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300 Years of History in the Heart of New Paltz, New York |
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Huguenot Street: A Virtual Tour After purchasing 40,000 acres stretching between the Shawangunk Ridge and the Hudson River and receiving a patent from Governor Edmund Andros, eleven French-speaking Huguenot families set out from Nieuw Dorp and Wiltwyck, two small villages the Hudson River Valley of colonial New York, to strike out on their own. It was 1678. They settled inland, in a valley centered on a small river. They called their village New Paltz after Die Pfalz, the region of Germany that their families had first found refuge in back in Europe. The river they called "Wall Kill," after the Wall Valley of Europe from which their families originally hailed. They built their first houses out of necessity — simple earthfast log structures, pit houses and perhaps even a palisade for protection. Once protected from the elements, they began establishing farms and set about creating their own village on a raised flat area previously inhabited by Native Americans. Recent research suggests that they began to replace these simple long and earth structures with permanent stone buildings in the early 1700s. The houses would have originally consisted of only one room and were added to over the subsequent generations. Of the eight original houses, six survive at Historic Huguenot Street. Archaeology and oral history confirm the location of the other two. The survival of these houses in their original setting attests to their physical strength and the cultural value placed upon them by the many generations which have passed since their construction.
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