The Colonel Lewis DuBois House
"In 1757, Colonel Lewis DuBois...built himself a commodious house on the second rise from the river not far from the King's Highway. It was stoutly framed of heavy timbers and encased with clapboards, the first clapboarded house to be erected in Ulster County."
"The pitch roof was truncated at the ends, jerkin-head wise, a fashion of roof that seems to have found favour amongst the colonists of this part of the Hudson....Maple Grove presents substantially the same appearance as it did when the doughty Colonel inhabited it, surrounded by his family and a retinue of black slaves."
"The mode of life maintained by Colonel DuBois was not only patriarchally ample and comfortable, but elegant as well, according to the standards of the time, for Maple Grove enjoyed the distinction of being the first house in the neighbourhood where a china dinner service was used, and curious housewives from the country round about came journeying thither to gaze with interest on the unwonted piece of luxury."
"Colonel DuBois being a personage of prominence in the vicinity, and his anti-British sentiments and activities being well known, when the British forces ascended the river in October, 1777, on their way to burn Kingston, under General Vaughan, Maple Grove, which could be plainly seen from the river, became the object of marked attention from the gunners on the men-of-war who fired red hot cannon balls at it in hopes of setting it a-fire. They failed of their purpose, but the cannon balls were preserved and, for years afterward, the children of the household, when they went into the attic to play on rainy days, used to roll them back and forth along the floor to simulate thunder."
"In this house was held the meeting of the Masonic lodge when Benedict Arnold's name was deleted from the rolls."
The above taken from "The Manors and Historic Homes of the Hudson Valley", Harold Donaldson Eberlein, 1924
The Town of Marlborough, Maple Grove
created by
MaryLou Mahan,
Town of Marborough Historian,
Send me a note mlmahan2@pipeline.com
URL:http://www.rootsweb.com/~nycmarlb/