In the tradition of the times, Captain Andries De Witt was given the farmland from his father Tjerck Claessen De Witt. The Captain was born in 1657 and lived in Marbletown on the farm but his unproved occupation of the land was short lived as he moved to Kingston in 1708. On July 22, 1710, ‘Captain Andries De Witt departed this life in a sorrowful way; through the breaking of two sleepers (beams)
he was pressed down and very much bruised; he spoke a few words and died’. The farm Captain Andries lived on in the closing decades of the 17th century would have had a wood frame house that, like all similar structures in Marbletown, has not survived. Although, the frame house no longer exists, materials of the first house were utilized in the stone house. It was customary to make use of whatever materials were sound to build into the new structure. In 1753, Andries De Witt of the fourth generation, the grandson of Captain DeWitt, married Blandina Ten Eyck, and settled on the fertile land and built the current house on the West side of the farmland. At the time, there were at least two other houses on Hurley Mountain Road, the Wynkoop and Ten Eyck. The richness of the soil enabled a large and productive farm that was passed on to his son, John A. De Witt (1756-1836) who served in the Revolutionary War. The farm remained in the possession of his descendants until recent years. The first owner outside of the De Witts, in 1925, was the Honorable John G. Van Etten of Kingston. In the 1950’s a NY Wall Street financier bought the farm and sold off the farmland to Gill’s farm. The house is famous for the role it played in the Revolutionary War. It’s location made it an ideal place to store military supplies and rations for the Continental Army. According to Houses in Ulster County, ‘rations for six-hundred men for a month (hard bread and salt provision) were concentrated at this house and on August 3, following, it was stated that the guard over the magazine consisted of two sergeants and twenty-eight privates’. The De Witt farm house on Hurley Mountain Road was built in three parts; first the middle section in 1753 (logically the same year as his marriage to Blandina Ten Eyck); then the South and lastly the North end in 1800. According to Helen Wilkinson Reynolds in Dutch Houses in the Hudson Valley Before 1776, the original house consisted of ‘ two rooms, two chimneys, a door to the West and a half story attic’. The second portion added one large room to the South, ‘with a chimney, and like the first part [...] an entrance-door on the West side’. In 1800, according to the marked stone in the East wall, (This stone is no longer visible, possibly due to the addition of the sunroom in the 1960’s) the present kitchen was built at the North. Probably, at the same time that the kitchen was built, some changes were made to the interior and a porch was built on the East side of the house. In addition to the two 18th century Dutch doors on the West side, there is an interior Dutch door connecting the rooms of the first and second section of the house. In 1935, several dormers were added during extensive remodeling. Possibly in the 1960’s, a sunroom was added on to the East side of the house next to the kitchen. Two of the existing windows were enlarged for doorways into the sunroom. Between those two windows, now doorways, is a large stone with the date 1698 and additional markings carved into it and set upside down. Also of note are two other large carved stones with 1698 carved into them. One is to the right of the formal front door entrance on the West side. The other is on the upper Southeast corner of the house.
