USA > New York > Bronx County > The Bronx and its people; a history, 1609-1927, Volume I > Part 1
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47 | Part 48 | Part 49
--
-
-
--
1
-
-
به عد
--
Gc 974.701 B78w v.1 1129638
M. L.
GENEALOGY COLLECTION
1
ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY 3 1833 01150 0110
3.000
15-
1
i
@ UNDERWOOD & UNDERWOOD STUDIOS, N. Y.
James L Wells
THE BRONX AND ITS PEOPLE
A History -
1609-1927
Board of Editors JAMES L. WELLS LOUIS F. HAFFEN JOSIAH A. BRIGGS
Historian BENEDICT FITZPATRICK
VOLUME I
THE LEWIS HISTORICAL PUBLISHING CO., Inc. New York. 1927
COPYRIGHT LEWIS HISTORICAL PUBLISHING CO., INC. 1927
FOREWORD
1129638
W RITING the history of The Bronx has been a work of peculiar complexity. It is not and never has been a separate civic organization, as, for example, one of the cities of the State. Nor has it grown as a definite political territory, as, for instance, the County of Westchester. It was once part of that county, and it is today part of the City of New York. Nor was its annexation to New York City a single event in which a well-defined territory was given metropolitan status. It was taken from Westchester County in piece- meal fashion. It represented the coalition of many villages, and was assembled district by district, and township by township, in an un- even manner. Finally it attained itself the dignity of a borough; then became a county, rivalling in population the great historic county to which it was once the tip of the mainland; and while remaining as one of five boroughs in a single city has outstripped in population most of the great cities of the, country. A civic organism of that character, once a vague sparsely populated region, then assuming a close design of well-defined features, then all the strength and dignity and density and importance of a new metropolitan status, with systems of thor- oughfares and lines of transit without parallel elsewhere save in the gigantic city of which it has become a part, is a difficult entity to fol- low through a chameleon and astonishing history. But it has been in- teresting work, as spiritually profitable to the authors as we hope it will be to the reader.
The authors of this work have had recourse to the original sources wherever possible, but in tracing the history of the various territories that went to make up the borough they have made liberal use of the work of historians who have gone before them. They are in particular indebted to Scharf's "History of Westchester County," Bolton's "His- tory of Westchester County," Jennings' "History of The Bronx," and Bonner's "New York, The World Metropolis." But they have left no source that might throw light on their subject unexplored, and have had recourse to works and authorities of every kind too numerous to be particularized.
The publishers of this work feel that they have been particularly fortunate in the editors who have presided over the work, who have been indefatigable in the aid they have extended to it whenever called
FOREWORD
upon, who have shown a keen interest throughout, and who corrected a number of the chapters in manuscript. It is only fairness to them to say that the actual writing has been accomplished in the main by mem- bers of our staff of historians, all of them experienced writers, skilled in research and exposition, who nevertheless recognize that the work cannot escape the imperfections attaching to everything human. They recognize that much of the merit of the work is due to the superior knowledge of the Borough possessed by the distinguished trio of edi- tors, all of them born in The Bronx, and identified with its interest and its development during the whole period of their lives. Mr. Wells, Mr. Haffen, and Mr. Briggs have been most closely associated with the events which led up to the establishment of The Bronx, the initiation and adoption of measures authorizing public improvements in the Bor- ough, and the supervision of the construction of public works during the larger part of the period from annexation to the City of New York in the year 1874 to the present time.
Particular expression of appreciation should be made of the serv- ices of the Committee of Contributors and Advisers, whose members responded, in the main, to every call made upon them. This com- mittee was composed as follows:
William T. Hornaday, former Director New York Zoological Park; Hon. John M. Tierney, Judge of the Supreme Court; John M. Haffen, Banker, President of The Bronx Board of Trade; Charles E. Reid, Executive Secretary of The Bronx Board of Trade; George W. Fen- nell, President The Bronx National Bank; Alfred M. Rogers, Presi- dent Francis Rogers & Sons, Inc .; Dr. Charles J. Goeller, Physician ; William H. Kephart, D. D .; Rev. John F. X. Murphy; Rabbi Julian J. Price ; Prof. Alexander Haring, C.B., LL.B., LL.M .; John C. Hume, Topographical Engineer, The Bronx; H. C. Appleton; Dr. George F. Brewster; George W. Markey, Editor and Publisher "The North Side News;" Edward R. Cunniffe, M. D .; Henry Roth, M. D .; Philip Eichler, M. D .; Nathan B. Van Etten, M. D.
Several organizations placed valuable engravings and photographs at the disposal of the work, and these are, in each instance, credited to the proper source, additional acknowledgment and appreciation of this courtesy being made in this place.
That the history may fill the place for which it was designed and for which the labors of its many contributors and supporters qualify it is the earnest desire of those who have sponsored it.
THE PUBLISHERS
CONTENTS
Page
Chapter I-The Story of the Land-Geology and Topography. 1
Chapter II-The Earliest Record of Inhabitants 19
Chapter III-Settlement by Europeans 57
Chapter IV-Intercourse and Conflict With the Indians 105
Chapter V-Manors and Patents 127
Chapter VI-Revolutionary Period. 167
Chapter VII-Political Status of the Territory 227
Chapter VIII-Villages Then Within the Present Bronx. 309
Chapter IX-Official Record and Personnel 351
Chapter X-Civil War. 387
Chapter XI-The Spanish-American War 423
Chapter XII-The World War. 435
Chapter XIII-Courts and Lawyers. 475
Chapter XIV-Education 513
Chapter XV-The Medical Profession 555
Chapter XVI-Banks and Banking. 601
Chapter XVII-Charitable and Philanthropic Organizations 627
Chapter XVIII-The Religious Aspect. 663
Chapter XIX-Parks, Parkways and Bridges 687
Chapter XX-Industries 713
Chapter XXI-The Press 733
Chapter XXII-Fraternal Orders and Societies. 741
Chapter XXIII-Transportation and Shipping. 757
Chapter XXIV-Real Estate and Building. 795
Chapter XXV-Mercantile Interests 809
Chapter XXVI-Old Homes and Families 825
PART I GENERAL HISTORY
CHAPTER I THE STORY OF THE LAND-GEOLOGY AND TOPOGRAPHY
The Bronx has in the last generation assumed the proportions of a great civic organism, which, elsewhere than under the shadow of Man- hattan, would make it an independent city of fame. There are few other tracts of land in the country that can point to a development so rapid. It has become largely residential, a home borough for the workers of Manhattan as well as for the workers in the other parts of the city. It has become also a great commercial region. It cannot boast of the great concentration of power and wealth which is the essence of Man- hattan. It can boast chiefly that that power and that wealth are largely also its own possession and its own work. It can glory in the fact that if it is not the heart and brain it is at least a powerful limb of the earth's greatest city. But it has also numerous other features that make it interesting ground, as distinctive in its way as Manhattan, as Brooklyn, as Queens, and as Staten Island.
The Primordial Bronx-Let us begin by looking at it from the distant angle of some supposititious Archæan aborigine who saw it first rise with Manhattan and adjoining lands over the waves of the primordial seas. It is a fact that to many the expositions of geology are as remote and meaningless and ghostlike as a cloud sailing lazily on a distant horizon. The mere run of the language, the collocation of words and phrases-"stratified rocks," "igneous agencies," "anticline and syncline," "basaltic columns," "Silurian animals,"-conjure up dreary regions so far removed from practical interest that one grudges even a preliminary effort at comprehending what they mean, assuming they have any other than an imaginary meaning. And yet there is hardly any other study that comes so near to us and is so rich in reward as geology, once the fundamental principles are brought home to us. For the raw data for our thinking lies under our very feet and constitutes the environment on all sides of us. The path along which we walk, the ground through which the path is cut, the flow of the river, the rustle of the trees, the configuration of the land, the distant peak, the nearer palisades, the slope of the hill, the dip of the valley-all these things have meanings to which geology provides us with the key. The earth speaks to us with a voice as familiar and comprehensible as the conversation of the friend with whom we drink our coffee. The geologist is not a whitebearded phil-
Bronx~1
2
THE BRONX AND ITS PEOPLE
osopher who meanders through caves and peers eccentrically at rocks and mud. He is a man of illuminated common sense who sees visions of the subsistence of which the crowd does not even dream. Like the philosopher his effort is to see things not as they appear to be but as . they are. He is looking for reality through the crystal of appearance. He seeks to get farther and farther away from that vision of the world on which the newly-born child first sets it eyes-the big, blooming, buzzing world without meaning, the mosaic of flat surface and kalei- doscopic color without form or perspective, the chaos of sight and sound which assails the eyes and ears of the babe without previous experience. He seeks to continue the mental process by which the infant turns mere sensation into rounded perception, gradually meta- inorphoses the blob of white above him into his mother's face, the rhom- boid of brown into the mahogany table, and the circle of gray into a bouncing ball. The young shipping clerk out for an afternoon in the parks laughs consumedly at the great boulder of a hundred tons which he can rock with his hands and looks at the planed and polished rock beneath it as a convenient place for a picnic without further meaning. To the philosopher and geologist on the other hand that boulder and that scored and striated surface of rock and the entire environment tell a story as definite as the largest print. He notes first of all that the boulder is of a kind of rock completely different from the rock on which it stands and from all the natural rock of the region. What superhuman power carried it from its native locality and placed it there? What power smoothed its angles? What grinding and tearing chiselled the face of the rock on which it lay? The answers come as instinctively as the queries, and in a moment the geologist is away in the Glacial Period when great continental ice sheets worked their way southward from the pole through northern America and northern Europe through several hundred thousand years. He knows that that giant boulder has been carried by glaciers from a point perhaps a hundred miles to the north and was there deposited when the ice sheet receded. He sees not merely that boulder but hundreds of other loose rocks all around which have undergone a similar voyage. He sees the great moraine of sand and gravel and loose stone covering the surface everywhere, and he sees the stratified rock underneath this more recent mantle and knows that rock had been laid down in prehistoric seas before the travail within the earth had lifted the continent above the waters. There is not a rock, not a tree, not a waterfall, not a stream, not a river bank, not a cliff that to the geologist's vision has not a story to tell, so that the landscape, a mere escape and change of environment to the average city dweller, is to the higher intelligence a haunt invested with innumer-
3
GEOLOGY AND TOPOGRAPHY
able spirits, a great world of meaning, a congregation of symbols that are transparent curtains to immense revelatory scenes beyond.
Geology North of Manhattan-The Borough of The Bronx embraces a region that stretches outward to the Sound and encloses the low- winding valley of the River Bronx-a picturesque but shrunken stream which only in spring exhibits the congruous features of a river. The borough continues the geological features of Manhattan and in the main is a group of north and south ridges with a strike approximating that of New York, declining eastward to the waters of the Sound from the high cliffs of Fordham and Van Cortlandt Park, and separated by valleys, or lower areas, with a drainage to the southeast, and more directly south between Fordham and the highland of the Hudson. It has not been so much opened as the region of Manhattan Island, though in its general aspects of gneiss rock and granite veins, surmounted here and there by prominences of limestone, it displays the features familiar to all observers on Manhattan itself and promises the same mineral dis- closures when more thoroughly explored. The glaciation is marked and significant and, in this respect, it forms only a pendant to the identical features of Manhattan Island. The gneiss ridges on the north side of Westchester Avenue, the gneiss rock of Fordham Heights, the gneiss in The Bronx gorge, all present and duplicate the familiar features of Manhattan Island.
The Borough of Manhattan and The Borough of The Bronx have a common geological expression ; the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens are identical in geological character and carry to its most typical limit the drift area so largely reduced on Manhattan Island by municipal changes, while the borough of Richmond bears an individual geological structure involving peculiar features not observed in the others. In geological affinities Manhattan and The Bronx are allied to northern or primordial, even Archæan structures; Richmond, Kings, and Queens to southern and recent, though, in Richmond there is a problematic nucleus similar to those of Manhattan Island. Geologists have called attention to the rock character of the highlands for north of Manhattan Island as being composed of fragmental rocks, chiefly feldspar and quartz, and mainly designated under the term granulite. They have traced a series of beds of rocks over these southward and have urged that the red gneiss, which they consider typically shown at Yonkers, and therefore called by them Yonkers gneiss, underlies the gray gneiss of Fordham or Fordham gneiss, and that this again underlies the mica- ceous gneiss or schists of Manhattan Island, which latter they term the Manhattan gneiss. The view is held as having considerable interest and draws attention to the fact of the varying character of these three
4
THE BRONX AND ITS PEOPLE
groups of rocks. Attention has been drawn to the more ferruginous- stained reddish-stained reddish gneiss on and near Jerome Avenue, a little north of the New York City line, made up of small grains of quartz, fragments of reddish orthoclase and biotite; viz., the Yonkers gneiss. Then they may notice the Fordham gneiss, two hundred feet thick, which is gray, made up of biotite and quartz, with layers of pure biotite schist and white quartz rocks, to be met at Fordham Heights and on Seventh Avenue and Northern Boulevard. And then the mica schist or very micaceous gneisses of New York Island. The so-called Poughquag quartzite may be represented in The Bronx borough by a very silice- ous schist.
Topographical Features-An instructive review of topographical features in The Bronx is afforded by crossing from the Subway Elevated Railroad Station at 174th Street to the Harlem River ; dark gneiss ridges are seen on Third Avenue and Jackson Avenue further south, with low, smoothed, abraded gneiss hills and intermediate depressions generally declining towards the Sound and East River, where marshy emargina- tions, resistant strips of rock and islets compose an immature coast line. From 174th Street westward the observer first passes over the rounded degraded knobs of rock in Crotona Park, at a considerable elevation, surmounting a sharp rise from the West Farms section, while Crotona Park reveals a folded area. The exposure of gneiss in Crotona Park shows in places a very slatey and fissile rock, with corrugated beds and granite veinings. Morainal heaps and alluvial coverings hide or bury the gneissic contours, seen somewhat markedly at Third Avenue and 175th Street. Next succeeds the Tremont gulch or channel, steeply walled by the ridge of Echo Park, where a strong development of white gneissoid granite is seen, sheathed in gray flexuons ribbons of mica schist. To the west again, as the hill slopes to Jerome Avenue, a vast hill of glacial sand occurs, through which the trolley tracks pass by a tunnel way. Westward by Tremont Avenue another ridge is crossed made up of laminated, upturned mica gneiss, its scars and erosions molded into a smooth hill by alluvial and drift accumulations of sand and soil. In places the rock becomes granitic through retaining a gneiss- oid structure. On Aqueduct Avenue, at the top of this ridge, granite developments of considerable volume occur. A hill with boulders is seen north of the Public School, from whose western porch the Harlem valley is commanded, the Fort George Heights, and, through the Dyck- man Street intervale, the wooded crests of the Palisades. This last ridge is heavily banked with drift on the west. South again along Sedg- wick Avenue towards Washington and High Bridges, the gray gneiss, fine-grained, folded and swerving in thin sheets, is conspicuous. Low
5
GEOLOGY AND TOPOGRAPHY
cliffs of the gneiss have been well exposed north of 161st Street on Mott Avenue. The topographical expression is clearly north and south ridges and separating valleys. This is continued westward over Man- hattan Island to the Hudson, with an accentuation in the Harlem River defile, possibly deepened by faults.
The limestone beds of The Bronx lie in the river valleys, or more correctly, the rivers have formed their valleys in the limestone de- pressions as more easily eroded and dissolved. Tippett's Brook has worn its channels partially in a limestone rock, the northern extension of the Kingsbridge dolomite; the Bronx River has its head in limestone at and north of Williamsbridge; and it may be so with Westchester and West Farms creeks. These limestone beds were traversed by the subway tunnel under the Harlem River, and a deep open cut made in them at 149th Street, toward Third Avenue, brought in view their crystalline integrity and bedded structure. Limestone beds are seen at Jerome Avenue reservoir, where actinolite, titanite, pyrite, pyrrhotite, orthoclase are developed in a metamorphic seam.
The surface of The Bronx is such as to present all varieties of scenery ; and in its wild state it must have presented sylvan scenes of surpassing beauty. Today much of that beauty is retained and there are points of vantage where the vistas of hill and stream are worth coming from afar to see. The elevated portions of the borough are continuations of the ranges of hills of Westchester County, and, speaking generally, run north and south, parallel to the Hudson. The valleys between are occupied by streams flowing to the southward and are comparatively level, so that they became the way of the earlier roads, and later of the railroads. These elevations rise to a height of two hundred feet in many places, and do not fall below a hundred, except in the slopes to the valleys. The westernmost ridge extends from Yonkers to Spuyten Duyvil Creek, through Mount Saint Vincent, Riverdale, and Hudson Park. In Riverdale is the highest elevation in the borough, 282 feet. This ridge has a sharp descent to the Hudson and presents a bold frontage when viewed from that stream. The streams emptying into the Hudson are few and short; the longest being Dogwood Brook near West 247th Street. On the east the slope is almost equally abrupt to the valley of Tippett's Brook. The lower part of the valley is flat meadow land, in places over a mile and a half in width. At its southern end is a rocky islet in this sea of meadow, upon which the principal part of the former village of Kingsbridge is situated; in ancient times it was the core of the island of Paparinemo, or Paparinemin.
The second ridge extends from the Yonkers line to Central Bridge, and is the dividing line between Tippett's Brook and the Harlem River
6
THE BRONX AND ITS PEOPLE
on the west, and the Bronx River, Cromwell's Creek, and Mill Brook on the east. It presents a bold front to the Harlem River all the way from Kingsbridge to Central Bridge. Its southern terminus is known as Devoe's Point, after one of the earlier proprietors, a descendant of the original patentee, Daniel Turneur. This ridge is known as the Fordham Ridge ; its northern portion is called Woodlawn Heights. Several brooks find their way down the easterly slope into the Bronx River. The valley between Fordham Ridge and the ridge on the easterly side of the Bronx valley is wide at its southern part, allowing of several minor ridges forming the valley of Mill Brook. The ridge forming the eastern side of the Bronx valley has a considerable elevation at Wakefield and Wil- liamsbridge, but it falls aways gradually towards the shores of the East River and the Sound, so that they present in general the appearance of low, salt meadows, which, at unusual high tides, are awash. Castle Hill Neck below Unionport is an elevation of sixty feet, separating Pugsley's and Westchester creeks. To the eastward of Westchester Creek is Throgg's Neck, which does not rise higher than fifty feet. Before the Westchester meadows were filled in, Eastchester Bay, the Sound, and Westchester Creek virtually used to make an island of · Throgg's Neck at high tides.
Tippett's Brooks has its rise near Valentine's Hill in Yonkers and empties into Spuyten Duyvil Creek, almost equally dividing the former township of Kingsbridge. Its Indian name was Mosholu. Just below High Bridge there was formerly a small stream entering into the Harlem River, which constituted the northern boundary of Turneur's patent ; it has disappeared under modern improvements. A considerable extent of wet meadow lines the shore of the Harlem River below the Fordham Ridge. Below High Bridge, this meadow formerly constituted Crab, or "Crabbe" Island, of the ancient records. Cromwell's Creek had its origin about East 178th Street and Jerome Avenue, and emptied into the Harlem River south of Central Bridge, but the stream has been filled in. Jerome Avenue follows the valley of the old stream for a considerable distance. Mill Brook was an important watercourse in former days, and it about equally divided the ancient manor of Morris- ania. It had its rise near East 170th Street, between Claremont and Crotona parks, and emptied into the East River near the manor house. In the improvements, in the decade before 1900, the stream disappeared within a great sewer under Brook Avenue, which follows approximately the bed of the old stream.
Bungay Creek was composed of two branches rising in Crotona Park and uniting at East 170th Street, whence it flowed into the East River above Port Morris. Intervale Avenue follows very closely the course
7
GEOLOGY AND TOPOGRAPHY
of the old stream. From its crossing at Westchester Avenue to the river, it formed the boundary between the manor of Morrisania and the West Farms patent of Richardson and Jessup. The next stream to the eastward is the longest and most important of all, the Bronx, which has given its name to the borough. It has its origin in the distant hills of North Castle and flows into the East River after a course of more than thirty miles. Its Indian name was Aquahung, "a high bluff or bank"; but it derives its present name from the first white owner of the soil, Jonas Bronk. It is navigable for small vessels for about three miles from its mouth. It was a very important stream during the Revo- lution as, during the Westchester campaign of 1776, it constituted a barrier between the armies of Washington and Howe. There is a tradi- tion that Admiral Howe impressed some Americans familiar with the locality to pilot his ships up the Bronx in order to bombard Washington out of his entrenched camps on the west of the stream. It is a little difficult to imagine how a 74-gun ship of the line could sail up the delight- ful, shallow stream.
In the year 1798 New York was ravaged by yellow fever, and on its subsidence the question was agitated of furnishing the inhabitants with an abundant supply of pure, fresh water. The Bronx seemed to the authorities to have been provided by nature for the purpose, and an engineer was sent to survey it and plan for its use ; but upon his report that the project would cost the city $1,000,000, the corporation withdrew on account of the expense. Aaron Burr, who was at this time forming his Manhattan Company, also probably helped them to an adverse de- cision by holding out the hope of supplying the city with water under the charter of his company. Until the Croton River was selected as the source of New York's water supply the Bronx was the favorite with the authorities and engineers, commending itself on account of the purity of its waters, its nearness to the city, the feasibility of damming its waters at Williamsbridge, and, especially, on the score of economy. Its waters were impounded for the use of the Annexed District, in 1888, by building a dam at Kensico, above White Plains. The Bronx of today still retains many of the beauties that inspired the pen of Drake, but its waters have lost their former purity. The land near the mouth of the Bronx and beyond is low, salt meadow, interspersed by small tidal streams. The most important of these is Wilkin's, or Pugsley's Creek, which forms the landward boundary of Cornell's Neck. Between this creek and Westchester Creek is Castle Hill Neck, so called because the Weckquaegeek Indians had a large castle, or stockade, on the high land between the creeks. On the south of Throgg's Neck is Baxter's Creek, and on the north side, Weir Creek. Throgg's Neck on the bor-
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.