"It was a cold November night, our second date," Marion Duckworth Smith recalls, visibly transported back to 1979. "I said, 'Where are we going?' And he said, 'How would you like to see my cemetery?'" And so began a love story—one that unfolded between Duckworth Smith and her then wooer and later husband Michael, who died in 2010—but also one between Duckworth Smith and her home for more than four decades, a Dutch farmhouse built from 1654 to 1656 in East Elmhurst, Queens. Not only is it one of the oldest buildings in New York City, but because many of the five boroughs' older historic homes have been converted into house museums, Duckworth Smith holds that the Lent-Riker Smith homestead is the oldest "inhabited private dwelling" in the city—and, she believes, the country.
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