As a child I heard Dutch spoken in the street,
in the stores and the market. We spoke Dutch, more or less, at home, and
no other language at my grandfather's farm. The Sears family came from
Cape Cod, but my mother was a Van Der Zee, and although the first Van
Der Zee came from Holland in 1642, the family was as Dutch as ever in
1842, two centuries later. Mother learned English, at school but spoke
it very little until after her marriage, and then crooned nursery rhymes
in Dutch to her children; "Trip a trop a tronches," "Wat zegt Mynhur
Papa," etc.
My father's store was "on the Pier," which is equivalent to saying he
was a flour merchant. The Pier was a sort of bulkhead between the canal
basin and the river, and it was occupied by a single row of buildings,
all of which were flour stores. The Genesee Valley was a famous wheat
growing country in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the
grain was ground in Rochester and shipped down the Erie Canal to Albany,
the receiving and distributing center for the trade.
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