into goblins and night birds into uncouth ghouls. Nevertheless, they slip unscathed beneath the monstrous branches of Andre’s tulip tree, which once stood in today’s Patriots Park on the Tarrytown/Sleepy Hollow border. A presence there spooks Gunpowder into dragging the pedagogue kicking and screaming off course into the haunts of Wiley’s Swamp. Today this neighborhood bustles about Valley and Wildey Streets.

  Encountering a cloaked headless traveler, Gunpowder takes a “plunge to the opposite side of the road.” The only real road there then was the Albany Post. Bolting, Ichabod’s one-eyed mare misses the uphill “road which turns off to Sleepy Hollow.” Today it’s called Bedford Road. Gunpowder flees to “the left,” taking a sandy, shady hollow now called Gory Brook Road. Crane hopes for safety. “If I can but reach that bridge,” which over two hundred years ago spanned the Pocantico, a long football pass east of the Old Dutch Church. The Headless Horseman, as Brom Bones foretold in his ghost race tale, cannot cross that bridge. Alas, while traversing that wooden bridgework, poor Ichabod gets brained.

  Crane’s race makes Wolfert’s Roost the most likely location for The Legend’s Van Tassel house. Roost is an English corruption of the Dutch word “roest,” meaning rust. A respectable homestead established in 1656 by Wolfert Eckert, it became in the 1760s the esteemed Jacob van Tassel’s farmhouse. Later the place enchanted the rambling young Washington Irving. Returning to the region in 1835, Irving, the world’s most successful writer at the time, purchased the old estate and renamed it Sunnyside. The spell of this ancient Dutch bouwery compelled Irving to buy the place and most probably swayed him to make it the setting of The Legend.

  Three early Dutch farmhouses compose the imagined estate of Baltus van Tassel. Apparently enough snug Dutch landowners endured throughout the region to make it possible for Irving to create Balt without any one model. Building an old-fashioned house may have been a pragmatic choice handed down by Dutch fathers to sons. Firth Haring Fabend, however, in his book A Dutch Family in the Middle Colonies, notes the old-style homes originate in the deep conservatism of the Dutch folk Washington Irving encountered throughout his ramblings in the Hudson Valley:

  He [the Dutch American] was ambivalent about America… Hundreds of sandstone houses built in Bergen and Rockland long after the Revolution—represents his misgivings about America and becoming American. By rejecting America’s demand for newness, innovation and change, the Dutch farmer was rejecting the very spirit of progressivism that impelled him to America. But in doing so he is rejecting all the violence that newness, innovation and change had wreaked upon an older ideal that had ended by dividing and damaging his family, church and community.

  Dutch ways persisted long after Peter Stuyvesant peacefully surrendered the New Netherlands to the English in 1664. People of the Hudson Valley spoke Dutch while keeping their Old World customs and cookery well into the early nineteenth century. Martlenghs and Van Alen clearly followed Dutch homebuilding traditions.

  The provincial Baltus, “without a thought beyond his farm and daughter’s marriage,” indeed rejects the violence of American change. He’d never accept a Connecticut Yankee schoolmaster as a son-in-law. Plus, Balt remains unperturbed, puffing his pipe, “watching the achievements of a little wooden warrior,” when Ichabod courts Katrina. Baltus van Tassel sits as a stalwart against the migrating tides of change coming along the Hudson. Irving took refuge in a Balt-like home when a wandering teen and later when a melancholy young man.

  Any world-weary traveler would welcome an invitation to this good-natured fellow’s “quilting frolic.” What joy “to help yourself and fall to it” at Balt’s bountiful table! Following the hearty meal and a lively dance, folks roast apples, puff long-stemmed pipes and listen to a few ghost stories. Soon all heartache and haste dissipate around the Dutch hearth:

  I mention this peaceful spot with all possible laud for it is in such little retired Dutch valleys, found here and there embosomed in the great State of New York, that population, manners, and customs remain fixed, while the great torrent of migration and improvement, which is making such incessant changes in other parts of this restless country, sweeps by them unobserved (TLSH, 8).

  Again, Balt rises not from any one man Irving met in an isolated Dutch hollow. He’s the steadfast folk under the Dutch spell, holding out in the Hudson Valley.

  Another figure roars out of the Hudson Valley. Irving got to know in Kinderhook one Abraham (Brom) van Alstyn. A brawny blacksmith, he gave Irving inspiration to create the Herculean Brom Bones. He, like Balt, embodies the manners and ways of a traditional Dutchman. This “rollicking roystering blade,” made of “more mischief than malice,” however, is a unique American character.

  BROM

  He was famed for great knowledge and skill in horsemanship, being as dexterous on horseback as a Tartar. He was foremost at all races and cock fights; and, with the ascendancy which bodily strength always acquires in rustic life, was the umpire in all disputes, setting his hat on one side, and giving his decisions with an air and tone that admitted of no gainsay or appeal. He was always ready for either a fight or a frolic; but had more mischief than ill will in his composition; and with all his overbearing roughness, there was a strong dash of waggish good humor at bottom (TLSH, 28).

  Abraham van Brunt rides into our consciousness, making an indelible dark impression in the guise of a galloping goblin. Granted, Diedrich Knickerbocker’s storyteller never plainly states Brom Bones is the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow. The Legend’s teller strongly suggests Brom just dressed up like the ghost: “[Brom] always burst into a hearty laugh at the mention of the pumpkin; which led some to suspect that he knew more about the matter than he chose to tell” (TLSH, 72).

  If Brom chased off Ichabod, are skeptics right to assert that there is no actual Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow? The Legend’s storyteller counters, “The old country wives, who are the best judges” of these spooky matters, know the ghost of a galloping Hessian still creates midnight blasts while scouring the countryside for his head.

  Indeed, in the late nineteenth century, renowned folklorist Edgar Mayhew Bacon heard a story of an encounter with the Headless Horseman from an Irish washerwoman. Impatient over her husband’s tarrying at Van Tassel’s tavern, a noise outside moved the woman to creak open the top of her cottage’s double Dutch door. She leaned out into the chilling night air. Mounted on a sparking horse, a monstrous goblin rose up with a head in his hand. The petrified woman barely managed to slam shut the door before the ghoul hurled that projectile at the snooping woman. When Bacon tried to dismiss her story as evidence of Irving’s life imitatin
g art, the woman invited the skeptic to come see the Horseman’s bloody stain on her door! The Friends of the Old Dutch Church still collect Headless Horseman sightings today. Clearly, the spirit of the galloping headless Hessian rides beyond Brom Bones.

  Scholars and storytellers from Columbia and Westchester Counties champion their respective Abrahams—Van Alstyn and Martling—as Brom Bones. Another historian cites an Abraham van Tassel. All are crafty blacksmiths. One, however, stands out as the model for The Legend’s Abraham van Brunt. The old veterans at the Van Tassel frolic share their Revolutionary War stories after Ichabod’s frenetic dance with Katrina. “Doffue” Martling boasts that he fought off the British fleet in the Tappan Zee with a six-pound cannon. An actual veteran, this Captain Daniel Martling fought honorably in many local skirmishes. Daniel’s relative, Abraham (grandson of the Martlenghs who built the 1730 Sleepy Hollow on the Hudson House), also demonstrated some clever heroics. When the Patriot Van Tassel cousins, Peter and Cornelius, suffered the destruction of their farms near Elmsford, militiamen elected blacksmith Abraham Martling as raid captain to lead a retaliatory attack on the home of Loyalist leader Oliver DeLancey. Captain Martling guided his men down the Hudson with muffled oars. They slipped by Loyalist guards to burn DeLancey’s house. Both bold and cunning, this “Brom” demonstrated the character found later in Irving’s Brom. Thus, Abraham Martling shows the mix of mischief with a lesser dose of malice needed to win the Revolution. No doubt Abraham van Brunt is composed of a few real blacksmiths named Abraham. The Dutch Brom Bones foreshadows the coming of other blunt and brawny, wild and wily American characters.