After the General's death in 1843 Mrs. Cruger lived at Monument Place, receiving visitors as of old, and increasing in the eccentricities that kept any one from being her warm admirer. Always she proved herself an unusual woman. "If fate had placed her in the compressed centre of a court, instead of in the inconsequent hurly-burly of a republic, she would have made for herself a great place in history," Mrs. Rebecca Harding Davis once wrote of her. She was still managing a large plantation during the Civil War, when a visitor dropped in to see her who has left the following picture of what she saw: "We saw a well-built house of dressed stone, very large and solid, with the usual detached kitchen and long row of 'negro quarters.' ... "Mrs. Cruger's age was told by the skin of face and hands, which were like crumpled parchment, but the lips were firm and the eyes, deep set in wrinkled lids, were still dark and keen. She was then one hundred years old. "We went up to see the ball-room, which was across the whole front of the house, with many windows and a handsome carved marble mantel at each end, and deep closets on both sides of these fire-places. "Like Queen Elizabeth, Mrs. Cruger would seem to have kept all her fine clothes. The whole walls were hung thick with dresses of silk and satin and velvet pelisses trimmed with fur; braided riding-habits; mantles of damasked black silk; band-boxes piled from floor to ceiling full of wonderful bonnets, some of tremendous size, fine large leghorn straw, costing from fifty to one hundred dollars; also veils that would reach to the knee of fine old English lace; gold and silver ruching; and fine embroidered cashmere turbans, a perfect museum of fashion from 1800 to 1840." To another visitor Mrs. Cruger explained that it had long been her custom to put aside each year two gowns made in the fashion of that year. In her old age she liked to be alone. Frequently she would send every one from the house that she might bathe at night. Once her physician urged her to keep her maid near her. "Why?" she asked; "because I am afraid? afraid of what? of death? Death will not come to me for twenty years yet." She was then ninety years old, and she lived to be nearly one hundred and two. She is buried, by the side of her two husbands, in Old Stone Church Cemetery on the hill above Elm Grove. A rough monument carries inscriptions to the memory of the three pioneers whose lives, as has been pointed out by a local historian, "covered the Indian War, the Colonial Period, the War of the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Civil War." LXXXVIII THE CASTLE AT FORT NIAGARA, NEW YORK THE OLDEST BUILDING IN THE NORTHERN UNITED STATES, WEST OF THE MOHAWK