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Community Corner

A Colonial Christmas at the Jacobus Vanderveer House

Open house tours from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. this Friday through Sunday show major program in turning historic home into a museum.

The Jacobus Vanderveer House & Museum in Bedminster will open its doors for another Colonial Christmas celebration this Friday through Sunday to proudly show off a year of major progress made by a group of volunteers — including many from Basking Ridge — in creating a regional history museum.

The 8th annual Colonial Christmas open house will be held from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. from Friday through Sunday. Admission to the fundraiser is $10 for adults, and free for children age 12 and younger. More information is online.

Groups of schoolchildren visited the decorated house and museum on Thursday, when they were invited for a special discussion with Gen. George Washington, said Renae Biale of Basking Ridge. Washington worked closely with Gen. Henry Knox, who occupied the circa-1760s Vanderveer house in 1778-79. Knox reportedly trained trained the nation's first artillery officers at the nearby Pluckemin encampment of Colonial soldiers.

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Biale is one of the Basking Ridge residents who serves on the all-volunteer Friends of the Jacobus Vanderveer House Board of Trustees. Last year, the president of the board was Jay Petrillo of the township.

This year, the Friends organization opens the house with a permanent exhibit of period antiques in two of the major rooms in the pre-Revolutionary War home.  

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Colonial Christmas will again feature decorations by area interior designers envisioning how the home would have looked during the Christmas season in past centuries.

However, members of the museum's furnishings committee, led by Madeleine Fleming of Harding Township and Leslie Mole of Bedminster, had by this year made major gains in a "treasure hunt" of finding appropriate antiques for the home, Biale said.

Fleming said tracking down the right furnishings had taken about a decade of searching, with concurrent fundraising.

One major acquisition was a tea set, owned by Gen. Knox and handed down through generations of his family. The previous owner, a descendant of the general, had learned about efforts to establish a museum in the Vanderveer house, Biale said.

The volunteers also discovered and acquired a Windsor chair commissioned by the general for another home.

"Now that we have more permanent exhibits, we will have more visitors," Fleming said. The next step is to work on the property's garden, she said.

"This is the first year that we have really had a lot of furniture to show off," said John Charles Smith, this year's president of the board and a resident of Peapack-Gladstone. The museum also now is open on a regular basis on the second Sunday of each month, he said.

The Friends organization was established in 1999. However, the house itself was in 1989 purchased by Bedminster Township. It was in dilapidated condition, recalled Diane Holtaway, wife of Bedminster Township Mayor Robert Holtaway.

The vision for the creation of a museum on the property captured the attention of volunteers from throughout the Somerset Hills area and into Morris County, Holtaway said.

The Friends group and researchers also have been seeking historic artifacts from the nearby encampment site on Schley Mountain, heading up in the direction of the Bernards Township border.

The house and museum will continue to hold its summer history camp for children from Bedminster and surrounding towns, said Jeanne Galbraith, co-chairwoman of Colonial Christmas.

 

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