History of Duchess county, New York, with illustrations and biographical sketches of some of its prominent men and pioneers, Part 50

Author: Smith, James H. (James Hadden); Cale, Hume H; Roscoe, William E
Publication date: 1882
Publisher: Syracuse, N.Y. : D. Mason & Co.
Number of Pages: 868

USA > New York > Dutchess County > History of Duchess county, New York, with illustrations and biographical sketches of some of its prominent men and pioneers > Part 50

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There is no evidence that the lands conveyed by this patent were occupied by the owners before the year 1700. It is not certain that there was a single settler in the town of Rhinebeck anywhere before that year. The lands were divided among the partners May 26, 1702, by deeds to each from all the others, on record in the office of the Ulster county Clerk, in Kingston.f Of the lands pur- chased from the Indians by the Kips, Hendrick Kip took two-thirds of his share on the south and one-third on the north of the tract, Jacob taking his share in one lot between Hendrick's two parcels.

Having set over to the Kips their share, the other three partners divided their share into six parcels, and assigned two to each. In this assign- ment, lots one and four became the property of Arie Rosa ; two and five of Roeloff, oldest son of Jan Elton, deceased ; and three and six of Gerrit Artsen.

The Kips were the first to build and settle in what is now the town of Rhinebeck. A small stone house was built on Hendrick Kip's south lot, with what are supposed to be two port holes under the eaves, looking toward the river. On the east side of this house is a stone lintel with this inscription distinctly cut : " 1700 H K A K," which are evidently the initials of Hendrick Kip and Annatje Kip, his wife. The time of the erec- tion of the house evidently accords with that year .* The house at the Long Dock, now the property of Frederic G. Cotting, is near the south side of the land which fell to Jacob Kip. The stone part of this house has in the front wall a stone very dis- tinctly inscribed, "1708." This was, doubtless, Jacob Kip's house, built in this year. The name of the Kips was given to the whole of the grant to Artsen, Rosa, Elton, and Hendrick Kip, and it was for a long time known as "Kipsbergen." This name is met for the first time in 1712, in a deed from Laurens Osterhout, the owner of lot number one, the south end of the patent, to Jacobus Van Elten, for a lot of land in Hurley, Ulster county, in which he refers to himself as a resident of " Kıps- bergen in Duchess County." In 1714, Gerrit Art- sen became the owner, by purchase from the heirs of Jan Elton, of nearly two-thirds of the land covered by the Indian deed to Artsen, Rosa and Elton.

In 1716, he sold to his son-in-law, Hendricus Heermance, all the land included in number three, and referred to it as a part of the land called " Kipsbergen," "bounded northerly by lot num- ber four, easterly by a creek on which Henry Beek- man's corn-mill stands, southerly by lot number two, and westerly by Hudson's river."

Again, in the record of the marriage of Roeloff Kip to Sarah Dumon, January 9, 1721, it is said "He was from Kipsbergen, she from Kingston ;" and, later still, the record of the marriage of Nicho- las VanWagenen to Maria Kip, November 31, 1731, says they were "both born and living in Kipsbergen." It is therefore clear that the name was applied to the whole patent from 1712 to 1731, and that at the latter date the name of Rhine- beck had not yet been applied to that immediate section.

The name Rhinebeck came through the Pala- tines who settled on the Beekman patent. A pre-

* Recorded in the Secretary's office for the Province of New York, in Lib. No. 2, begun 1686, page 349.

t Duchess County, organized in 1683, was provisionally attached to Ulster county, because of its scanty population, until 1713.

* This is the house between the village of Rhinebeck and the river, which Lossing says was built by William Beekman, the first settler, and of which Martha J. Lamb, the historian of New York, says : " William Beekman purchased all the region of Rhinebeck from the Indians, and built a small stone house, which is still standing."

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HISTORY OF DUCHESS COUNTY.

viously written history,* says William Beekman, settled several poor families from the banks of the Rhine, in the autumn of 1647, " and founded the little village of Rhinebeck." There is no record of lands purchased from the Indians in 1647, or at any other time by William Beekman, in what is now the town of Rhinebeck. Henry Beekman, the son of William, in 1695, according to the "Calen- dar of Land Papers, " petitioned the government for a patent for land in Duchess County, lying op- posite Esopus creek, and known by the name of Sepeskenot, for which lands he received a patent April 22, 1697. They were defined as " lying to the north of Hendrick Kip, and alongst Hudson's river, to the bounds of Major Peter Schuyler, containing in length about four miles, and in breadth into the woods as far as the bounds of the said Major Schuyler, " for the which he was to pay every year forever next and after the expiration of seven years, upon the first day of annunciation (March 25th), at the city of New York, the yearly rental of forty shillings. This bears date April 22, 1697. Lord Bellomont, in a letter to Secretary Popple, July 7, 1698," says of this patent :-

"One Henry Beekman, a Lieut. Coll: in the Militia, has a vast tract of land as large as the Midling county of England, for which he gave Fletchert a hundred dollars, about 25 pounds En- glish, and I am told he values his purchase at £5,000."

This patent, however, did not define, as fully and accurately as Beekman desired, the bounda- ries of the lands, and he obtained another in the place of it June 25, 1703. The new patent gave the boundaries as :-

" All that tract of land in Duchess County * * situate * * on the east side of Hudson's river, beginning at a place called by the Indians Quan- ingquious, over against the Klyne Sopuseffly, be- ing the north bounds of the land called Pawling's purchase ; from thence extending northerly by the side of the Hudson's river aforesaid, until it comes to a stone creek, over against the Kallcoon Hoek, which is the southerly bounds of the land of Col. Peter Schuyler ; from thence so far east as to reach a certain pond called by the Indians Waraugh- keemeek, and from thence extending southerly by a line parallel to Hudson's river * * until a line run from the place where first began easterly into

the woods does meet the said parallel line. Bounded westerly by the Hudson's river, northerly by the lands of the said Peter Schuyler, easterly by the said parallel line, and southerly by the line drawn from the place where it was first begun, and meeting the said parallel line, which is the north- ern bounds of the said land before called Pawling's purchase."

Henry Beekman's lands, then, by the terms of this patent, were carried to the point where the Saw kill enters the river,-to the creek between the Bard and Barton property, in Red Hook, -- and included the lands patented to Artsen, Rosa and Elton, called Kipsbergen, and thus embraced more than Beekman was entitled to or able to hold. Schuyler crowded him back to the little creek called "Stein Valetie," the point on the river which divides the present towns of Rhinebeck and Red Hook. There is no evidence that Henry Beekman ever disputed the validity of the Artsen patent or claimed any part of the land covered by it. But his son, Henry, evidently pretended to have a claiin to the whole or part of the land ; and when, in 1726, he procured the land which fell to the share of Hendrick Kip, the son of the patentee, by an exchange of lands therefor in his purchase from Peek DeWitt, in the Schuyler patent, he went through the formality of waiving his claim to "all such right, estate, interest and de- mand whatsoever, as he the said Henry Beekman had or ought to have in or to all that certain tract or parcel of land in Duchess county, which tract of land is heretofore granted to Captain Arie Rosa, John Elton and others in company." * * *

In 1710, when Col. Robert Hunter came from England to assume the governorship of New York, he brought with him some four thousand Germans from the Palatinate, on the Rhine. An account of these people who settled on the Hudson river, which was rendered to the British government by Gover- nor Hunter, August 7, 1718, placed thirty-five families, containing one hundred and forty persons, besides the widows and children, in Rhinebeck. It is not definitely known in what year these people entered upon Beekman's patent, but it is quite certain that they gave the name to the town.

November 29, 1714, the elder Henry Beek- man sold to Peter and William Ostrander a tract of one hundred and twenty-four acres of land, "the whole being bounded to the northwest by a hill ; to the northeast by the lands of said Beekman laid out for the High Dutchers." The deed further describes these lands as lying in Duchess County, at Ryn Beek. Part of this land is now included

* By Peter A. Jay.

+ Doc. Hist., Vol. IV., Page 327.

# Col. Benjamin Fletcher was Governor over New York, and was one of the most corrupt officials the province ever had. Lord Bellomont complains of him that he made grants to persons of no merit. Under his mismanagement it is quite probable that numerous extensive grants were obtained, if not fraudulently, at least under conditions far from just as regarded remuneration. Even this patent, as the text shows, covered land already patented by others, which, it should seem, could not have been the result of mere ignorance.

11/1/2

MOSS ENG CO.N.Y.

TTTTITS

THE DAIRY

" LEACOTE "-RESIDENCE OF DOUGLAS MERRITT, RHINEBECK, N. Y.

255

TOWN OF RHINEBECK.

in the farm of Thomas Reed. The other part reached the post-road, is now the property of William Van Steenburgh, and was owned by Dr. Ananias Cooper, before the Revolution, who built the brick and stone house now thereon, at the post-road, still known as the "Cooper House." On February 28, 1715, Henry Beekman gave to Jacob Kip, of "Kipsbergen," a deed for eighty- nine acres of land in Duchess County, at Ryn Beek. This land joined that of the Ostranders, and embraced the land about the Hog Bridge, and doubtless the homesteads of Charles I. Kramer and William Van Steenburgh, and a part of the Hoffman farm. The deed says, "The said Beekman has further bargained and sold unto ye aforesaid Kip *

* all the high land that lies between ye said Jacob Kip's east bounds or lyne to ye southern bounds of Peter and William Ostrander." The survey for these lands was made by John Beatty, Deputy Surveyor, November 29, 1714; and he says, on his map, "On ye bounds of ye said Coll. Beekman, called Reinebaik, in Duchess County."

The "High Dutchers" above mentioned were the Palatines placed in Rhinebeck by Governor Hunter's report in 1718, and the lands laid out for them lay north of the Hog Bridge, and principally about the old German Reformed Church at Pink's Corner. The name Ryn Beek was confined to these lands for many years by the early settlers, and is thought to be written for the first time in the deed to Peter and William Ostrander, in 1714. They did not get their deeds until October 20, 1718, two years after the death of Henry Beekman, the patentee. There are now to be seen about a dozen of these deeds, all bearing that date. A census of the county, taken in 1714, found but sixty-seven heads of families in the county. The names of those located in what are now Rhinebeck and Red Hook are easily distinguished. They are Holland and Huguenot, and thus tell us that the Palatine founders of Rhinebeck had not taken possession of their lands when this census was taken. They probably came here in 1715. It is possible that Beekman intended that the name Ryn Beek should apply to the whole of his grant, as the name of the Kips applied to the entirety of the grant to Artsen, Rosa, Elton and Kip. The adoption of the name was gradual. When, in 1729, the German Reformers bought out the interest of the Lutherans in the old Rhinebeck church, in the mutual conveyances the church was located at "Rhynbeek," When, in 1730, the

lands on the Flats were laid out for the "Low Dutchers " or Hollanders, they were described as being "in Duchess County, in the North Ward, situated on the southwesterly side of a large plain near the now grist-mill of the said Henry Beekman." Nothing was said of Rhinebeck. Apparently, the name was confined to the land laid out for the High Dutchers until the organization of the Precinct, December 16, 1734. The name Rhine- beck was then legally applied to the entire territory embracing all of Pawling's purchase on the South ;* all of the present town of Red Hook, on the north ; and all of the patent of Artsen, Rosa, Elton and Kip, which then ceased to be distinct- ively known as Kipsbergen.f

The first installment of these Palatines came in the ship Lyon, which arrived in the Port of New York in June, 1710. Governor Hunter purchased from Robert Livingston a tract of land on the Hudson River, "consisting of 6,000 acres, for £400 of this country money, that is £266 En- glish, for the planting of the greatest division of the Palatines."

On November 14, 1710, Governor Hunter addressed the Board of Trade, in England, as follows :-

" I have now settled the Palatines on good lands on both sides of the Hudson River, about one hundred miles up, adjacent to the pines. I have planted them in five villages, three on the east side of the river, upon the 6,000 acres I have purchased of Mr. Livingston, about two miles from Rowlof Jansen's Kill, the other two on the west side, near Sawyer's Creek. * *

* The land on the * west side belongs to the Queen, and each family hath a sufficient lot of good arable land, and ships of fifteen foot draught of water can sail up as far as the plantations. In the spring, I shall set them to work preparing the trees according to Mr. Bridges' directions."

The settlement of these people on this side of the river was known as East Camp, and that on the other side as West Camp. The object in set- tling them on good land near the pines was to ena- ble them to make tar and pitch for the English Navy, and support themselves by cultivating the land on which their tents were pitched. From these sturdy Germans came the Palatine settlers of Rhinebeck. Unlike many of the English, French and Hollanders, who had come here solely to make

* Then known as Staatsburgh.

t Although the name was thus broadly applied and legalized, people long continued to, and even to this day still distinguished between Rhine- beck and the Flats. The road from Mrs. Mary R. Miller's to Pink's Corner is still the road to Rhinebeck. St. Peter's Lutheran Church is the Rhinebeck Church, while the Reformed Church is still the church on the Flats.

256

HISTORY OF DUCHESS COUNTY.

money in commerce and trade, and who, according to Sir John Knight,* "would be Protestants, Papists or Pagans for a guilder a head," the Palatines came here to maintain the freedom and purity of their consciences, and their "ingenuity and their dili- gence could not fail to enrich any land which should afford them an asylum ; nor could it be doubted that they would manfully defend the coun- try of their adoption against him whose cruelty had driven them from the country of their birth. "t They had attained that moral and intellectual ele- vation in which they knew that their masters and rulers were tyrants,-men who had been debased by luxury, and who, by the long exercise of usurped or hereditary power, had lost all sense of human responsibility,-and that it had become their duty to themselves and to their fellow-men to resist them, and, failing of success, to escape the yoke by flight to more congenial shores. They had thus developed within them a power of will and purpose to which un- just governments, and the world of cunning and ve- nality must sooner or later succumb. While they were laboring to subjugate the earth, shrewd and ava- ricious men were absorbing their lands, limiting their opportunities, crippling their skill, appropriating the profits of their toil and endeavoring to secure in their bondage the source of a princely and per- petual income. But they had imbibed the spirit of resistance to unjust demands; they had within them the elements of progress and growth, and soon " swelled beyond the measure of their chains," attained to the mastership of their own per- sons, and became the owners of the soil they had conquered.

Vast areas of land were acquired by the patentees for nothing save a trifling quit-rent at the end of seven or ten years, by which they assumed to some extent the claims if not the dignity of feudal lords, or through which they absorbed the subsistence of others. "They toiled not neither did they spin," and yet during their existence they lived, in too many instances, lives of semi-barbarous luxury. But, notwithstanding their ostentation, and the position and power to which their wealth entitled them, theirs were not the hands whose labors re- deemed the forests and planted the villages. Lesser men, yet sturdier, felled the forest, sowed the fields and formed the nucleus of the hamlets and villages which grace the County to-day, and in Rhinebeck those tasks

were performed by the sturdy German set- tlers and their descendants ; by those who, exiled from their native land, had here sought a refuge, and were here designed to become mere hewers of wood and drawers of water, but who, seeing the doom which was preparing for them, resisted it; which shows that they had attained a development of mind and soul beyond the reach of the measure which many have accorded them.

Henry Beekman, the patentee, died in 1716, apparently intestate .* In 1713, he gave a deed to his son, Henry, for all of his Rhinebeck patent lying south of a line run from the junction of Landsman's and Rhinebeck creeks in the saw-mill pond, directly east to the end of the patent, and including the mill at the mouth of the first-named creek. On August 30, 1737, the balance of the patent was divided between him and his two sis- ters. For the first step a middle line was run from the saw-mill pond to Schuyler's Fly, on the north ; from this line as a base the land was divided into six parts-intended to be equal-by lines to follow the angle of the Schuyler patent, those on the west reaching the river, and those on the east extending to the end of the patent. This gave to each of the parties a lot fronting on the river. In this division lots one and six fell to Henry ; two and five to Catherine, wife, first of John Rutsen and now of Albert Pawling ; three and four to Cornelia, wife of Gilbert Livingston. Number one included the "Flats" where Rhine- beck now stands, which thus became the property of Henry Beekman, the Second.

William Beekman, the father of the patentee of "Ryn Beek," was born at Hasselt, April 28, 1623, and came to New Amsterdam, now New York, at the commencement of Governor Stuyvesant's administration, being then in the employ of the Dutch West India Company. He married Catherine, daughter of Frederic Hendricks de Boogh, Captain of a Hudson River trading vessel, September 25, 1649, by whom he had seven chil- dren-three sons and four daughters. In 1653, '54, '55, '56, '57, he was elected one of the Schepens (assistant aldermen) of New Amster- dam. In 1658 he was appointed Vice-Director of the Dutch Colony at the mouth of the Delaware River. On July 4, 1664, he was appointed Sheriff at Esopus, now Kingston. In 1670 he purchased the farm formerly owned by Thomas Hall, and then occupied by his widow, in the vicinity of the present Beekman street, and front-

* A member of Parliament, in a debate on a bill to naturalize these people in England.

t Lord Macauley, in his Hist. of England, on the French and German Protestants who had been driven into exile by the edicts of Louis.

* His wife was living in 1724.

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TOWN OF RHINEBECK.

ing on the road along the East River shore-now Pearl street, New York. He was Alderman at twelve different dates under the English, until 1696, when he retired from public life. The old New York records inform us that the business by which he lived and prospered was that of a brewer. He resided in New York in high repute among the citizens of his day until his death in 1707, at the age of eighty-five. His sons were Henry, Gerard and John. Henry, the eldest, the patentee of Rhinebeck, married Joanna de Lopes and settled in Kingston, Ulster county, where he became County Judge,* Member of the Legislature, Col- onel of the militia, and deacon and elder in the Protestant Reformed Church. He died, as before stated, in 1716.f His children were : William, born in Kingston in 1681, died in Holland aged eighteen ; Catharine, born September 16, 1683, inarried John Rutsen, of Kingston ; Henry, born in 1688, married Janet Livingston, daughter to Robert, a nephew of Robert, the patentee, and first lord of Livingston manor; Cornelia, born 1690, married Gilbert Livingston, son of Robert, the lord of the manor.

John Rutsen and Catharine Beekman had four children, baptized in Kingston: Johanna, born April 11, 1714 ; Jacob, born April 29, 1716; Hendrick born March 9, 1718; Catharine, born May 24, 1719. There is no evidence that John Rutsen ever lived in Rhinebeck. He was living in 1720, and in that year as justice of the peace in Kingston, witnessed a deed from Hendricus Heer- mance to Gerrit Artsen. He died before 1726. In that year his widow, Catharine Beekman, at the age of forty-three, married Albert Pawling, of Kingston. There is no evidence that he lived in Rhinebeck. He died in 1745. From a letter [in Dutch] from Henry Beekman, in New York, to his sister, Mrs. Catharine Pawling, in Rhinebeck, dated 1746, it is assumed that she was a resident in Rhinebeck at this date, but in what particular locality is not known. Albert Pawling and Catha- rine Beekman Rutsen had no children.

Jacob Rutsen, son of Jacob Rutsen and Catha- rine Beekman, married his cousin Alida, daughter of Gilbert Livingston and Cornelia Beekman. Īt is said that he built the mill known as Rutsen's mill, on the premises now owned by Mrs. Mary R. Miller. This mill was in existence in 1750 as

Rutsen's mill .* Jacob Rutsen died before 1755, and therefore, before he was forty years old. He was not a freeholder in the town in 1740, when he was twenty-four years old. If he built the mill after he became of age, he built it after 1737. It is assumed that he built it when he became a resi- dent of the town, and, therefore, after 1740. Jacob Rutsen and Alida Livingston had two children : John, born October 23, 1745 ; Cornelia, born May 31, 1746. He died after this date, and his widow after 1755, married Henry Van Rensse- laer, of Claverack, by whom she had seven children.

Catharine Rutsen, daughter of John Rutsen and Catharine Eeekman, married Peter Ten Broeck. They lived in Rhinebeck as early as 1751, he being road-master here at this date. In 1765 he lived on the Barrytown road, his gate being the end of the road district from the post-road, William Feller being road-master. He therefore lived north of the Feller homestead. He was Supervisor of the precinct in 1763, '64, '65, '66, '67. In 1755 Peter Ten Broeck and his wife conveyed to Wm. Schep- moes part of the farm now occupied by Thomas Reed, and in the same year we find him Colonel of a regiment of Duchess County soldiers. If they had children the fact is not now known, and, be- yond their baptism, there is no existing knowledge of Johanna and Hendrick, the other two children of John Rutsen and Catharine Beekman.

John Rutsen, son of Jacob Rutsen and Alida Livingston, married Phebe Carman. They had two children : Catharine, born September 18, 1768; Sarah, born 1770. John Rutsen, we are told, died at the age of twenty-eight, and therefore in the year 1773. His widow married Robert Sands, January 25, 1779, by whom she had five children, (Christina, Joshua C., John R., Eliza, Grace). She died No- vember 23, 1819, aged seventy-two. Robert Sands, the husband, died March 3, 1825, aged eighty.

Catharine Rutsen, daughter of John Rutsen and Phebe Carman, married George Suckley, an En- glish merchant in the city of New York, by whom she had seven children : Rutsen, Mary, Elizabeth, George, Sarah, Catharine and Thomas. George died at nine, and Catharine at nineteen years. George Suckley was a widower with two children (George and John L.,) when he married Cath- arine Rutsen.

* He was one of the Justices in Ulster county in 1693. Doc. Hist , Vol 4., p. 27.

t He never lived in Rhinebeck, although it was he who laid out the land for the " High Dutchers," and settled on his patent the Palatines who founded and gave name to the town.

* One of the first mills-if not quite the first-erected in Duchess County was that known as the old Tillotson mill, or one on the same site, built, it is supposed, by Henry Beekman, the elder, as early as 1710, on land purchased from Arie Rosa. It was located near the river where grain could be taken to it, and flour away from it, by water as well as by land, and was thus serviceable to settlements on both sides of the river.

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HISTORY OF DUCHESS COUNTY.

Sarah Rutsen, the only other child of John Rut- sen and Phebe Carman, married Philip J. Schuyler, son of General Philip Schuyler. He built the man- sion now the property of his niece, Mrs. Mary R. Miller. He was a resident of Rhinebeck, and a Member of Congress from Duchess County in 1817, '18. They had five children : Philip P., John Rutsen, Catherine, Robert and Stephen. Sarah Rutsen Schuyler died October 24, 1805, aged thirty-five.

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History of Duchess county, New York, with illustrations and biographical sketches of some of its prominent men and pioneers, Part 50

Author: Smith, James H. (James Hadden); Cale, Hume H; Roscoe, William E Publication date: 1882 Publisher: Syracuse, N.Y. : D. Mason & Co. Number of Pages: 868

Author: Smith, James H. (James Hadden); Cale, Hume H; Roscoe, William E
Publication date: 1882
Publisher: Syracuse, N.Y. : D. Mason & Co.
Number of Pages: 868