Historic Cherry Hill

Publications

• Murder at Cherry Hill

  Louis C. Jones $10 Includes NYS sales tax.  Postage and handling fees will apply to mail orders.

  

  Murder at Cherry Hill has the ingredients of a Hollywood thriller; yet it is also an exciting piece of social history. The story centers on a love affair between Elsie Whipple, daughter of a leading Albany family, and Jesse Strang, a mere hired hand. The affair culminates in the murder for which Jesse Strang was convicted and hanged, the last public hanging in Albany. The setting for the book is Cherry Hill, a farm estate in 1827—and today a historic house museum open to the public.

• The Confession of Jesse Strang

  $2.70  Includes NYS sales tax.  Postage and handling fees will apply to mail orders.

  

  Facsimile of original document sold at Jesse Strang's 1827 hanging. Strang was a hired hand at Cherry Hill and was convicted of the infamous murder of household member John Whipple.

• On the Score of Hospitality: Selected Receipts of a Van Rensselaer Family Albany, New York, 1785-1835

  Jane Carpenter Kellar, Ellen Miller and Paul Stambach $5.40 Includes NYS sales tax.  Postage and handling fees will apply to mail orders.

  

  On the Score of Hospitality has been compiled from the handwritten receipt books belonging to Cherry Hill matriarch Maria Van Rensselaer, her daughter, Arriet, and her granddaughters Elizabeth and Harriet Maria between the years 1785 and 1835.

  These receipts illustrate the complex responsibilities of women in a prominent Dutch household in the Hudson River Valley. Their cooking recipes, remedies for the sick, and instructions for farming document the family's domestic history and supply a firsthand, colorful account of life in America at the turn of the 19th century.

• Creating a Dignified Past: Museums and the Colonial Revival

  Edited by Geoffrey L. Rossano $27 Includes NYS sales tax.  Postage and handling fees will apply to mail orders.

  

  The cultural phenomenon known as the Colonial Revival emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period of intense and unsettling social and economic change. Many fields were affected, none more so than the infant museum community. Historic preservation, gallery installations, research and publication all reflected some element of the Colonial Revival aesthetic which postulated an American “golden age” stretching from Plymouth Rock to the death of Thomas Jefferson.

  In recent decades historians have begun examining some of the movement's underlying assumptions, while also analyzing its social, economic, and political origins, as well as its impact on art, architecture, and literature of the period. Museum professionals have been particularly interested in discovering the ways in which the Colonial Revival affected their own institutions.

  Creating a Dignified Past includes an overview essay by Harvey Green, as well as detailed studies of Pennypacker Mills near Philadelphia, Colonial Williamsburg, Portland's Wadsworth-Longfellow House, Wallace Nutting's efforts in Wethersfield, Connecticut, and Historic Cherry Hill in Albany, New York. Taken together, they offer several insights into the social, cultural, and intellectual origins and development of the American History museum, an institution that has played a crucial role in preserving and interpreting the past.

Teaching Units

• Different Voices, Different Truths:  The 1827 Murder at Cherry Hill

  $20.00: School and libraries price. $25.00: Regular price.  Includes NYS sales tax.  Postage and handling fees will apply to mail orders.

  

  Field tested by seventh and eighth grade teachers and found to be a great way to excite students about history, this unit is an innovative model for the interdisciplinary teaching of social history at the junior high school level. The Cherry Hill murder is especially fascinating to students because it involves elements of romance, mystery, and the drama of public punishment.

  Different Voices contains facsimiles of 40 documents associated with the 1827 murder at the Cherry Hill farm in Albany, New York. These include the murderer's confession, newspaper accounts, letters, broadsides, and legal and trial records. An accompanying guide for teachers features student activities, answer key, overviews of major themes and characters, an explanation of documents, a glossary and other helpful materials.

  Students act as detectives, examining documents, analyzing evidence and drawing conclusions. In the process they are introduced to historiography - how the past is interpreted - and learn about women's roles and legal rights, slavery in New York, capital punishment, the law, and lifestyles in the early nineteenth century.

  Through their study of the murder at Cherry Hill, students will understand why historians and people who participated in events might have different interpretations of the same facts. This teaching unit encourages students to "hear" these different voices and then draw their own conclusions.

• Kittie Putman and the Cherry Hill Household, 1860-1884

  A Teaching Unit for Fourth Grade Teachers $20.00: School and libraries price. $25.00: Regular price. Iincludes NYS sales tax.  Postage and handling fees will apply to mail orders.

  

  After her mother's death in 1860, three year old Kittie Putman was sent to live with relatives at Cherry Hill in Albany, New York. This is the story of Kittie, a real American girl, who led a life of both adversity and privilege. Using primary sources and lessons, this unit explores Kittie's daily activities in the Cherry Hill household, where the lives of people of different social positions, genders, ages, and races were closely intertwined.

  Designed to meet New York State Social Studies Standard 1: History of the United States and New York.

  Contains facsimiles of almost 100 primary sources including letters, diaries, photographs, school compositions, census records, receipts, cartoons, floor plans, sheet music, and trade cards from the collections of Historic Cherry Hill, the New York State Library, the Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institution, and other repositories.

  Features 45 lessons with interdisciplinary and hands-on activities as well as answer keys, student worksheets, information sheets, transcriptions of primary sources, and more.

  Developed for classroom use, independent of a field trip to Historic Cherry Hill.

Purchase

Please indicate below which publications and/or teaching units you are interested in purchasing.  You will be contacted by the Shop Manager.  Postage and handling fees will be applied for all mail orders.