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The Pieter Claesen Wyckoff Farm Museum is a place where history comes alive.
High school students farm the land here as it was farmed hundreds of years ago.
They sell the produce at the Wyckoff Farmer's Market, so the community can reap the benefits of fresh and local fruits and vegetables.
The Pieter Claesen Wyckoff house is the oldest structure in the state and city of New York.
When the New York City Landmarks Commission was founded in 1965,
this farmhouse was the very first designated landmark of New York City.
It's the last structure of any sort standing during the period of time when this colony was known as New Netherland,
before the English took it, in 1664, and it became New York.
Today it is proudly a New York City park, and it is open for the public to enjoy,
and learn a little bit about the unspoken history of New York City and Brooklyn in particular.
If this house could write a book about the history of America, it would be a bestseller.
I mean, this house stood a hundred and twenty-some-odd years before the Revolutionary War,
before the United States became the United States.
Many people don't realize that the farms in Brooklyn and Queens
were the largest agricultural producers in the region all through the 18th and 19th centuries.
This wasn't always a city. Once upon a time, this was the most fertile farmland in the United States.
We try to bring a little bit of that former farm life back into the modern age.
There's a little bit of something for everybody.
There's tours you can take, there's everything. It's just a nice place to spend the day.
We have a wonderful program here for school groups.
In fact, during the school year, almost every day is booked with school groups that are coming in.
I found this place through my school, which is just around the corner.
When it came time to do community service for my school, I chose this place.
Just to get a glimpse of how people lived 300 years ago and 200 years ago, and 150 years ago.
I learned about all the farming history that was in Brooklyn, that no one knows about, because there's no farms here now, there's just buildings.
So I discovered a lot about the history of this house and the history of Brooklyn.
For the past 20 years now, Brooklyn College has been working with the Parks Department
and the Historic House Trust on several of their properties, to put together a larger story
of the history of the former inhabitants of the houses that they maintain.
I've been working here for almost three years now.
I work in the garden. I plant, and weed, and we grow organic fresh fruits and vegetables;
collared greens, eggplant, carrots, radishes. You name it, we grow it, and on Sundays, we sell it.
You can buy fruits and vegetables, there's workshops where you can learn about different aspects of growing and produce.
We sell produce we grow ourselves on the farm, and we have produce from upstate New York, a couple farmers up there.
Our little market here, we have the same vendors that are at 14th Street Market.
We're able to get the best produce, we're able to have the best things here.
I was just passing, so we decided to stop to see what's going on.
And then we saw that they had organic food and fresh fruit, so we decided to buy some.
I eat organic food because it's natural. There's no pesticides, nothing in it that will destroy our body.
But in addition to that, here you're able to get organic produce that was produced on the same land that was being grown back in 1662.
We're doing the same thing that was done here hundreds of years ago.
To me it's a fascinating point, and I'm proud to be a part of it.
I'm Kanya, and the Wyckoff House is my park.