author
Frederick Brückbauer
b. 1864
Best known for The Kirk on Rutgers Farm (1919), this little-known New York writer preserved the story of an old church and the city history around it. His work has the feel of local history told with care, turning one place into a window on early New York.
1 Audiobook
The Kirk on Rutgers Farm
by Frederick Brückbauer
About the author
Frederick Brückbauer was an American writer born in 1864. He is known for The Kirk on Rutgers Farm, published in 1919, a historical work focused on Henry Rutgers and the Church of the Sea and Land, also connected with the old Market Street Dutch Reformed Church in New York.
The book suggests a strong interest in New York City history and in the lives of the institutions that shaped it. Rather than writing broad national history, Brückbauer seems to have worked on a more intimate scale, using a single church and its neighborhood to trace a larger story about the city.
Little biographical information about him is easy to confirm from widely available sources, but records associated with his book and memorial listings place him from 1864 to 1928. Even so, his surviving work remains a useful glimpse into how local history was researched and written in the early twentieth century.