Paying by credit card? Click here to go to Brown Paper Tickets to pay. We accept a non-refundable $100 deposit to reserve your space.

Paying by check? Please make your check payable to the Old Stone House, write your child’s name and the class/course in the memo field, and mail to the Old Stone House, PO Box 150613, Brooklyn, NY 11215.

You will receive a confirmation email shortly.

Wednesdays, March 28 to June 6
No class on April 20th
12 sessions , 3:30 – 5:30 pm
Fee: $325
For children ages 7 – 11
We offer free pickup from PS 321 and The Children’s School

Discover the world of plants, gardening and food at the Old Stone House.

• Start seeds indoors and outdoors
• Transplant flowers and herbs 
• Work with compost
• Use garden tools for spring planting
• Study plants, flowers, insects and other garden dwellers
• Prepare simple foods 
• Play lots of games

The program will take place inside and around the Old Stone House. A light snack is provided.

Register online now > >

New Plays by Brooklyn Playwrights, curated by Rosemary Moore, brings together five accomplished playwrights –Trish Harnetiaux, Marian Fontana & Leah Gray Mitchell, Karen Hartman and Joseph Goodrich — presenting their latest works-in-progress.

Suggested donation of $5 includes refreshments.

Marian Fontana is a playwright and performer whose plays and one-woman shows have been performed at Playwrights Horizons,the Vineyard Theater, Variety Arts and more. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. Her memoir A Widows Walk was published by Simon and Schuster in 2005 and was chosen as People Magazines “Top Ten Reads” for that year. She recently finished her second memoir, Middle of the Bed.

Joseph Goodrich is an Edgar Award-winning playwright and the editor of Blood Relations: The Selected Letters of Ellery Queen, 1947-1950 (Perfect Crime Books). His plays have been produced across the United States and in Austrialia and are published by Samuel French, Playscripts, Inc.; The Padua Hills Press; and others.

Trish Harnetiaux is a Brooklyn-based playwright. Her recent full-length plays include Your Pretty Little World, adapted from Shirley Jackson’s novel, The Bird’s Nest; Welcome to the White Room; and Mr. Bungle and the Incident on Lambdamoo. She has been a two-time Fellow at both the MacDowell Colony and The Corporation of Yaddo. Harnetiaux received her MFA from Mac Wellman’s playwriting program at Brooklyn College and currently, she is a member of the 2011/2012 Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab where she is writing her new play, an unconventional love story titled The Convention.

Karen Hartman’s Goldie, Max, and Milk premiered last season at Florida Stage and the Phoenix Theater, and was nominated for the Steinberg and Carbonell Awards. Wild Kate opened at ACT in San Francisco ,and will be published by Playscripts this month. An alumna of New Dramatists, Karen has taught playwriting extensively, including at the Yale School of Drama, and currently leads popular writing workshops in New York. Her prose has been published in the New York Times.

Leah Gray Mitchell graduated from the NYC High School of Performing Arts as a music major and received her BFA in dance from SUNY Purchase. She has performed in numerous films and theatre projects, as well as composing and performing original music.

Rosemary Moore’s Side Street, Slight Kidnapping, The Bar Play, Aunt Pieces, Pain of Pink Evenings and Pineapple have been read or staged at the Cherry Lane Alternative, The New Group, New York Theater Workshop, New Georges, Manhattan Theater Source, The Old Stone House, Barbes and Here. Her play, The Pain of Pink Evenings, was published in The Best American Short Plays of 2001 by Applause Books. During the day she teaches writing at Rutgers University. Rosemary holds an MFA from the Dramatic Writing Program of Tisch School of the Arts at New York University where she studied with Maria Irene Fornes and Tony Kushner

Remember Show & Tell in elementary school? When you got a chance to bring something in from home to show your class? It was simple, innocent fun. Join painter Shawn Dulaney and photographer Hugh Crawford in the cozy upstairs gallery at The Old Stone House to learn about their work and ask questions about their creative process. At this informal gathering with wine and light refreshments, the artists will explore the themes that inspire their work and their reasons for making it. It’s a chance to go behind the scenes of the the creative process and find out the why, what and how of artistic endeavors.

Shawn Dulaney, whose work is currently on view at the Sears Peyton Gallery in Chelsea, has worked as a painter for over three decades, exhibiting nationwide. Her paintings can be found in extensive public collections worldwide-the Hunterdon Museum of Art in New Jersey, the Trump International Hotel in New York, The Venetia Resort in Macan, China, as well as in the private collections of author Annie Proulx, actor Steve Buscemi, artist Jo Andres and musician Stuart Copeland.

Hugh Crawford whose current exhibit, Sections, is on view at the Old Stone House, studied photography and received a BA from Bard College, and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, New York Magazine and Tattler. His fine art work has been exhibited in numerous galleries in NYC and San Francisco. A recipient of a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, he was also an artist-in-residence at ArtPark in Buffalo, NY. He is currently at work on a book about Polaroid photographer Jamie Livingston. His photos can be seen daily on the No Words Daily Pix feature of Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn.

Two-week sessions
9 am – 3 pm, Monday through Friday

Session 1: July 2 – 13 (closed July 4)
Session 2: July 16 – 27

$550 each session
($100 non-refundable deposit due upon registration)

Learn about plants and their uses; gather and plant seeds; explore soil, worms, and insects; use garden tools; play; make art projects; and share experiences.

Much of the day will be spent outdoors in the gardens surrounding the Old Stone House and MS 51, with an indoor meeting room next door at MS 51.

To register online, click here >>>

This is John Turturro. As a native New Yorker and Brooklyn resident, I welcome this opportunity to share this fascinating aspect of the borough’s history, and how it impacted the United States.

The American Revolutionary War was a contest between the British and their rebellious colony for control of North America. Among our present-day factories, shops, and houses, the war for American independence went on right here in Brooklyn’s streets and parks, and underneath its houses.

This tour covers six significant Battle of Brooklyn sites located throughout the borough. While the sites on this tour can be visited in any order, the story can be divided into three parts, in the sequence of this tour: the landing, the engagement, and the escape.

We hope that visitors will view glimpses of the Brooklyn that used to be.

For further information about the Bbattle, please refer to the more detailed information available in PDF format on the Old Stone House website.

(2) Gravesend Bay/Denyse’s Ferry Landing 1:23
This contemporary neighborhood view looks from Staten Island, towards the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and Denyse’s Ferry Landing, a lost treasure of the Battle of Brooklyn. This area – known as Gravesend Bay – is where the British began their assault in the summer of 1776.

During the spring and summer of 1776, the British began to build up their forces in New York, on ships in the harbor and in camps on Staten Island. Illustrations from the time show the front of the fleet of 437 ships. By midsummer there were more than over 12,000 troops in the harbor and it looked “as if all the City of London were afloat.”

On August 22nd, the British began moving their troops into Brooklyn. They came ashore from Gravesend Bay along the beachfront here at Denyse’s Ferry Landing. 550 American riflemen attacked the British — 15,000 strong. Gunfire crackled, from both the British and the Americans, and smoke and flames could be seen from the surrounding houses and fields.

Brooklyn’s peaceful farmlands became the battlefield.

(3) The Green-wood Cemetery 1:39
From the Altar of Liberty at the top of Battle Hill in the Green-Wwood Cemetery you can see the panorama of the Gowanus Bay, Red Hook, the upper and lower harbors, Governor’s Island, Staten Island, lower Manhattan, and New Jersey.

In the spring and early summer of 1776, while the British were preparing for battle in Gravesend Bay near Brooklyn, the Americans were trying to prevent the British from entering Manhattan. They built a string of forts extending from Brooklyn Heights along the hilly ridges down to Green-Wood Cemetery.

Around two o’clock on the morning of August 27th, the largest battle of the Revolutionary War broke out. The fighting began in a watermelon patch near the Red Lion Inn, a small frame building close to three busy country roads, and near today’s Fourth Avenue entrance to the Green-Wwood Cemetery.

It was a cold night. Maryland and Delaware troops, led by Colonel Samuel John Atlee, waited for the enemy on the Gowanus Heights. By sunrise, there were 2,100 Americans against 7,000 British, both sides firing rifles and cannons no more than 100 yards apart.

Men ran in every direction trying to find safety from the confusion and horror; one observer wrote, “the fields and woods of Brooklyn were covered with dead bodies.”

Green-Wwood’s lush landscape is one of the few sites that still reflect Brooklyn’s rugged terrain of the time.

(4) Prospect Park 1:27
Today’s Battle Pass was once the Flatbush Road, where American troops set up defenses to block the British advance.

In the early hours of August 27,1776, the British met fierce and bloody fighting on the hills of Prospect Park. The scent of gunpowder from muskets and cannons, mixed with smoke from burning haystacks, drifted through the six towns – Brooklyn, Bushwick, Flatbush, Flatlands, Gravesend and New Utrecht.

But the Americans were outmanned and outgunned nearly 10 to 1. The British soon pushed through the American lines and continued along the Flatbush Road toward Brooklyn Heights. The American defenders scattered into the woods in disarray.

The Americans did not know that at the same time, only two miles away, thousands of British troops had snuck through the unguarded Jamaica Pass the previous night and were poised to spring their trap, leaving the bulk of American fighters surrounded and cut off from the main defenses on Brooklyn Heights.

The British attacked from the rear. Americans turned to fight, leaving the Flatbush Pass defended by two cannons and a small body of riflemen. The stronger British force surrounded the Americans, in a struggle to the death.

(5) Fort Greene Park 1:20
Fort Greene Park is the site of the memorial to those Americans who died on the British prison ships.

In 1776, it was the site of Fort Putnam, built by American General Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island. Fort Putnam was one of the forts that formed the American outer defense during the Battle of Brooklyn.

After the Americans’ defeat at the Battle of Brooklyn and a retreat through all of Manhattan, Westchester and northern New Jersey, the British occupied New York until the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783. Thousands of American prisoners of war were held in captivity in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The most dismal conditions existed for inmates held aboard floating prison ships in Wallabout Bay, the site of today’s Brooklyn Navy Yard. Hundreds died of disease. A McKim, Mead and White memorial was dedicated here in 1908.

Fort Greene Park, designed by Olmstead and Vaux, (vox) now exists as a lush, green urban park. Traces of the rural and war-scarred landscape have been buried with the passage of time, but the view from the monument is a reminder of why this was an ideal spot for a fort.

(6) Fulton Ferry Landing 1:37
On the site of today’s Brooklyn Bridge, during the Revolutionary War, a turning point took place.e….

Two days after the Battle of Brooklyn, many colonial soldiers were exhausted, wounded, or dead. It became clear to General George Washington and his command that decisive action was needed.

At the same time, on August 28th, the British army rested, after nearly twenty-four hours of non-stop fighting and marching over miles of roads and fields. The British delay gave the Americans time.

Then, at daybreak on the 29th, the American commander-in-chief and his staff spotted the British digging a trench 2,500 feet in front of Fort Putnam (now Fort Greene) and preparing for another siege. Washington decided to evacuate his entire army from Brooklyn.

The evacuation began that rainy night, August 29th, around 6 pm. Led by Colonel John Glover’s Marblehead regiment, more than 9,000 troops, cannons, wagons and horses traveled on boats from the Fulton Ferry Landing across the East River to Manhattan.

The evacuation went on all night as a fog came up during the early hours of August 30th. That morning, the British stormed the American forts and main camp, but found them empty.

The Americans had made an amazing escape.

(7) The Old Stone House 1:45
Today’s Old Stone House is a 1930’s reconstruction of the snug stone farmhouse built by the Vechte (VECK-te) family in 1699. Built on the shore of the Gowanus marshes, it was the most important site of the largest battle of the Revolutionary Wwar. More than 256 men were captured or died.

The British over-ran the American outer defenses and continued their advance toward the main American camp on Brooklyn Heights. Late in the morning of August 27th, 1776, the American General Lord Stirling, realizing the direness of the American position, led a regiment of 400 Maryland soldiers, against the 2,000 British forces commanded by General Cornwallis at the Old Stone House.

The Marylanders fell, regrouped, and attacked again, but eventually their losses became too great to continue…ue and Stirling finally surrendered. Cornwallis later said that General Lord Stirling “fought like a wolf.”

The outcome of the Battle of Brooklyn was a victory for the British, who killed or captured 1,000 Americans, during the brief but bloody engagement. However, the Americans persevered during the seven long years of the Revolutionary War.

In 1783, the British finally surrendered and sailed from New York in defeat …and America embarked on its destiny as an independent nation.

(8) Old Stone House Audio-Video Walking Tour: Conclusion 1:03

The Battle of Brooklyn, was the largest battle of the Revolutionary War. In fact, it was the largest naval landing until D-Day in 1944 during World War II.

Despite the outcome in Brooklyn, General George Washington’s troops stayed strong throughout the long years of the war and the British failed to capture Washington or defeat the American army.

The Old Stone House, built in 1699 and reconstructed in 1933, was central to the Battle of Brooklyn. It was the first battle in the history of the United States––a war that pitted family members and neighbors against one another to painfully separate from their Mother Country, King and countrymen.

This is John Turturro. We hope that as you tour Brooklyn today, you will remember the patriot cause, the Revolutionary mind-set, and the Brooklyn landscape that once existed. Please be sure to visit the Old Stone House, and further explore Brooklyn’s fascinating history.

Online registration > > >

New Student Fee: $340
Returning Student Fee: $310

Pickup from PS 321 included.

Group 1: Monday Sessions, 3:30 pm – 5:30 pm
JANUARY: 23, 30, FEBRUARY: 6, 13, 27, MARCH: 5, 12, 19, 26, APRIL: 2
(Note: no class Feb. 20 for Winter Recess)

Group 2: Tuesday Sessions, 3:30 pm – 5:30 pm
JANUARY: 24, 31, FEBRUARY: 7, 14, 28, MARCH: 6, 13, 20, 27, APRIL: 3
(Note: no class Feb. 21 for Winter Recess)

Register Now > > >

Please share this with anyone you think might be interested and visit us online at http://www.artinthehouse-osh.org or our blog, http://blog.artinthehouse-osh.org.

What’s Next?

During the past 6 years, your support has helped the Old Stone House transform Washington Park and JJ Byrne Playground into the liveliest small park in Brooklyn. The playground renovation is on schedule for completion in March 2012. It is going to be spectacular! We are also planning a major renovation in our gallery space that is an exciting and innovative interpretation of the story of the Old Stone House, focused on the Battle of Brooklyn and life during the 18th century here in our community.

While the city and state cut ‘non-essential’ programs, the Old Stone House is filling the gaps. We continue to expand our history and environmental education programs, which served more than 7,000 students last year. Our upcoming programming includes our annual holiday concert with the Brooklyn Brandenburgers, and a free dinner and performance of Thornton Wilder’s The Long Christmas Dinner, performed by Brave New World Rep. If you’ve enjoyed our programming in the past, or great community events like the Brooklyn Bike Jumble or our annual Harvest Fest with Park Slope Parents, this is the time to help us continue our work!

Individual donations are the most important source of support for our programming and park conservation efforts. If you haven’t given yet this year, it’s not to late to help us meet our fundraising goal of $25,000!

Please donate online or send your donation to Old Stone House, P.O. Box 150613, Brooklyn, NY 11215. Help us keep YOUR local park strong.