GORINCHEM – A week and a half ago, the Archaeology working group of the municipality of Gorinchem, led by archaeologist Pieter Floore from the University of Amsterdam, started the excavation of the house Paffenrode on the Kazerneplein.
This house was built at the end of the sixteenth century by Stadspensionaris mr. Adriaen van Weresteyn, confidant of Prince Maurits. In 1618 it was bought by Drossaard Jacob van Paffenrode, married to Maria van Arkel. They, and later their son Johan, were the most famous residents in the seventeenth century. Later this house was inhabited by Drossaard Louis Huygens van Zuylichem, the son of the famous poet Constantine HuygensDue to its dilapidated state, the building was demolished in the second half of the eighteenth century.
Jacob van Paffenrode and his wife Wilhelmina van Arkel, JA van Ravesteijn (1626)
No detailed images of the house are known. The seventeenth-century cartographers Blaeu and Wijdtmans drew a large country house with stables and a coach house, surrounded by ornamental gardens and an orchard, on their maps of Gorinchem on the site of the current Kazerneplein. The research of the working group aims to obtain the most accurate possible insight into the size and layout of the building. Last Tuesday, the first foundations of the house were discovered. During the first week, a well and a water cellar were also discovered.
On the same site, the archaeologists also found a ditch or canal that is much older than the remains of the Paffenrode house. In this filled-in ditch were shards from the fifteenth century, about a hundred years before the Paffenrode house was built. A special find from this ditch was the waste from a "fifty-maker". This was the medieval name for someone who made rosaries. A rosary contained fifty beads. The waste consisted of beef bones sawn into strips with the holes for the beads drilled into them.
Gorcumse Courant
August 20, 1997