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HISTORY of HUDSON COUNTY
and of the
OLD VILLAGE of BERGEN
133 172
HISTORY of HUDSON COUNTY and of the OLD VILLAGE of BERGEN
The founders of Bergen erected a palisade of logs around their settlement on the site of what is now Bergen Square, Jersey City
History of HUDSON COUNTY and of the VILLAGE of BERGEN
I BEING a brief account of the foundation and growth of what is now JERSEY CITY and of the many advantages now offered the inhabitants thereof in the newly constructed building of the TRUST COMPANY of NEW JERSEY. Jersey City. ..
Issued by The TRUST COMPANY of NEW JERSEY Jersey City, N. J.
Copy 2
Copyright 1921 by the TRUST COMPANY of NEW JERSEY
F144 . JST8 copy a
Designed, Engraved and Printed by BARTLETT ORR PRESS, New York
JAN -6 '22
CLA654131
no.2
The Old Village of Bergen
A History of the First Settlement in New Jersey
HEN the first representatives of the Amsterdam Licensed Trading West India Company built W four houses on Manhattan Island in 1610- 1612, one could hardly consider the territory crowded. Those ancestors of New York and New Jersey, however, had more spacious ideas than are held by their apartment-dwelling descendants. The charter of the Dutch East India Company, which had granted the trading monopoly to its West India Company, designated New Netherland as comprising"the unoccupied region between Virginia and Canada"-a little tract that must forever inspire pained admiration in modern real estate dealers. It was bounded approximately on the south by the South River, as the Dutch called the stream that the English afterward re- christened the Delaware. And because the Delaware was South River, the river explored by Henry Hudson in 1609, which first was called Mauritius River in honor of Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange, came to be referred to as North River, which explains why we today call it Hudson River or North River, just as the words happen.
Henry, we may suspect, always had remained a little disappointed, if not indignant, about that river. He had no
.
6
The HISTORY of HUDSON COUNTY
The Coming of the White Men
genuine interest in rivers. He was one of the many dreamers who for two centuries had been butting against the coast line, hoping for that rainbow thing, a passage to the golden East Indies. But the steady-minded Dutch traders who followed him thought very well of it. They saw it as a perfect water highway to the fur country, giving them almost direct access to the fur-trading Indian tribes of Canada, whose offerings passed from hand to hand down to Albany, while all along the banks could be gathered the almost equally rich tribute from the fur lands of Adirondacks and Catskills.
Its beauty, too, was loved by the Dutch. Dutch commercial instinct, Dutch thrift, never made the Dutchmen dull to the good art of living. They loved the straight wild cliffs of the Palisades. They loved the squall-darkened broad reach that they named the Tappan Zee. They loved the sweet
7
and of the OLD VILLAGE of BERGEN
From the Mural by Howard Pyle, Hudson County Court House
tranquility of the vastly stretching sea meadows at its mouth, where flowed the rivers Hackensack and Passaic, the deep sound of the Kill von Kull, and many pleasant little streams that have been filled in long ago and are covered now by streets and towns.
They looked out from their New Amsterdam, and despite all ample Manhattan Island north of them, the western shore invited prettily. Its river mouths and undulating sea-grass plains and shining sleepy coves reminded them of home. Men who had come so far were not men to sit down and sink root in one little spot. The performances of Captains Hen- drick Christæn and Adrien Blok are recommended earnestly to the attention of those who imagine that the Dutchman is a large body that moves slowly. Adrien Blok sailed from Holland in 1614. He arrived at Manhattan Island in 1614.
8
The HISTORY of HUDSON COUNTY
His ship was destroyed there by fire in 1614 and he built himself another in 1614. Their handful of men built those four houses, and for good measure a fort, Fort Amsterdam, on the land above what later was known as Castle Garden, and now is the site of the Aquarium. They sailed up the North River and established a trading post, Fort Orange, on an island below Albany. They sailed through Hell Gate, which even now is no place for timid navigators, though it is not one-tenth as dangerous as it was then. They explored the whole great Long Island Sound to Cape Cod. They looked thoroughly into that tract which afterward became the Rhode Island Plantations. They investigated the Connecticut River. And they started the opening up of New Jersey by establishing a trading post on the west side of the North River oppositelower Manhattan, following it some years later with a small redoubt.
They might have left records as romantic as the narrative of Captain John Smith, for they explored and traded every- where, from Cape Cod to the Delaware. But they were not men of the pen. We are not sure even of their exact names. The few scattered records refer with generous freedom to Adrien Blok, Adrian Block, Hendrik Christæn, Hendrick Christianse and Hendrick Christansen. The best people in that time were more than liberal in spelling, and many of the most important official documents have a sprightly way of giving two or more quite different spellings to the same name.
All around the handful of Europeans were Indians. Sea- coast Indians came in canoes through the marsh thorough- fares and from the high lands beyond the Raritan. Warrior Indians came down the river in war canoes from their forests,
9
and of the OLD VILLAGE of BERGEN
From an Old Print
Prior's Mill, located near what is now the Corner of Fremont Street and Railroad Avenue
where they were well accustomed to contest the hunting rights with other tribes. For a long time there was little strife between them and the Dutch. The men of Holland were sharp traders, but they were not robbers or tyrants. From the very first they purchased instead of taking, and so, though Indian wars finally came into even their quiet history, they were wars not caused by attempt to snatch lands or other possessions from their savage neighbors.
They left the Indians to live their own free life, and the red men were well satisfied to exchange their furs, maize and tobacco for the strange and tempting goods that had been brought across the great salt water. The Dutchmen smoked their long pipes in peace, cultivated tulips in the alien soil, drank their aromatic Hollands in taverns that were Holland
IO
The HISTORY of HUDSON COUNTY
In the Old Dutch Days
transplanted, and walked forth in untroubled dignity with enormous guns to shoot the wild fowl whose wraithlike flights filled that sky which now is filled by wraiths of smoke from Sandy Hook to the Highlands of the Hudson.
During the next few years the silence of their bay was broken at rare intervals by a cannonshot below the narrows. Then all New Amsterdam gathered at the Battery and watched for wide sails over a wide ship-a ship almost as wide as long, but in all dimensions so small that we of today would think it no small adventure to make a mere coasting voyage on her. Out of the ship would come arrivals from Holland in wide breeches and noble Dutch hats, solid as the Dutch nation itself.
The passenger lists of these occasional ships could find room on small scraps of paper, yet the pioneers plainly felt that there was too much pressure of population, for only a few
II
and of the OLD VILLAGE of BERGEN
From the Mural by Howard Pyle, Hudson County Court House
years after Adrien Blok built the first four dwellings some New Amsterdammers moved over the river. They selected a lovely wooded ridge that looked down on a green, water-cut foreland and temptingly across at the little Dutch houses of Manhattan.
Unfortunately these settlers did not leave a precise record, for they did not realize that they were making history by establishing the first settlement in New Jersey. Therefore we know only that "sometime between 1617 and 1620 settlements were made at Bergen, in the vicinity of the Esopus Indians and at Schenectady." We cannot even be sure that these first settlers in New Jersey were Dutch. "It is believed," says another historian, "that the first European settlement within the limits of New Jersey was made at Bergen about 1618 by a number of Danes and Norwegians who accompanied the Dutch to the New Netherland."
I2
The HISTORY of HUDSON COUNTY
Various chronicles allege that the name "Bergen" was intended by these people of Scandinavian stock to perpetuate the name of the old city of Bergen in Norway. Others maintain that it was to recall Bergen op Zoom in Holland. But the word "bergen" also means "hills" or "mountains," and thus would have been an obvious title for the Dutch to give the ridge. Most of the names of early land-holders as recorded in the deeds of the succeeding epoch seem indubitably Dutch.
The Amsterdam Licensed Trading West India Company did not succeed in extending the colonization of the new
Old Octagonal Church
Corner of Bergen Avenue and Vroom Street
I3
and of the OLD VILLAGE of BERGEN
country very largely, and really energetic efforts were lacking till 1621, when powerful and rich Hollanders formed the great Dutch West India Company. It was of the semi-governmental form then common in companies for undertakings over seas, and thus had the wealth and power of the States-General of Holland behind it. The Licensed Company was taken over by it, and ships were sent to all parts of the coast from Cape Cod to the Delaware. By 1623, there were settlements on Long Island and at Fort Orange, near Albany, while New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island gained rapidly increasing importance as headquarters for the Company and its officers.
In 1629, the Company granted the famous charters to men who would undertake to found settlements, and who bore the title of Patroon. These charters conferred exclusive property in large tracts of land (sixteen miles along a river "and as far back as the situation of the occupiers would permit") with ex- tensive manorial and seigneural rights. In return the Patroon bound himself to place at least fifty settlers on the land, provide each with a stocked farm, and furnish a pastor and a school- master. The emigrants were bound to cultivate the land for at least ten years, bring all their grain to be ground at the Patroon's mill, and offer him first opportunity to purchase their crops.
Various directors of the West. India Company, among them Goodyn, Bloemart, Van Renselaer and Pauuw, obtained charters as Patroons, and sent ships with agents to select land and make settlements. The land granted to Pauuw was Staten Island and a large tract along the North River shore opposite Manhattan Island. This holding along the river, "A harsimus
14
The HISTORY of HUDSON COUNTY
and Arresinck, extending along the River Mauritius and Island Manhatta on the east side and the island Hobocan- hackingh on the north" became the Patroonship of Pavonia. The name is said to have been based on the Latin equivalent for the Dutch word paaun, meaning peacock. Michael Pauuw, or Pauw as some records have it, was a burgher of Amster- dam and Baron of Achtienhoven in South Holland. Hobocan- hackingh, which was Indian for"the place of the tobacco pipe," later became known as Hoebuck, and is so referred to even in Revolutionary annals. Today it is Hoboken, and the tidal streams that made it an island have been long covered by streets.
After a few years, the Company sought to revoke Pauuw's Patroonship on the ground of non-fulfilment of contract; but they evidently found him a bird rather tougher than a mere peacock, for the records show that they had to buy him out, paying him 26,000 florins, or about $10,000. We find what look like echoes of that old dispute when we search through the meager history of the period; such laudatory remarks, for instance, as that "the Boueries and Plantations on the west side of the river were in prosperous condition," and such pessimistic reports as "in 1633 there were only two houses in Pavonia, one at Communipau, later occupied by Jan Evertsen Bout (who had come over as Pauuw's representative), and one at Ahasimus, occupied by Cornelis Van Vorst," who was suc- cessor to Bout.
In that same year of 1633, Michael Paulus erected a hut on a shore front of sand hills as a government trading post where the Indians could bring their product by canoe. The place became known as Paulus Hoeck. Some records give this
I 5
and of the OLD VILLAGE of BERGEN
Van Wagenen's Cider Press. ( Academy Street, west of Square)
trader's name as Paulaz, others call him Paulusen. For a time the Dutch name of the "Hoeck" was lost entirely, having been changed by ready spellers to "Powles's Hook." Then the original name came back, and that part of the shore was so known long after Jersey City was made into a municipality.
With the elimination of Patroon Pauuw, Paulus Hoeck was leased in 1638 to Abraham Isaacsen Verplanck. The sand hills covered about 65 acres, and they became popular for tobacco planting. In the past generations there has been so
16
The HISTORY of HUDSON COUNTY
much filling in of shore front that the site of Paulus' trading post is more than a thousand feet inland.
Jan Evertsen Bout, the lone house-holder of Communipau, got a lease of Communipau from the Dutch West India Company in the same year, 1638. His yearly rental was set as "one quarter of his crops, two tuns of strong beer and 12 capons." Presumably the New Amsterdam representatives of the Company knew what to do with the two last items. In 1641, Hobocan-hackingh, or Hoebuck, was leased to Aert Teunisen Van Putten for twelve years, for a rental of "the fourth sheaf with which God Almighty shall favor the field." These, and a Bouerie in the Greenville section occupied by Dirck Straatmaker, were apparently the only notable settle- ments then existing in the large tract that afterward became the township of Bergen.
The conveyances of the lands that had belonged to the Patroonship of Pavonia were made by Director-General William Kieft. It is a melancholy duty to say that William Kieft lacked that equable disposition which so distinguished most of his fellow colonists. His zeal for the interests of the Dutch West India Company was perhaps sincere but certainly injudicious. When he went so far as to demand tribute of maize, furs and other supplies from the Indians, with threats of force if they refused, they responded in their own injudicious way by capturing or killing cattle. The peaceful intercourse of the past ceased, and mischief followed on mischief. Finally Kieft ordered an attack on an Indian encampment behind Communipaw, or rather Communipau, as it was called till well into the Nineteenth Century. The order was obeyed with
I7
and of the OLD VILLAGE of BERGEN
unhappy punctuality. According to the records, "eighty soldiers on the night of February 27, 1643, under Sergeant Rodolph attacked the sleeping Indians and massacred all." From the Raritan to the Connecticut, red runners carried the news. There came an uprising of tribes so sudden and so terrible that almost over night the whole territory was swept clear of white men, "not a house was left standing and all Boueries were devastated."
The settlers who succeeded in escaping made their miserable way into New Amsterdam with the plaint: "Every place is abandoned. We wretched people must skulk with wives and little ones that are still left, in poverty together by and around the Fort at New Amsterdam."
What happened thereafter stands as a good memorial to the sober sense and the stout intelligence of these Dutchmen. In their misery, with the fruits of years of hard toil gone as in a whirlwind, they might have been excused for giving way to rage and hate. They might, as did many other pioneers in similar circumstances elsewhere, have cried for a war of extermination. They did not. These Holland men ran true to the Holland history of straight thinking. They complained to the States-General against the Director-General (or Gover- nor, to use a common term for his office) and demanded his removal.
Holland was far away, Kieft did not lack friends, and governments move slowly. So it was 1646 before there was a decision; but when it came, it was the best that could have come, for the man who arrived in 1647 to govern the Colony was Petrus Stuyvesant-Petrus the hot-headed, Petrus the
18
The HISTORY of HUDSON COUNTY
hot-hearted, Petrus who in his person exemplified in dramatic degree all that obstinacy side by side with tolerance, that courage mingled with liking for peaceful ways, that shrewdness grained with a deep honesty that has made the small Dutch nation a power in the world to be reckoned with, both in peace and war.
The great Petrus Stuyvesant-and he was indeed one of the greatest of the men who had come into the New World up to that time-was emphatically no pacificist. But he knew when to fight and when not to fight. Little by little he restored something of the old good relations, until settlers again dared to enter New Jersey. For ten years they planted and traded in peace. Then in 1654 the killing of an Indian girl on Man- hattan Island caused another war. The Indians brought it home to New Amsterdam itself. On the New Petrus Stuyvesant Jersey side they swept the country almost as before. "Not one white person remained in Pa- vonia." Twenty Boueries were destroyed and three hundred families were collected in the Fort on Manhattan Island.
Governor Stuyvesant had been away on a little war against the Swedes who had settled along the South River (Delaware) in defiance of Dutch claims. He returned quickly and again conciliated the Indians, even agreeing to pay ransom for their prisoners whom they held at Paulus Hook. Gradually peace
19
and of the OLD VILLAGE of BERGEN
returned, but there was not the old feeling of security. On January 18, 1656, the Director-General (or Governor as we shall call him hereafter) issued an Ordinance commanding all settlers to "concentrate themselves by the next spring in the form of towns, villages and hamlets so that they may be more effectually protected, maintained and defended against all assaults and attacks of the barbarians." To enable them to restore their holdings, another Ordinance exempted them from tithes and taxes for six years on condition that they obey the concentration order by establishing villages of at least twelve families.
The Dutch did not like to live in fear, and they did not like to live huddled. They were a sociable people but they wholly lacked the timid herd instinct. It was impossible for them to look over the rich valleys and bottom lands and remain content in close settlements. They had stout bodies and stout weapons-two arguments generally recognized as excellent for acquiring title to coveted domain. Yet despite the bitterness of two Indian wars, they still preferred more commonplace methods of real estate transaction. In January 30, 1658, Governor Stuyvesant and the Council of New Netherland acquired by purchase from the Indians a tract of land lying along the west side of the North River. This territory was signed over for the red men by the Indian chiefs Therincques, Wawapehack, Seghkor, Koghkenningh, Bomo- kan, Memiwockan, Sames and Wewenatokwee (which pre- sumably was a casual approximation to their real names by the honest Dutch scribes and notaries) to "the noble Lord Director-General Pieter Stuyvesant and Councill of New
20
The HISTORY of HUDSON COUNTY
XX
"There Came an Uprising of Tribes"
From the Lunette by C. Y. Turner, Hudson County Court House
Netherlandt." It is described as "beginning from the Great Klip above Wiehachan and from there right through the land above the island Sikakes and therefrom thence to the Kill von Coll, and so along to the Constable Hoeck, and from the Constable Hoeck again to the aforesaid Klip above Wiehachan."
The word "Klip" was Dutch for "cliff." It is hardly necessary to explain what places were meant by Wiehachan and Sikakes. Merely as a matter of superfluous accuracy we mention apologetically that they were Weehawken and Secaucus. Secaucus was scarcely an island. It was a strip of firm land surrounded by tidal marsh. For some reason it was highly prized by planters. Its name was Indian for "place of snakes" and it and Snake Hill or Rattlesnake Hill, appear frequently in subsequent land transfers.
21
and of the OLD VILLAGE of BERGEN
Paying for the Land From the Lunette by C. Y. Turner, Hudson County Court House
For the territory thus sold, which included all the land between the North and Hackensack Rivers and the Kill von Kull, the Indians received "8ofathoms of wampum, 20fathoms of cloth, 12 brass kettles, I double brass kettle, 6 guns, 2 blankets, and one-half barrel of strong beer." It does not seem much; but wampum was good Indian money, and 80 fathoms is 480 feet, and 480 feet of good money would seem not insignificant even today. One wonders, however, how the tribes divided the one "double brass kettle" and who drank the beer. In 1920, this territory was assessed for taxes on a valuation of $671,141,067. It seems to have been one of those excellent transactions that permanently satisfied both parties to the bargain.
Despite the purchase, the concentration orders and the remission of taxes remained in force, and on August 16, 1660,
22
The HISTORY of HUDSON COUNTY
a petition for farming rights was granted to several families on condition that, first, a spot must be selected which could be defended easily; second, each settler to whom land was given free must begin to build his house within six weeks after drawing his lot; third, there must be at least one soldier enlisted from each house, able to bear arms to defend the village.
In November of the same year the village of Bergen was founded "by permission of Peter Stuyvesant, Director-General, and the Council of New Netherland," and thus Bergen, (described as being "in the new maize land") besides being the earliest settlement in New Jersey also holds the honor of being the first permanent settlement in New Jersey.
The site of the original village is marked by the present Bergen Square and the four blocks surrounding it, the bound- aries being Newkirk and Vroom Streets north and south, Tuers Avenue east and Van Reypen Street west. There were two cross roads, and they are still represented today by exist- ing streets. The present Bergen Avenue was the road to the Kill von Kull and also to Bergen Woods, now known as North Hudson. Academy Street of today was then the Communipaw road. From their height the inhabitants looked over island-dotted and stream-divided meadows of tall sea- grass, swarming with wild fowl and rich with fish. Those bright, unstained expanses gave them mighty crops of salt hay for no trouble save that of harvesting it. They were crops that could not fail so long as the tides ran. Everywhere the salt tides were the Dutchman's friend. He utilized high flood to bring craft close to his farms for easy loading or unloading. He used the
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