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| A SNUG little farm was the Old Brevoort, | |
| Where cabbages grew of the choicest sort; | |
| Full-headed and generous, ample and fat, | |
| In a queenly way on their stems they sat; | |
| And there was boast of their genuine breed, | 5 |
| For from Old Utrecht had come their seed. | |
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| These cabbages, made into sauerkraut, | |
| Were the pride of the country round about, | |
| And their flavour was praised at each farmer feast, | |
| Among the Stuyvesants, far to the East, | 10 |
| Delanceys, that in the South meadows lay, | |
| And Strykers, perched up at Stryker’s Bay. | |
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| The Brevoorts had lived, as the record appears, | |
| On the farm for almost a hundred years. | |
| From Brevoort in Holland at first they came, | 15 |
| From that parent village they took their name; | |
| Whence the head of the family—his name was Rip— | |
| To New Netherlands came in an Amsterdam ship. | |
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| The farm itself was by no means great | |
| Alongside the Stuyvesants’ splendid estate, | 20 |
| But its pumpkins were golden, its apples round, | |
| And buckwheat grew on its upland ground; | |
| For a rule of diet the family had— | |
| To eat buckwheat cakes from green-corn to shad. | |
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| Some mulberries, quinces and Dordrecht pears | 25 |
| Grew where Grace Church its new steeple rears; | |
| Some creeping grape vines on trellis had run | |
| Where beckons the statue of Washington; | |
| On the spot where Brevoort House proudly towers | |
| Were clumps of orange-hued bloempje flowers. | 30 |
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| The homestead stood at the end of the lands | |
| Where Grace Memorial House now stands; | |
| In its garden, Dutch tulips of every shade, | |
| Their beautiful form and colour displayed; | |
| A low-roofed and unpretentious abode, | 35 |
| The homestead confronted a dusty road. | |
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| A merry old Dutchman was Uncle Brevoort, | |
| Who had not lived eighty odd years for naught; | |
| With abundant waist and laughing blue eye, | |
| And nose of a colour a trifle high, | 40 |
| A gouty foot, and long silvery hair, | |
| And a forehead free as a child’s from care. | |
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| You saw, just through his half-opened door, | |
| The well-scoured planks of a sanded floor; | |
| And within the cupboard was ranged on a shelf | 45 |
| Old-fashioned crockery brought from Delft. | |
| The roof o’er his porch for shade was a boon | |
| In the heat of a summer afternoon. | |
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| In front of the spot where his tulips grew | |
| Ran the road now known as Fourth Avenue; | 50 |
| Thence a lane to East River, through fields of wheat— | |
| It now goes by the name of Eleventh Street. | |
| And as the old gentleman sat in his porch | |
| He looked down the lane to the Bouwerie Church. | |
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| To him, thus enjoying his leisure and cheer, | 55 |
| One fine afternoon, some surveyors drew near; | |
| He offered a glass of old Holland schnapps, | |
| They accepted with thanks, but produced him some maps, | |
| Which showed that a project was well under way | |
| To open Eleventh Street through, to Broadway. | 60 |
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| The red lines and blue they duly explained, | |
| The land this one owned, the bounds that one claimed; | |
| An assessment put here and there an award, | |
| To run curb and gutter through garden and sward. | |
| He listened in patience as long as he could, | 65 |
| And then he remarked, “He’d be blanked if they should!” | |
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| He fought all their maps, and he fought their reports, | |
| Corporations, surveyors, commissioners, courts; | |
| He hired his lawyers, well learned in the law; | |
| The plans and the projects to fragments they tore. | 70 |
| But Uncle Brevoort, ere the law suit, expires, | |
| And calmly he sleeps at St. Mark’s with his sires. | |
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| The city abandoned the contest at last; | |
| He knew not his triumph, his struggle was past; | |
| His cabbage plot’s built on, his tulips are gone, | 75 |
| Where his old homestead stood is a palace of stone. | |
| But this of the old Dutchman’s pluck we can say— | |
| Eleventh Street’s not opened through, to this day! | |
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