Hudson in the midst of wilderness, where
Indians and deer abounded, when Vrederyck Flypse caused the old part
of the stone mansion to grow out of the green hill slope in 1682. He
planted a foundation two feet thick and thereupon raised walls whose
thickness was twenty inches. He would have a residence wherein he
might defy alike the savage elements, men and beasts. For the front
end of his entrance-hall he imported a massive mahogany door made in
1681 in Holland,--a door in two parts, so that the upper half could be
opened, while the lower half remained shut. The rear door of that hall
was similarly made. Ponderous were the hinges and bolts, being
ordinary blacksmith work. Solid were the panel mouldings. He brought
Holland brick wherewith to trim the openings of doorways and windows.
He laid the floor of his aforesaid kitchen with blue stone. The
chimney breasts and hearthstones of his principal rooms were seven
feet wide.

Here, in feudal fashion, with many servants and slaves to do his
bidding, and tenants to render him dues, sometimes dwelt Vrederyck
Flypse, with his second wife, Catherine Van Cortlandt, and the
children left by his first wife, Margaret Hardenbrock; but sometimes
some of the family lived in New York, and sometimes at the upper
stone house, "Castle Philipse," by the Pocantico, near Sleepy Hollow
Church, of this Flypse's founding. He built mills near both his
country-houses, and from the saw-mill near the lower one did the
Neperan receive the name of Saw Mill River. He died in 1702, in his
seventy-seventh year, and the bones of him lie in Sleepy Hollow
Church.

But even before the first lord went, did "associations" begin to
attach to the old Dutch part of the mansion. Besides the leading
families of the province, the traders,--Dutch and English,--and the
men with whom he held counsel upon affairs temporal and spiritual,
public and private, terrestrial and marine, he had for guests red
Indians, and, there is every reason to believe, gentlemen who sailed
the seas under what particular flag best promoted their immediate
purposes, or under none at all. That old story never _would_ down, to
the effect that the adventurous Kidd levied not on the ships of
Vrederyck Flypse. The little landing-place where Neperan joined
Hudson, at which the Flypses stepped ashore when they came up from New
York by sloop instead of by horse, was trodden surely by the feet of
more than one eminent oceanic exponent of--

"