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Vander Ende-Onderdonk House, 1820 Flushing Avenue, Ridgewood, Queens, New York City, New York, United States

The Onderdonk House, located on Flushing Avenue near the corner of Onderdonk Avenue in an industrial section of Ridgewood, is, in part, a rare surviving late-eighteenth-century Dutch- American farmhouse in the Borough of Queens, as well as one of the few houses of eighteenth- century stone construction in New York City. In particular, it is one of the city's very few eighteenth-century Dutch-American stone houses with a gambrel roof. It has associations with many early and interrelated families of settlers, mostly Dutch, of western Long Island.

Nearly demolished in 1974, the one-and-a-half-story house suffered a major fire in 1975, which destroyed most of its wooden elements. Saved through the efforts of diligent local residents, the house was reconstructed for the Greater Ridgewood Historical Society by the firm of Giorgio Cavaglieri in 1980-82, based largely on the recording of the house by the Historic American Buildings Survey in 1936 and on surviving physical evidence after the fire. Despite the numerous alterations to the Onderdonk House over the last two hundred years, and its reconstruction in large part, it survives as a significant early remnant of Queens history, and a testament to the work of those neighborhood residents who recognized its worth.

The Onderdonk House is one of the very few Dutch-American houses in New York City on its original site with a substantial parcel of land and with public accessibility. Additionally, the land around the house has yielded significant archaeological resources of both prehistoric and historic periods, which have aided in the interpretation and added to the understanding of the house and the site. The site has the potential to yield additional archaeological resources in the future.

History of the Property and the House in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries'

During most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the property associated with the Onderdonk House was part of the large "disputed territory" between the Dutch-settled town of Boswijk (Bushwick) in Kings County and the English town of Middleburgh (later Newtown) in Queens County; this conflict stemmed from conflicting grants made to Dutch and English settlers.

What is now Flushing Avenue, originally a trail used by Native Americans, was later the highway between the two towns, and this site was adjacent to the end of a branch of the English Kills section of Newtown Creek. The earliest report of habitation by a Dutch settler on the Onderdonk House tract was 1662 when Hendrick Barentse Smidt, a prosperous landowner and silversmith whose name appears in many records of New Netherland, is recorded as having a house on his property.

The land changed hands several times prior to 1709, when one hundred acres were purchased by Paulus van Ende and his wife, probably the former Jannetje Hendricks, daughter of Hendrick Ryker. Bora c. 1679 in Utrecht, the Netherlands, van Ende was a descendant on his mother's side of the van Cortlandts, and was from Flatbush at the time of the purchase. The property was inherited in 1737 by his son Hendrick, and by the latter's widow Antie Calyer van Ende in 1750.

Based on existing evidence, the house dates from about the third quarter of the eighteenth century; reference is usually made to the survey in January of 1769 that established a boundary line between Kings and Queens Counties in the Bushwick-Newtown area (placing the house in Bushwick). The report of the survey commissioners notes the house of Joseph Woodward, located northeast of the Onderdonk House site. The Annals of Newtown by James Riker (1852), however, cites one of the reference points used by the surveyor Francis Marschalk as "the northerly corner of the house, formerly the house of Frederick Van Nanda [sic], and now in possession of Moses Beegel [sic]." The former was undoubtedly Hendrick van Ende, while the latter was Moses Beadel, husband of Jannetje (Jane) van Ende, Hendrick's daughter. Beadel is thought to have been of French Huguenot descent, probably born in 1725 in Hempstead, Long Island. Recent research on the development of the timber framing and floor plans of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century

Dutch-American farmhouses indicates that the form of the house (prior to the fire and as reconstructed) would probably have a date no earlier than mid-eighteenth century. Clifford W. Zink has analyzed the timber framing of Dutch-American houses and has categorized these houses into three periods of development and seven types of framing. Based on Zink's prototypes, the Onderdonk House, with its "hybrid gambrel frame" combining Dutch anchor-bent and English box-frame elements (with the anchor bents placed at the bay intervals on the second floor), would date from the last period — the second half of the eighteenth century /first quarter of the ninetee

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