Dutchess County Historical Society Yearbook Vol 020 1935

Philip Hart always attended Friends Meeting with his wife. He was, however, not so severe in his taste as was his wife, and among other properties he owned a large yellow coach, which was the finest vehicle in the town, which his wife thought a little more showy than was right.

With his children he was extremely good natured and easy, frequently chasing them, when they misbehaved, with a straw in his hand on pretense of an intention to whip them. All who remembered Philip Hart spoke of his cordial hospitality, and notwithstanding his large family, his house was continually open to many guests. When he used to visit he always wore a drab hat and plum colored coat, not full Quaker garb but what would pass as such.

All of Philip Hart's eleven children, excepting the youngest, were born in the old house which now stands on the northwest corner of the North Road. The house originally stood on the southwest corner and was of greater length than the present building, its west end being where Dr. Tredway, a son-in-law, subsequently built and its east end well down toward the drive. About 1800 he moved this house across the turnpike and erected his new house, the house you are visiting today, in which eight generations have slept and in which Miss Haviland was born and continues to live. This house remains very much as originally built, except as to the piazzas. The house is "a frame structure of two stories, with central hall and four rooms on each floor and with finish in the detail of 1800. When it was new, the front and end walls were painted white and the rear wall red; in later years it was white and now is yellow with white trimmings. The finish of the exterior is somewhat elaborate, including decorated window-cornices, a triple window over the front door, windows with arched tops in the north and south gables, some applied trim on the wall, etc., but the inside of the house is simpler and, in this connection the story has come down that Grandmother Hart, who was a Friend, told her husband that the exterior had been done to his liking and that she would plan the interior of the house in accordance with her own taste. That husband and wife held differing preferences regarding the presence or absence of that which was merely decorative and not necessary does not indicate any cleavage in sympathy between them, who spent fifty-five years together. In 1821, when Philip Hart made his will after forty-seven years of married life, he referred to Susanna Akin Hart as: 'My chosen and well-beloved bosom friend, Susanna, the wife of my youth' and surely no woman could ask a tribute 23