History of Westchester county : New York, including Morrisania, Kings Bridge, and West Farms, which have been annexed to New York City, Vol. I, Part 123

Author: Scharf, J. Thomas (John Thomas), 1843-1898, ed
Publication date: 1886
Publisher: Philadelphia : L.E. Preston & Co.
Number of Pages: 1354

USA > New York > Westchester County > History of Westchester county : New York, including Morrisania, Kings Bridge, and West Farms, which have been annexed to New York City, Vol. I > Part 123

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Legal tender legislation was not then so well understood. Many people refused to accept the base scwant until, in the following September, the Council enacted "that the base strung sewant should be received by every one without distinction, in payment for small daily and necessary commodities in housekeeping, and that it should be current as follows: For twelve guilders or under, all may be paid in base strung sewant; from twelve to twen- ty-four guilders, half base and half good strung sewant; and in larger sums agree- ably to the agreement between buyer and seller." In 1658 the rate was again al- tered to eight white and four black of the good sewant for one stuyver. The colony was suffering from a superabundant and depreciated currency, which was intrinsically worthless. Bea- vers, which had an actual value apart from that which legislation could place upon them, apprc- ciated until they were rated at sixteen guilders each ; and, as a matter of course, provisions and house- hold necessaries followed the upward movement of the currency which kept anything like an even ratio with real money. Shop-keepers, tapsters, brewers, bakers, grocers and workingmen charged a difference of eighty, ninety or a hundred per cent. between sewant and beaver in taking pay for their goods or their labor. The Council struggled bravely to enhance the value of the sewant by resorting to tlie fiction that values can be controlled by arbitrary enactment. Its next law (November 11, 1658) was " that the brewers, tapsters, bakers, and other shop- keepers and common grocers, should sell the daily

1 " Reminiscences of the City of New York and Vicinity."-Henry B. Dawson, New York, 1853.

10.00

A The United Statess

KORNOR

THIRTY

472g

MANNERS AND CUSTOMS.

necessary family commodities to the buyers at their different prices, to wit, silver money, beavers and sewant : as for instance, the brewers should deliver one barrel of good beer for ten guilders (abont $3.80) in silver money, according to the Holland value of fifteen guilders in beavers, the beaver at eight guilders to twenty-two guilders ; in sewant eight white or four black for a stnyver."

It is testimony to the drinking customs of the Dutch families' that beer and wine were estimated by the law as necessaries of which no household should be deprived by exorbitant or Anetuating priees.

The cost of the malt liquor was made little enough in this ordinance of 1658, and it was equally accom- modating in providing that French wine should cost no more than eighteen stuyvers (nine cents) the pint in silver money ; Spanish wine no more than twen- ty-four stuyvers, and brandywine only five stuyvers for a gill. Yet these prices, which were official, so to

1 Their English successors followed them bravely in this respect The amount of liquor it required to help in conducting an election in New York in 1738-39 wns something startling. The Magazine of Amer- ican History for December, 1884, printed the following bill, indorsed as election expenses for those years and divided equally between James Alexander and Eventhuss Van Horne:

" To 5612 Gall. Jamaica Rum for Punch, 312 Gall, ditto 8. d.

for Drams ye morning, 62 Gall, at 38. 3d . 10

1 6 To Cash for 312 Gall. Brandy at 7 1

To Cash for 8 Gall. Lime-Juice at 48 1

1º 0

To 7334 Ib Single refined Sugar whereof is left 91/2, Return 6514 İb at 14p

To a Barrill for Wine & Shrub

To 104 Bottels for Wine & Rum whereol there is 3 re- turned, Remains 101 Bot. @ 40pg.

To 7 pds Candles at Two Nights 0

To the Carting Wine & Shrub 0

To 2 Loads woode and carting 0

To 4 Case Bottels broke 0

To 3 Tapes

To l Gugs

To Mr. Smith for 6 Bottels

1 8

To Mrs. Lancellet acct. for earthen & Glass Broak 3

To John Benck acct. for pipes and nings

To John Berback for bread . 0

To John Outhout acct. barrills deducted 4

To .lohn Brashers acct. for Tobaco O

To Garrad Dnyke mending glass

()

To William Walton for a pyd wine

To yi hornpipes

To ye other 3 each 9

To the Drum

To tunis Teahut for a spad stolen .

-1

To Mr Alexander for Chease, to John Wright . 9

To Zenger & Golett 2

To Angeneta Adolph 5

To Wm Langforl 1

To Mr. Alexander

134

Alexander

Van llorne

- -

£72

speak, were subject to the competition set up by the smugglers, whose illicit trade in the harbor and for a long distance up the Hudson had much to do with stocking the bars of the tapsters and the cellars of the manorial lords, besides furnishing the Indians and slaves with the cheap liquors that incited them to riot, " whereby," says the ordinance of October 26, 1656, " almost all the calamities occur." This omni- bus enactment proceeded after the smugglers with a stinging thong. Five hundred guilders was the fine fixed for the first offense, and the forfeiture of the " barque, yacht, boat or eanoc " the owner whereof attempted to evade the custom officers, for the second. Still the rewards of the prohibited trade were so tempting, that the many seamen engaged in it contin- ued to run the gauntlet. They brought their cargoes to the numerous secure nooks on the river-shore in Westchester County, and when the contraband goods were onee unloaded and run into the back-country, they might defy detection.

In pursuing the smugglers the Council did not omit to pay attention to various frauds perpetrated by lawful traders. The comprehensive enactment aimed at the smugglers also embraced a fulmination against the bakers. It obliged them " at least once or twice a week, to bake both coarse and white loaves of bread, both for Christians and Indians, at the es- tablished priee and weight of one double coarse loaf, eight pounds, for fourteen stuyvers," and smaller loaves in proportion. The double white loaf was re- quired to weigh two pounds, and to be sold for eight stuyvers. In case of light-weight bread, or over- charges, the bread was forfeited and the baker fined twenty-five guilders for the first offense, fifty for the second, and for the third six hundred guilders and absolutely prohibited from condueting the business. No bakers were permitted " to sell any bread made of sifted bran, whether at wholesale or retail, to Christians or Indians; but the bakers of coarse bread may make their coarse bread of the ground grain as it comes from the mill." It was further enacted that in consequence of "the many frauds in baking and tapping," "no person shall follow the business of baking and tapping without first having made appli- eation to those of the magistrates in their respective distriets, and having procured from the same or their authorized agents a license for that business," which was to be renewed quarterly.

The eriminal law was rigorously administered in the primitive days, and its penalties were almost ferociously harsh. About the time of the settlement of New York hanging was succeeding beheading in the northern European countries as the means of executing those convicted of capital erime, and it was not long before the hangman became one of the officials of the colonies. His methods were far more brutal and painful than those which a more humane civilization has sinee devised. Instead of the modern trap, or other appliances designed to dislocate the

To Robin the fidler =

472h

HISTORY OF WESTCHESTER COUNTY.

vertebræ of the conviet, the old-time gibbet was merely two uprights with a eross beam, from which depended the rope and noose. He was driven under it in a cart, the noose fasteued about his neck and the cart driven off, leaving him to perish slowly of strangulation. Such malefactors were always hanged in chains and their bodies left swinging in the irons for months, a supposed ghastly and terrible warning to evil-doers. Sometimes the hangman would jump upon the shoulders or swing from the feet of the criminal in order to expedite the strangling process.

The stocks, the pillory and the whipping-post were instruments of punishment for lesser offenses. They were part of the judicial equipment of every county town or seat of government, and stood conveniently near to the court-house or jail, for in the early days both were usually situated in one building. Punish- ment by the pillory was much the more severe, the victim being in a standing position ; but even that by the stocks was exceedingly painful, aud it was not uncommon for men to swoon under the agony of either the pillory or the stocks. But while the colonists followed European precedent in the infliction of rigorous penalties, and their laws embraced many

THE STOCKS.

statutory crimes now abolished, yet they made no use of, such instruments of torture as the rack, wheel, thumb-serew or pincers, found in all European prisons and even the ducking-stool seems not to have been employed outside of New England.

It will be gathered from the foregoing that the government of New Amsterdam, which exercised jurisdiction over Westchester County, went a long distauce into the details of every-day life, and was almost microscopic in its purview of the incidents of trade and personal relations. While this is true, it was yet liberal and generous, Modern criticism may take exception to its religious intolerance, but that was more apparent than real. The Dutch settlers at Manhattan and above on the Hudson were soon joined by English Puritans, Huguenots from Rochelle, Waldenses from the Piedmont country of France, German Lutherans aud Anabaptists, Swedes and Catholic Walloons. They lived together amicably, because the Dutch trend in the new country was toward tolerance, whatever it might have been in the old.

Incidents that took place within and around the historic houses of Westchester County during the

Revolution reveal much of the methods and sur- roundings of the people in those days. 1 The phleg- matic Dutchman who then occupied the Livingston house at Dobbs Ferry, was for a time frightened away by the hum of cannon-balls about his premises. When, in 1777 General Lincoln made the place his headquarters, he piled four barrels of gunpowder in a little shed in the rear of the house, answering the proprietor's remonstrances with the remark that "it was a good dry place for it." After the army marched away the Dutchman found that the barrels contained nothing but sand, aud had been placed there as a ruse to deceive the enemy if any of their spies should come prowling about.

Here Washington entertained the Duc de Lauzun, Count de Rochambeau, Steuben and others of the dis- tinguished foreign officers, on July 6, 1781. Alexan- der Hamilton presided, and his graceful manners and witty speeches provoked universal admiration. Here also Washington and Sir Guy Carleton, and their respective suites met to arrange for the evacuation of New York by the British. On the sequestration of the Philipsburgh Manor the property was purchased by Peter Van Brugh Livingston, and it thence took his family name.

The Roger Morris house, at the most elevated point of Harlem Heights, where the steep, rocky right bank of the Harlem River slopes gently to the southwest, was built, in 1758, for the man whose name it bears. He was a captain in the British army, and in that year married the lovely Mary Philipse, for whose hand Washington is said to have been an unsuccessful suitor. A lively fancy may be permitted to call up his emotions when, in Septem- ber, 1776, as commander-iu-chief of the American army, he made the residence of the woman who had rejected him his headquarters, or when, iu July, 1790, as President of the United States, he revisited it, she and her husband being attainted fugitives from the home which the new government had con- fiscated. The wealthy Freuchman, Stephen Jumel, bought it, and his wife adorued it with an exquisite taste and lavish hand. There she lived until her death, in 1865; there, in the days of her widowhood, she married Aaron Burr, and it was over this very valuable estate that her heirs wrangled until the courts disposed of it.2

During and after the fight at Chatterton's Hill Washington had his headquarters in the Miller house

1 Soldiers and marauders plundered indiscriminately in Westchester County, until Washington sent Aaron Burr to take command. A letter from Judge Samuel Yonngs, of Mount Pleasant, printed in the " Ilis- torical Magazine" for June, 1871, says : " No man went to bed but under the apprehension of having his house plundered or burnt, or him- self or family massacred before morning. Some, under the character of Whigs, plundered the Tories ; while others of the latter description, plundered the Whigs. Parties of maranders assuming either character or none, as suited their convenience, indiscriminately assailed both Whigs and Tories." Burr came to the county in the fall of 1778 and stopped all this by military rule and strict enforcement of order.

2 Benson J. Lossing in Appleton's Journal, vol. x., 1873.

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MANNERS AND CUSTOMS.

at White Plains, which until recently was in the pos- session of that family, by whose name it is still known. He was frequently at the Birdsall house, in Peekskill, which was one of the first buildings ereeted in the vil- lage. It was a favorite tavern and was repeatedly vis- ited by the officers when the allied armies, under Washington and Rochambean, menaced the English positions in and about New York. It stands on the old post road and isstill kept as a tavern. Near by are yet seen the remains of the old fort whiel crowned this elevated position at the month of the Highland Gorge.1

It appears from some Revolutionary papers that there were localities in Westchester County which are now unknown. Washington, in his order-book, under date of October 24, 1782, direets :

"The tents being too cold for the accommodation of the siek. the regimental surgeons will send no more to the flying hospital, but have such as are hospital patients sent to the huts at New Boston." Where was " New Boston ?"

On the night of the 13th of May, 1781, Lieutenant Colonel Greene, the hero of Red Bank, was killed at his quarters on the Croton River, near the site of the present dam, by a party of De Laneey's eorps. Pay- master Thomas Hughes, of the American army, who was in the house at the time, contrived to eseape. A letter describing the aetion, written a few hours after- ward, he dates at Rhode Island Village. Where was " Rhode Island Village ?" 2

The old-time taverns of the eounty had their ree- ords worthy of preservation. One of the most eele- brated of these was the "Blue Bell," concerning the location of which there has been much controversy. In vol. iv., No. 6, of the Historical Magazine, June, 1880, Charles A. Campbell thus indieates it in a quotation from an old chronicle :

" The holy sacrament was adnilnistered to the Huguenots of New Ro chelle four times a year. viz., Christmas, Easter, Whitsunday and the middle of September. During the intermissions that occurred the com- municants walked to New York for that purpose. Prior to their de- parture, on a Sunday, they always collected the young children and left them in the care of their friends, while they set off early in the morning and walked to the city barefooted, carrying their shoes and stockings in their hands. About twelve miles from New York, at a place aince called the Blue Bell, there was a large rock by the roadside covered with redar ; here they stopped for a short time to rest and take some refresh- ments, and then proceeded on their journey till they came to Fresh Water l'ond, within the bounds of the city. Here they washed their fert, put on their shoes and stockings, and walked to the French Church (the old church Dn St. Esprit in Pine Street), where they generally ar- rived by the time service begun."

A writer in the same magazine (vol. viii., No. 4, October, 1881) located the tavern on the east side of the old King's Bridge road, " opposite the old yellow house now standing south of One Hundred and Eighty-first Street," and added that it was directly cast of Fort Washington, and was demolished about

1820. To support his statement against those writers who urged that it was on the west side of that high- way, he quotes at length (vol. iv. p. 460; v. p. 142; vi. pp. 64, 22, 300), from the reminiseences and papers of Isaae M. Dyckinan and Blazius Ryer. He contends that the mistake arose from the location of another old house about half a mile south of the " Blue Bell," and which was on the west side of the road and was destroyed by fire about 1846. The Magazine of American History for November, 1881, reviews all this testimony and draws the deduetion that the colonial tavern was on the west side, but that some time after 1802, the first hostelry of the name having been abandoned in 1787, Blaze Moore revived the old sign of the " Blue Bell" at a tavern which he kept on the east side.3

Lossing's gossip of this venerable house of refresh- ment4 accepts the west side theory and makes it a

THE PILLORY.

structure that, when he wrote, was still standing and occupied as a dwelling. He quotes Cadwallader Col- den, who, in October, 1753, wrote to his wife of having rested at it on a journey to New York, when it was " very well kept by a Dutchman named Vanderventer, and our food and lodgings were very comfortable." Tradition says that General Heath occupied it for his headquarters in October, 1776, and that Washing- ton and Lee met there on the morning when they followed the American army and journeyed together to the Bronx. It was the headquarters of the Hessian Colonel Ralle after the assault on Fort Washington. One of his aides fell in love with the pretty sister of young Vanderventer, and promised to remain in America if she would marry him. Her mother and Ralle favored the union, and despite the opposi- tion of her brother, they were married in Ralle's own

3 The abundant references for this theory include the records of the Van Ohlem's tract. Gauthier's survey of the northern part of New York Island, made by order of Lord Percy, in November, 1776, locates the " Blue Bell" on the west of the road on the lane leading to Fort Wash- ington. In 1848 John Macdonald made the note that "the old stone honse in the field west of the road nt Fort Washington was the ' Blue Bell ' tavern of the Revolutionary war, kept by Jacob Moore." + Appleton's Journal, December 13, 1873.

1 Hist. Mag. vol. iii. No. 2, April, 1879. The same number mentions that on his entrance to New York, in November, 1783, he stopped at Day's Tavern, opposite the Point of Rocks, at the junction of the Ilar- lem and Kingsbridge roads.

2 Hlisto. Mag., vol. vi. No. 1, Jannary, 1881.

472j

HISTORY OF WESTCHESTER COUNTY.

room by his chaplain the night before his departure from the " Blue Bell." The young husband was made prisoner by Washington at the battle of Trenton, and refusing to be exchanged took the oath of allegiance to the United States, and settled in East Jersey.

On October 24, 1783, Washington stood in front of this tavern to review the troops as they were marching into New York. There he confided to the care of Major Robert Burnet, commanding the rear-guard, a young deserter from the British army, who had secretly married an American girl at the " Blue Bell " on the preceding day. Thus twice the venerable inn had been the scene of a clandestine wedding. 1

The October, 1881, issue of the Historical Magazine has these additional notices of old houses on the King's Bridge road,-

THE BLUE BELL TAVERN.

THE CROSS KEYS, the very old stone house on this road, at about One Hundred and Sixty-fifth Street, is prohably the only survivor of the out ward Revolutionary inns. It was, traditionally, one of Washington's stopping-places, and was known as the Cross Keys, by reason of two keys being crossed on the sign-hoard. It is said to have been kept hy David Wares.

THE DYCKMAN HOUSE, the only real Dutch farm-house extant on this road, standing not far from the twelve-mile stone, was built by Jacob Dyckman, as we are told hy Isaac M. Dyckman, the present representa- tive of the name at King's Bridge, just after the close of the war, the original family mansion heing hurned by the enemy. The said Dyck- man, a very enterprising and wealthy man, was the projector of the hridge across Harlem River, sometimes called by his name, and owned the land on which the large hotel at King's Bridge now stands. The old one stood on about the same foundation, and was bornt down some forty years ago. Fifty-five years ago it is remembered as kept by James Devoe. General Heath, in his " Memoirs," speaks of it as Hyatt's tay- ern. This was in 1777. Devoe subsequently hired it to one Jacob Hyatt. Douhtless it was sometimes called Dyckman's tavern, from the Dyckman ownership.

THE MCCOMB HOUSE, at King's Bridge, long the property of Joseph Godwin, Esq., is said to have been used as a tavern during the Revo- lution, and Mrs. Robert McComb was accustomed to point out to her

1 The New York Packet of June 10, 1748, contains the following adver- tisement :

" THE BLUE BELL REVIVED .- Stephen Dolheer hegs leave to acquaint his friends and the public in general that lie has opened the Bhie Bell Tavern, at Fort Washington, where he hopes for the continuance of his former customers and all those gen- tlemen who please to favour him with their custom shall he waited on in the genteelest manner. Also good stabling and pasture for horses."

In the Daily Advertiser of February 17, 1787, John Battin advertises that his porter house, at the sign of the Blue Bell, Sloat Lane, will remove on the first of May to the honse opposite to the one he then ocenpied. The carrying of the sign to the city probably disposes of the Revolutionary Blue Bell, as Colles, in his road map of 1789, marks the old house as Waldron's Tavern.

gnests one of the upper rooms as once the lodging-room of General Washington. The venerable Dr. Bihhy, of Cortlandt House, states that this property was purchased, shortly after the War of Independence, of the heirs of Eden Metcalf by Alexander McComb, of New York, the father of General Alexander McComb, of the I'nited States ariny.

THE CENTURY HOUSE .- The oldest farm-house now standing on or near the King's Bridge road is that known as "the Century House." It is on the Harlem River bank, and belongs to the ancient Nagie family, original landholders of that part of the island with the Dyck- mans. Its date, marked on a stone inserted in the front wall, is, if we remember right, 1734. It is described by W. C. Smith in his article on the Roger Morris honse .- Mug. of Am. Hist., vi. 103.

There were two " Black Horse " inns of famc. That of the colonial and Revolutionary period was situated near McGown's Pass, and was still standing in 1812. The second was built in 1805 near the Tabby Hook Landing, or what is now called Inwood Street, and was the half-way house for the Albany coaches be- tween their starting-point in New York City and the first change at Yonkers.2 Henry Norman was its builder and original proprietor, and when the Widow Crawford kept it, a sign, bearing the figure of a black horse, swung from a pole in front of the door. Neither the inn nor the land on which it stands has had many owners. In 1740 John Schuyler, Jr., Philip Schuyler, Stephen Bayard, Jr., and James Stephenson had it by letters patent from the King ; from them it passed to John Livingston, who sold it, with all its rights and titles, " except to gold and sil- ver mines," to Johannis Seckeles ; he to Henry Nor- man; he to a Dyckman, and the latter to the Flint family.

These are pictures of days that have long faded into the azure of history, but it seems as if the writer can almost touch the men and women who figured in them as he scans the records they have left of their work and their play, their strong attachments and their fierce resentments, their deeds in peace and war. They are very real when one accompanics them in their homes and follows them through the routine of the day. They were brave, sturdy, passionate, faith- ful and aggressive people, fitted to conquer virgin soil and found the nation that stands the pcer of the ancient commonwealths from which they were de- rived. Straight down in an unbroken line from them we trace the march of progress that leads to the im- perial New York of the present day and the noble environment of Westchester County. Their sons and daughters have been worthy of them, and in the people of the county to-day we see preserved those traits of moral worth, of maternal enterprisc, and of lofty patriotism which are the safeguard of the most highly developed American communities.

J. Thomas Scharf

2 .Appleton's Journal, November 7, 1874.

473

GENERAL HISTORY FROM 1783 TO 1860.

CHAPTER VIII.

GENERAL HISTORY FROM 1783 TO 1860.

BY REV. WILLIAM S. COFFEY, M.A. of East Chester.

Post-Revolutionary Narrative-Public Works-Political History.

IT will be readily conceived that years must have elapsed before the memory of the wrongs and of the emotions which they aroused should have disappeared to any exteut among the inhabitants of Westehester County, who had suffered so much in the Revolu- tionary confliet. The bitter animosities in families and between neighbors which had been engendered, it were hard for the most considerate to lay aside, and it were searee possible that the most trifling disagree- ment should not reproduee.1 The high-handed measures of eonfiseation, which followed the proela- mation of peace, served to inflame anew the old sores ; and the accusations, indietments, prosecutions and inflictions for offenses of the war-time, which filled up, for several years after it, the proceedings of the County Court of Sessions, are but indieations not more of the outrages reprehended, than of the subsequent unwillingness to condone and forget them. The many missed faees, the traees of eare and anxiety on those one did meet, the decayed and vacant houses and dilapidated barns, the marked ehange in the cir- eumstanees of the well-to-do families, the alteration in the moral tone, not only of the young, but of many past the years of early life who in them had been most exemplary, the number of diseased and wounded men, many of whom were hastening to their graves, the often felt presenee still of the lawless marauder daring enough to follow his onee riskless trade-all this kept up long the general sadness and fearfulness.

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History of Westchester county : New York, including Morrisania, Kings Bridge, and West Farms, which have been annexed to New York City, Vol. I, Part 123

Author: Scharf, J. Thomas (John Thomas), 1843-1898, ed Publication date: 1886 Publisher: Philadelphia : L.E. Preston & Co. Number of Pages: 1354

Author: Scharf, J. Thomas (John Thomas), 1843-1898, ed
Publication date: 1886
Publisher: Philadelphia : L.E. Preston & Co.
Number of Pages: 1354