The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

We are here today with Bill Lent, and he is the tour guide of the Old Dutch Church and graveyard.

Tell us about the church and graveyard. What do you find most interesting about the church and the graveyard?

Well, a lot of things about the church and the graveyard. Number one, the church is the oldest standing church in the state of New York, over 300 years. A date on our bell, I say, dates the building 1685. If you do the mathematics, it is well over 300 years old. What you see in here is an 1836 alteration. Before that, there was a balcony on the west wall and a balcony here on the north wall, which were eventually brought into “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” by Mr. Washington Irving. As a 15-year-old boy, he sat in the west balcony and had an opportunity to look across to the north balcony and see that beautiful female 18-year-old girl that he later called Katrina Van Tassel. We found out that beautiful girl was in fact Katrina's niece, later years Mrs. Cable Brush. She's buried in the south side of the church. Out in the yard, we have soldiers from every war, from the French and Indian War, which actually predates the American Revolution, right up to World War II. We also have men that were involved in the capture of Andre. I am very rude to some of the historians because I say the capture of Andre was a pivotal point in the change, if it hadn't happened the way it happened, we would probably be saying God Bless the Queen instead of God Bless America. Stories have been written about different people out in the yard, the Roman family is very significant to this family, the Couenhoven family, buried right north of the church. They hosted the American Revolutionary officers who came through this area. The Couenhoven Tavern was founded in Tarrytown. Ma, if you'll turn around back inside the church and up to the organ. All of those little designs, which are actually carvings, are done by a local man, and they have significance to the man that built the church and cemetery yard. Way up in the top, that is chaffs of wheat. Wheat in Dutch is tarwe. I jokingly say that two Dutchman were talking one day and one said to the other, "I am going to Tarwedorp." It didn't mean much sense to the Englishman who was standing over to the side, so he asked, "What is Tarwedorp?" "Tarwe" is wheat and "dorp" is town or village. So one Dutchman was saying to the other, "I am going over to the wheat village." And the Englishman, as we always do, we change the sound of words and do a messed up job on translation sometimes. So what did they do, the Englishman said, “Oh, you're going to Tarwedorp, that means tarwetown, Tarrytown.” Of course, Mr. Irving wouldn't allow us to think about it that way. He told us that the women of the village named the village--that their husbands tarried at the tavern so they called it Tarrytown. Third major alteration in here is what you see today. The large neo gothic windows replacing the smaller ones, plaster replacing the stone walls covered with Hudson River mud. Hudson River mud is hybrid clay, and if you apply it properly, it can react and come up to almost the same as plaster, a nice smooth surface. The balcony was taken out that Washington Irving sat in, and that balcony that is part of the picture that Ma just took, that was put in to replace the choir balcony and the men's balcony. That wall supports part of the balcony and the flower columns over there. Recent years, they wanted to change the look of lighting. So they added the sconces on the wall with candles and this chandelier over your head.

I understand some of the characters from “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” are buried here. Do you get a lot of tourists asking about that? Is “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” popular around here?

Why don't we shut off the camera and go outside. I'll show you some of the tombstones that are out there where we believe Mr. Irving got the names and lifestyles for the story.

We've walked about 40 feet north into the cemetery yard, and we've come into the area of two red stones. Both of them the last name is Van Tassel--Petrus, the husband, and Katrina, the wife. I believe one day Washington Irving was straight out there at about one o'clock in the afternoon, sunshine very bright. Sun was up in that tree, the sunlight was coming across the face, when it does, shadows form around the different objects. And if you come down and feel, there is a nose here, there is a cleft, a little dimple right under her nose, there are lips, there is a jaw line. When that shadow is up, the 3rd dimension appears to come into the face, and that 15 year old boy (Washington Irving) seeing it, I believe, came down here out of curiosity, looked at the name and remembered the name, and when it came time to write the story, he put the name of the female character in the book (Katrina Van Tassel). Now we've got a lot of things to add into this, some of it you might want to write down. This Katrina was the granddaughter of Wolfert Ecker, that's E-c-k-e-r, one of Peter Stuyvesant's entourage down in New York City. The British put the Dutch out of business. Wolfert came up river and built a house. He called it Wolfert's Roost. One of the stories that Washington Irving wrote was called "Wolfert's Roost." Her (Katrina's) father was born there, we don't know for sure if she was born there, but she is tied to that building in another way. Her brother-in-law, Petrus's brother, lived at the farmhouse. His name was Van Tassel. Now the Van Tassel farm in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," we believe, is this Katrina's grandfather's farm, or the original Wolfert's Roost. Now we found out that her (Katrina's) brother-in-law was not the pleasant old gentleman as Mr. Irving portrayed in the story but he, in the Revolutionary time, was a nasty old man. He did not like the British, and he would take his double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun and go down to the end of the property and sit there along the Hudson River and shoot at the British folks going by. One day he ran out of lead shot bullet, so what did he do? He took a pail of nails down with him. You've heard the expression, "He nailed them?" He used the nails in the barrel of the gun and fired the nails at the British. He made a mess of the British. Needless to say, it wasn't very long after that Mr. Van Tassel was no longer a resident of that building up on the hill above where he was shooting, because the British came along and burned it down. Years later, another man built a farmhouse; and years later, another man came along and bought the ten acres of property with that farmhouse on it. That man was Washington Irving. Wolfert's Roost, the Van Tassel Farm, and Sunnyside are all the same place. WOW! And people can't believe it's put together that tight. The whole story is forgotten, this area. He did a beautiful job. Now, let's go over this way.

What you're seeing on the film or the picture there, we found out that there is only one family that had anything to do with Hessian soldiers. That's this young couple right here, these are other Van Tassels. Their infant baby daughter's life was saved by a Hessian soldier. Let that sink in for a minute. And we believe when the headless Hessian soldier was found, this family was the only one that had that feeling--somebody did something very nice and saved their baby daughter's life, they would be the only ones to come forward and give a Hessian soldier a Christian burial. And that's why we believe he's here.

Blue plaque to the right is Sam Young. Now in the story, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," Ichabod was on his way home, and he was going to cross a bridge. Take a look at this. That bridge, this is a copy of a photograph that was done in 1864, and that bridge that you're looking at on this paper is right down there, right in the middle of that, I call it a double dog leg in the flow of water. That is where Ichabod was trying to get across this bridge. I'll give you one of these (photograph) so you can use it, if you want to enlarge it. When Ichabod, Sam Young, got knocked off the horse, he disappeared from here. He went to New York City where he became a lawyer, a judge, and a politician. Sam, we believe, is Ichabod after the pumpkin was thrown. Before that, he was a schoolteacher, and Mr. Irving used Mr. Merlin from Kinderhook, N.Y. for that character. Now if you want to go see Ichabod in the story, you'll have to go all the way to Staten Island. And you'll meet probably the historian of Staten Island, as she's trying to restore the stone. Mr. Irving and Ichabod Crane, the true human being, met during the war of 1812. They were both in the New York, well the United States Army. Mr. Irving was New York militia, and it was Captain Ichabod Crane, Colonel Washington Irving.

Brom Bones, thank you for remembering. Turn around this way. In the unabridged version, one of the very first versions of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" that Mr. Irving wrote, there was one sentence very, very important. It said Brom Bones is his nickname. A nickname is what--an abbreviated name. Here's how we get Brom--Abraham "A-b-r-a-h-a-m." Now I'm gonna take and cover up the "a" and the "h". What do we have left? Braam, pronounced Brom. When we found Brom was the nickname of Abraham, we started a search. This goes way, way back before we came to this conclusion. Brom was described; we used that description to help us find the right Brom. Brom in the story is the young man on the horse, Mr. Irving had him on a big black stallion that could outride all the other guys in the community, right? He was also a very muscular young man. I figured it out. What job would carry those characteristics? Somebody instead of on the horse, around the horses, and very muscular--the village blacksmith. Oh! Yeah! So in our search, we went looking for a village blacksmith known as Brom. And we found out that Brom, this Abraham, was the village blacksmith and knew Mr. Irving. Mr. Irving had a horse, and every once in awhile one of the shoes on Mr. Irving's horse would fall off. So he would have to go to Brom and have a new shoe put on the horse. And Mr. Irving, we find, had shoes on his feet too. And every once in awhile, a hole would appear on the bottom of Mr. Irving's shoe. So he would have to have somebody put a new sole on the shoe. And we find that this Abraham over here was that guy. This Abraham, Brom's son, was the village cobbler. And he repaired Mr. Irving's shoes. Every single person in the story had some relevance to interaction with Mr. Irving himself--Ichabod, the War of 1812, Sam Young did legal work for Mr. Irving, lived in this area close to Mr. Irving. Everybody had interaction with Mr. Irving that's in the story.

That is Eleanor Brush. Eleanor is Katrina's niece. When she died, she died somewhere when she was near 98 years old. Yeah. One of the men that saw her at the funeral made a comment, she is as beautiful today as the first day I met her. Whether he was complimenting the husband and flattering such, she was one of those women who carried her beauty through life. From the time she was a young girl like your sister up to the time way past Mom's age to maybe Grandma's age. So you can see how some women; they're around, they don't need cosmetics. They're just pretty ladies.

It is the homestead, reproduction, replication. All of those buildings that are over there I was told are original, the mill and the house. That is the home of the man that built this church and started this cemetery. Frederick Phipson, a Dutch name, later Anglicized, remember I told you the English changed the names. They changed it from Frederick Phipson, to Frederick Philipse. Now, the weather vein here in the back, can you get that in there? Later on go up there in the front and take pictures back this way and you will actually see the V F properly displayed, on this weather vein here, the one in the back. See the designs? It looks like a V? And little flags on the left side? That is reversed right now. It is V F, Frederick Phipson.

How do I think it affected the town? Well, the full effect isn't here yet, because not everybody realizes that "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" is a true story to a point. And it relates to this church, the cemetery, Mr. Irving's home, and all of this area in between. Now in actuality, this area as I'm pointing up north and east of here is what was more commonly known as Sleepy Hollow--Sleepy Hollow Road, Sleepy Hollow Farm, which was my great-grandfather's farm. My grandmother lived up there. If you can add this up, I was around very long. No, I wasn't here all that time.

Well if you calculate kids, schoolchildren, we have quite a few schoolchildren come and I do the basic talk that I gave you. And that usually happens around October. And then all during the year from whenever I'm here and somebody stops by and needs to have a little enlightenment, I'll talk; about, I would say an average of 1500 students, and possibly 500 to 1000 adults, about 2500 people. The publicity has always been quite poor, people that have done our publicity for us. Publicity is not a big thing. A lot of it is an overflow of people coming into the area and going to the manor across the street, Philipsburg Manor. The girls over there will tell them that the church across the street is in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," and some of the characters from the legend are here in the yard. And if they're curious enough, they'll come over and look. We get a few tourists out there.

Besides being related to the book, what makes Sleepy Hollow different from other towns?

I really don't know. I wouldn't know how to make a comparison like that. The reality is here, the farmhouse, now this is my take on it, my personal approach to it. Mr. Irving heard stories when he was a boy about the farmhouse where Katrina lived, and that was actually Eleanor Van Tassel. And later years he came back and lived here, he lived part of the story in a sense. The area where Ichabod rode is from Sunnyside to where this bridge crossed to the river. That is an actual fact. Mr. Irving wrote in the story that Ichabod turned and looked down on the Tappan Zee. There's only one Tappan Zee in the United States and that's right out there in the Hudson River. A part of the writing noted that Ichabod went by the monument where Andre was captured. John Andre was in the Revolutionary War. And that monument is still in existence today. There is no other monument in the United States for John Andre's capture. It is all right here. The church that Ichabod had the girls singing in, there is the church. So all of it adds relevance here, and it puts it right here. No other place in the United States has this. I don't like to say it too loudly, but a lot of these people who make movies can't find any better place and better story to destroy. Pathetically, some of these people have made movies about "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," have destroyed it. Their curiosity piques and they come over to see for themselves.

Do you think the people who live in Sleepy Hollow have read "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," or are they just aware of its existence?

I would believe, I would have to say that at least 65% of the people who live here have actually read "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," a lot of them. I know one old man who said it is a "stupid silly story that a man wrote." Well he didn't have anyone to talk it out with him and argue the points and show him the error of his ways. Misbelief.

A love of the place. I moved ten miles to be closer to what you see here. Now Ma, just turn and pan around. This is only about three acres of ground where people have been buried since about 1640. 1640, 1740, 1840, 1940, 2040 will be 400 years that people have been buried in this plot of ground. Out here now, you see stone markers. We believe that there were wooden markers before this. And those wooden markers would have rotted out, fallen over, and then the men of the church would come out and set fire to the tall grass. Now when you run fire over a piece of wood, or around a piece of wood, it's gonna burn. And I say about ten years down the road, there's not gonna be anything relevant to who is buried there. Because it's going to be a piece of charred wood. And eventually, all that knowledge is gone. The Dutch did not write down in a book deaths. Anything you wanted to know about a deceased member of the family, you had to go out and look at the tombstone or the wood marker. If the wood marker was burned up, then that knowledge was gone. And that's the shameful part of it, but that's the way they wanted to do it.

That photograph was taken around 1864. They took plates of glass, they put an emulsion on it, exposed it, and got a picture. They took tin, put an emulsion on it, put it in a camera effect, and took a picture. That, what you have in your hand, is a tintype, a copy of a tintype photograph that shows the bridge.

This old effigy, it's a simplistic way of doing it. Grandma had a conversation with the kids one day. And one of the kids said, "Grandma, I heard mommy say that you're getting old and you might die. And you are always saying that when you die, you're gonna go to heaven. How are you gonna get there?" And Grandma said "Well, when I die, the angels gonna come down and put a set of wings on me. And you remember what mommy said one day? That if you look into a person's face you'll see their soul. Well the face is the representation of the person's soul, and the soul is what goes to heaven. The soul is being taken to heaven by the wings.

Now if you look, this is Mr. Martling. This is Brom's father, and the son's grandfather. This man was born in the 1600's and died in the 1700's. Father, son, grandson--we got three generations of Martlings here.

If you have a chance some sunny day, some day when it's convenient for you, a real bright sunny morning, come up and get a hamburger or something. And try to be here about one o"clock. And you can take a picture of that with a heavy shadow, you can actually see how the sun comes around and how the design is lit up, which causes the optical illusion of third dimensions. So if you have time, you can do something like that.

Home	Washington Irving	Ichabod's Schoolhouse - Learn about The Legend & Old Dutch Church	Van Tassel's Mansion Fun, games, stories, dancing and music	Book Discussion & Guest Book
Interviews	Sketchbook - See our drawings and ideas	Trip Back in Time - We pretend to be the characters & rewrite the ending	Scrapbook - Our trip to Sleepy Hollow	Meet the Team & Bibliography/Credits