When Catherine Wheat was 12 years old, she stood in front of the home where her famous relatives, the Schuyler family, lived in from the 1600s to 1910. It was the early 1960s, and New York state had purchased the abandoned Schuyler Flatts home in Menands to convert it into a museum. Wheat watched as a plaque honoring the family was added next to the historic home.
“About three days after that, some young kids camped out and burned it to the ground,” said Wheat, who is named after her grandmother, Catherine Schuyler.
The fire, which consumed the house in 1962, left nothing behind — or so everyone thought. Earlier this year, Town of Colonie Historian Kevin Franklin was shocked when he received a phone call from a person saying they had the historic home’s front door. And now, for the first time in 40 years, the town hopes to display the door to the public and retell the history of the Flatts.
“I don’t have any reason not to believe that this door didn’t come from the Flatts,” Franklin said. “Through some research and photographs found online, this is absolutely, without a doubt, the same door. It’s probably the earliest piece of Dutch Colonial History that has survived from what eventually became the Town of Colonie.”
The man who called Franklin was Miles Cornthwaite, a laundromat owner in Ballston Spa and Wheat’s cousin. Cornthwaite said he must have mentioned to a customer how he was a Schuyler descendent and how his grandmother was born in the home. A short time after the conversation, Cornthwaite got an unexpected package on his front porch.
“(The customer) showed up in my yard on a Sunday night in the rain and told me he had spoken to me in the store,” Cornthwaite said. The customer had taken the door from the Schuyler home some time before it had burnt down, and after storing it away for years, decided to give it to Cornthwaite instead. “I didn’t even remember talking to the guy originally … he never mentioned the door before.”
Though Cornthwaite took the door, he, too, didn’t know what to do with.
“I kept it in my barn for several years thinking about what I can do with it. I kind of forgot about it in a way. Last year, I decided I wasn’t going to ever use it for anything, and it belonged in a museum someplace,” he said.
The heavy pine door towers over historian Franklin’s 6’1’’ frame. Partly thanks to some modern repairs over the years, including the changing of some nails in the structure, it is in very strong shape. Since Franklin doesn’t have a frame for the door, right now it’s separated into two parts.
When the two pieces fit together in the Flatts home, they opened to welcome generations of Schuylers. The home sat on hundreds of acres of the Schuyler family’s farm and faced east of the Hudson River. In the 1740s, the Flatts were fortified and became an assembly point for numerous attacks against the French.
“That door, we know it was standing there during the American Revolution, and maybe even before the French and Indian Wars and whatnot. The people who would’ve walked through that door would have been British generals, who were associated with the Schuyler family,” Franklin said.
The Open Space Institute now owns the Schuyler Flatts, and the public can enjoy the area as a park. The historic plaque was preserved from the fire and is now in the entranceway of the park. The stone structure of the house outlines its former footprint as if gravestones.
Franklin said he hopes once the door has a frame, they can set it up somewhere in Town Hall or in the town for the public to see.
Catherine Schuyler was one of the last descendents to live in the Schuyler home, and her granddaughter couldn’t be happier to see it can still be honored in some way.
“I think it’s marvelous. I’m so excited that it’ll be there and preserved. People can see it,” Wheat said. “I think the Schuylers are an integral part of state history and national history. I think that’s important.”