Uncover the Battle of Brooklyn in Park Slope with Kim Maier
Who better to share the Old Stone House’s rich history than Kim Maier, celebrating 20 years as Executive Director!
This article is an excerpt from an earlier Park Slope Pulse article written this year by Pam Wong celebrating Kim Maier’s work in the community.
On August 27, 1776, The Battle of Brooklyn – the largest battle of the Revolutionary War – took place on the site where Old Stone House currently stands.
“This site is really where the battle culminated,” Maier explains. “[The battle] was not very long. It started around 6am and it was over by noon. The bulk of the troop movement happened here around the stone house.”
During the Battle of Brooklyn, British troops advanced toward the American camp in Brooklyn Heights to cut off any escape. General William Alexander led a small regiment of Maryland soldiers against 2,000 British forces at the stone house site. Though they fought hard, the Marylanders were greatly outnumbered. General Alexander surrendered after 256 Maryland soldiers were killed or went missing, according to theoldstonehouse.org.
The British won the Battle of Brooklyn and occupied Brooklyn and Manhattan for seven years. Although the Americans lost the battle, the efforts of the Maryland regiment allowed Washington and his troops to escape across the East River and, ultimately, win the war.
“It’s not a well-known battle because the Americans lost,” Maier notes, “but for us it’s an incredible opportunity to talk about resilience, losing the battle and winning the war…. We’ve been having the same arguments for the last 250 years. None of this is new.”
By 1910 the original stone house — a farmhouse built by the Dutch settler, Hendrick Claessen Vechte, in 1699 — had fallen into disrepair and was eventually buried under 15 feet of landfill as the neighborhood around it developed.
After a “fairly extensive conversation between Robert Moses and the Park Slope community, which had wanted to recognize the history of the site for many years,” the current OSH opened in August of 1935, steps away from where the original house stood, near the corner of 5th Avenue and 3rd Street — “right where the baby swings are,” according to Maier. The house is a replica reconstructed using the original stones.
OSH became a member of the Historic House Trust of New York City in 1991 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2012.
During the early years of the OSH, there was a capital office on the first floor and kindergarten classes upstairs, according to Maier. Community youth programs were held in the building in the early 1970s but by the late ‘70s the city fell into a “fiscal crisis” and funding for “social services had been depleted,” so the house was shut down. “Kids would climb in…it was referred to as the old stoned house,” Maier says.
Over the years, locals volunteered to re-open and maintain the house and preserve its past. In 2001 a lively 225th anniversary of the American Revolution reenactment was staged by volunteers and board members of OSH. It started “up in Prospect Park and the Brigade of the American Revolution came running down 3rd Street,” Maier says.
OSH board members reached out to Maier in 2004 who was a co-president of the PTA at MS 51 at the time. “They were very focused on the history and they were having a hard time getting engagement.” They didn’t understand why students weren’t attending any of the educational programs at the house.
“My questions were really about the park. Why was the park not an engaging public space? Why was the park so rundown? Why was there no public programming in the park?” Maier remembers. “That was where we began our conversation – if you’re going to get people to care about the history of the site, you have to get them to care about the space.”
Read more about Kim Maier’s work at The Old Stone House here.
You can visit The Old Stone House at:
336 3rd Street
Brooklyn, NY 11215