Talk:Brook Farm (disambiguation)
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Book about fictitious "Brook Farm" in New York
edit(Please help fix this erroneous image file.)
This image: 
is not from the famous BROOK FARM in Massachusetts.
It is an image of "Pond Field Farm" in East Chester, New York.
This image is from this book:
- Brook Farm: the amusing and memorable of American country life (1859)
- Publisher: London, Wertheim, Macintosh, and Hunt
- Language: English
- Call number: 1570336
The book describes the location thus:
Brook Farm — the scene of all but two or
three of the following sketches — covered some
200 acres of the State of New York. It lay
about seven miles east of the Hudson, and
within an easy drive of the border of Con-
necticut. The reader of Cooper's admirable
tale of the "Spy" will be pleased to hear
that the noted house where the four roads
met, was within a quarter of an hour's walk of
us...
A reviewer describes the book: "This book is by James Bolton, son of Robert Bolton, who owned the Pondfield Farm, in what is now Bronxville, NY. It has nothing to do with the Brook Farm community in Massechusetts. It is a memorial to the family life lived on Pondfield Farm in the early 1800's. The family also purchased 30 acres in what is now Pelham, NY and built the Bolton Priory there, the first example of neo-gothic architecture in the US, built in 1838."[1]
This source explains that the book title is fictitious:
Thursday, March 26, 2009 Excerpt from Book Published in 1860 Provides Memories of Sundays at St. Paul's Church Before 1838
"Blake A. Bell is Town Historian and Town Clerk of Pelham, NY in Westchester County. He is also Village Historian of the Village of Pelham and is a member of the Boards of Trustees of the Westchester County Historical Society (Executive Committee), the Pelham Preservation Society, Ltd., and the Society of the National Shrine of the Bill of Rights at Saint Paul's Church National Historic Site."
Today's Historic Pelham Blog posting transcribes a chapter from a book published in 1860 containing an account of "Pleasant Sundays' spent at St. Paul's Church in about 1836. The author of the book was James Bolton (1824 - 1863), the youngest son of Rev. Robert Bolton who founded Christ Church in Pelham Manor and who served as Rector of St. Paul's Church in East Chester.
As James Bolton notes in the preface, he changed names in the book, but provides "truthful" narrratives from his boyhood. The book is about his family's life on the "Pond Field Farm" in East Chester which Rev. Bolton acquired in about 1836 before he built Bolton Priory and Christ Church in Pelham. In the book, James Bolton refers to Pond Field Farm as "Brook Farm", to East Chester as "Lancaster" and to St. Paul's Church as "St. Peter's Church".
"V.
Pleasant Sundays.
BROOK FARM was about three miles from the village of Lancaster. It was the nearest village to us, and thither we had to go for our letters, literature, clothes and groceries; all of which, and blue pills besides, could be obtained in one large shop. The village, nicely shaded with locust-trees, straggled for another mile along the high road...
Source: Bolton, James, Brook Farm: The Amusing and Memorable of American Country Life, Chapter V, pp. 33 - 41 (NY, NY: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1860).
-96.237.4.73 (talk) 17:03, 11 January 2013 (UTC)