CLARKSVILLE — John Hoagland and his wife, Jean, have been stewards of the Houghtaling House since 1972 when they moved in. This Sunday, the day after Plum Fest, a ceremony will dedicate an historical marker, donated by the Clarksville Historical Society, in front of the Hoaglands’ home.

The community is invited, but this won’t be a typical local ceremony. Instead, descendants of the man who built the home will come from across the country.
"Most of them don’t know each other," Hoagland said, as he talked about one woman coming up from Florida.

The Houghtaling House is the oldest house in Clarksville, he said, and while the plaque will read 1770, Hoagland thinks the house was built in 1765.
"I feel a kind of stewardship for an old house like this," Hoagland said.

The Hoaglands own 10 acres surrounding the white wooden building. After living in one place for 32 years, you grow to love it, Hoagland said. He has tried to maintain its 18th-Century character by avoiding things like aluminum siding, but at the same time, the couple has modern-day amenities like indoor plumbing, central heating, and a swimming pool, he said.

After his home was placed on the New York State Register of Historic Places in January of 2004, and then the National Register in July of 2004, Hoagland then began researching, locating, and contacting direct descendants of the original owner, Teunis Houghtaling.
""I’m not a genealogist," Hoagland said, but he believes he has found 500 names of descendants, although he hasn’t been able to verify them all, and most of the names came from second-hand sources, he said.

But there is a family cemetery with about 40 gravesites on his property, which helped him to link genealogy.

The property had originally been 100 acres.

Hoagland wrote in a recent issue of the Clarksville and New Scotland historical society newsletters that Teunis Houghtaling was a fourth-generation descendant of Matthys Hooghteling, a Dutch immigrant who settled in Coxsakie in the 17th Century.

Teunis Houghtaling’s gravestone, on the Hoagland property, indicates that he died in 1806. The property remained in the Houghtaling family until 1887 when it was sold to Mead, a descendant of the family, whose name was originally spelled Meed. Mead owned it until 1928, Hoagland wrote, when it was then sold to Charles Van Wie, an adjacent dairy farmer who sold the 10 acres and the historic house in 1931, he said.
"My family roots came from Holland," Hoagland said, and so did the Houghtaling family at around the same time, so Hoagland feels a sense of kinship with the Houghtalings.