Dutchess County Historical Society Yearbook Vol 016 1931

THE STONE BARN AT PLEASANT VALLEY At the west end of the village of Pleasant Valley there stands a barn, built of stone, which is a survival of the style of masonry and general construction that prevailed in the eighteenth century. The building is on two ground-levels and until recently the upper part was used for the storage of hay and the lower for stabling cattle.

In each of the four walls of this barn there are rows of openings, cut in the same form as embrasures for musketry.

The form of the openings (narrow on the outer side, flaring on the inner) gave rise to a popular idea that the barn was a block house or fort at the time when there were Indians in Dutchess, but this explanation of the shape of the cuts would need the best of proof before it could be accepted. There never were many Indians in the vicinity; the land was not taken up and settled upon by white men until the middle of the eighteenth century; and, when white men came to live in this neighborhood, there is no hint in the county records of any trouble with the Indians. The alternative explanation offered is summed up in the one word: ventilation. But at once it should be added that the openings in the walls of the barn are never-the-less of particular interest, inasmuch as only four other instances of their kind are listed in the Hudson Valley.

There are embrasures of graduated width in the walls of Crailo, the Van Rensselaer house at Rensselaer, New York; in the Van Cortlandt manor-house at Croton-on-Hudson; in the DuBois house at New Paltz ; and in the Hardenbergh house at Kerhonkson, Ulster County.

In 1931 the farm at Pleasant Valley on which the stone barn is found was purchased by the New York Power and Light Corporation as part of a large tract acquired as a site for a power-station. Representatives of the corporation laid out the new plant at first in such a way that it seemed necessary to tear the barn down but, when it became known locally that such was the case, sentiment was aroused in favor of its preservation and a special request that it be left standing was made 19