Gerrit Martense

Gerrit Martense is a fictional character created by H. P. Lovecraft in his story "The Lurking Fear" (1923). He is the progenitor of the Martense family whose hideous devolution is the subject of the story.
Martense was "a wealthy New-Amsterdam merchant who disliked the changing order under British rule", and in 1670 built the Martense mansion on Tempest Mountain in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York--a "magnificent domicile on a remote woodland summit whose untrodden solitude and unusual scenery pleased him." 
After moving to his new estate, his only disappointment with it was the "prevalence of violent thunderstorms in summer"; realizing that "the locality was especially liable to such phenomena," he built a storm cellar "into which he could retreat from their wildest pandemonium."
Martense raised his descendants "in hatred of the English civilisation, and trained [them] to shun such of the colonists as accepted it." Their social isolation led to them "intermarrying with the numerous menial class about the estate"; this inbreeding was said to make them "heavy of speech and comprehension," and gave them "a peculiar inherited dissimilarity of eyes; one generally being blue and the other brown."
Category:Humans
Category:Characters Originating From Lovecraft Circle Works