“Reimagining the Abraham Hasbrouck House, circa 1760,” a virtual presentation by Kate Johnson & Neil Larson

Kate Eagen Johnson has created, and advised on, a wide range of historic interiors during her museum career. From 1993 to 2011, she served as curator and director of collections at Historic Hudson Valley, an organization that administers such National Historic Landmark properties as Philipsburg Manor and Washington Irving’s Sunnyside. Since 2011, Kate Johnson has been busy as a freelance curator, museum consultant, and writer on history, arts, and design at HistoryConsulting.com. Pertinent to this presentation are her joint historic furnishing-exhibition initiatives for the Greenwich (CT) Historical Society’s Bush-Holley House and for the William Connor house, the centerpiece of Indiana’s Connor Prairie Living History Park. For the last dozen years, Kate has been a member of the Curatorial Advisory Board for the United States Senate which assists with the historic interiors and art objects in the Senate wing of the Capitol.

Between 2015 and 2016, Kate researched and wrote a furnishing plan and companion reports for the Abraham Hasbrouck House, a project funded by the Hasbrouck Family Association (HFA). From 2018 to 2020, Kate collaborated with Historic Huguenot Street’s Director of Curatorial and Preservation Affairs Josephine Bloodgood and HFA to implement the furnishing plan through the identification and location of specified objects.

In the first half of this program, Kate will explain how this directed furnishing plan serves as a blueprint for creating historically accurate interiors and aids in “bringing to life” the individuals who called this place home during the late colonial era. She will reveal the historical resources investigated, what drove the decision-making process, and some of the project’s surprising finds.

Neil Larson has been researching, writing, and teaching about historic architecture for more than thirty years. While he is interested in architecture of all types and periods, he confesses a particular fascination with Ulster County stone houses and the often-subtle differences found among different localities and ethnic groups. With an academic background in liberal arts and material culture studies obtained at Vassar College and the University of Delaware’s Winterthur Program in Early American Culture, Neil received a priceless field experience in the Hudson Valley in the employ of the New York State Historic Preservation Office’s National Register Program. After eight years of traveling the highways and byways of the region, Larson forsook his bureaucratic career for the independence of a freelancer. He has researched and re-written the history of 18th-century stone house architecture in the Hudson Valley and has had a long association with Historic Huguenot Street having authored historic structure reports, furnishing plans, and exhibit installations. As preservation consultant to the Hasbrouck Family Association, Neil has been advising on the restoration of the Abraham Hasbrouck house since 2002.

In the second half of the program, Neil Larson will be discussing the research, planning, and other necessary stages of a restoration project. He will divulge the various measures that have been taken over the course of many years to restore the Abraham Hasbrouck House on Huguenot Street back to its mid-eighteenth century state. He will talk about how he approaches these buildings from a cultural perspective, looking for reasons for why they look the way they do, how they functioned, and how they evolved through changing periods and generations.

$10 General Admission

$8 for HHS members, seniors, students, active military members, veterans, and children under 13

All ticket purchases are final and nonrefundable.