History of Westchester county : New York, including Morrisania, Kings Bridge, and West Farms, which have been annexed to New York City, Vol. II, Part 2

Author: Scharf, J. Thomas (John Thomas), 1843-1898,
Publication date: 1886
Publisher: Philadelphia : L.E. Preston & Co.
Number of Pages: 1286

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. II > Part 2

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(b) Van Der Donck ("History of New Netherland," 1650) speaking of the languages of the American Indians, says they may be " counted as four,-viz .: Manhattan, Minquas, Savanoos and Wappanoos. With the Manhattans (he adds) we include those who live in the neighbormy places along the North River, on Long Island and at the Neversink. With the Minquas we include the Senecas, the Maquaas and the other inland tribes. The Savanoos are the Southern nations, and the Wappanoos are the Eastern nations."

This author has here been understood to mean that the Manhattan tribe extended upward to " the neighboring places along the North River," whereas he clearly means this only, -that of the four general Indian lan- guages, of which he speaks, the Manhattan language was spoken by the Indians " along the North River." This was true. The Mohegans were closely allied to the Manhattans. Both were Algonquins, and both used the same tongue.

"Opposite Tappaan," as the word Tappaan is here used, was Dobbs Ferry, not Yonkers. It is true that " Weckquaskeck," in the restricted sense of the principal village of the Weckquaskeck family, was at Dobbs Ferry. But this did not imply that the Weckquaskeck family did not extend southward to Spuyten Duyvil, any more than it implied that it did not extend northward to Tarrytown. It really lay along the river

said to mean " the place of the bark kettle." It was applied, not to the family only, but to a rivulet emptying into the Hudson at Dobbs Ferry, and fur- ther still, to a family village at the rivulet's mouth. One of the Weckquaskeck villages was here, around the mouth of the Nepperhan. The family called it Nappeckamack, or " the rapid water settlement," evi- dently from the impetuous character of the stream, then flowing along without an artificial restraint. The word "Nepperhaem " was also used, possibly for the country around the village. "Nepperhan," as now applied to the Saw-Mill River, is probably from one or the other of these terms. In the upper part of our county, at a little village along this river, known by its people as Unionville, is a postal station known as "Neperan." Probably these orthographics all came from one source.

The Weckquaskecks were devoted to hunting and fishing and mostly negligent of agriculture. Though moved by many generous instincts, they were yet strangers to the motives which govern civilized men. The topographic conditions of the country they had never undertaken to modify. On the north of the Nepperhan, within the few hundred feet they occu- pied above its mouth, the wooded land sloped down to the stream without a break ; and on the south the flowing water was encircled by a close bluff (see our map of 1847), which excavation lias now set back to make room for the present Main Street and build- ing lots beyond it. If one would fancy how Nap- peckamack and its people appeared in 1609, let him call up what we read of American Indians, with their wigwams, scant attire, dark superstitions, implements of hunting and war and general habits of life. Let him set aside all present buildings and streets and restore the original conditions of the river-front. Let him bring back the forests and wild beasts, hush the hum of mills and the whistles of factories and locomotives, and put back the purity of the Nepperhan with the other conditions, as we have described them, of the original natural scene. Upon that scene have passed in two hundred and seventy-seven years all the

all the way from Spyten Duyvil to the Sing Sing Creek, and at the north extended eastward to the Armonck (now the Byram) River. Along the Hudson it had at least three villages, -Alipconck (Tarrytown), Weck- quaskeck (Dobbs Ferry) and Nappeckamack ( Yonkers), at the mouth of the Nepperhan. When De Vries speaks of Weckquaskeck, he refers not to the family, but to the middle one of these three villages, Van Tienhoven, Director Kieft's secretary, also refers to the middle village when he speaks of Weckquaskeck as "five (fifteen English) miles above New Amsterdam."

Bolton (" Ilistory of Westchester County ") says in his Introduction : "The Manhattans had their principal settlement on New York Island and from thence north to the bounds of Yonkers, nearly opposite Tap- paan." lle, of course, based this statement on the passages we have ex plained. In his map of the Indian territory of Westchester County he contradicts it by carefully encircling the Saw-Mill to its very month with the word " Weckquaskecks" and by so turning off the word " Manhat tans" as to make it include only the towns of Morrisania, West Farms and perhaps Westchester. We notice also that he calls the castle of Nipnichsen, on Berrian's Neck (Spuyten Duyvil Point), a Mohegan castle, which is certainly correct.

HISTORY OF WESTCHESTER COUNTY.

changes through which has come into being the | map of the new country, and applied for and received Yonkers of to-day.

The first Europeans who saw Nappeckamaek were the commander and crew of the historic " Half-Moon," which passed it on the 14th of September, and again on the 3d of October, 1609, in ascending and descend- ing the Mohegan, Shatemue or Cohatatea, various names given by the Indians to the river now known as the Hudson.1 The famous commander, an English- man by birth, had kept a minute diary of all he had seen. On his return to the Holtand East India Com- pany, in whose employ he had made his voyage, he gave it a stirring account of the harbor, river and country visited. The company was not moved by his report, but Holland merchants, eager for an American trade, appealed to the Holland government to send a trading vessel here. The appeal was at first unheeded. Private enterprise, however, soon became active. By 1614 a lively fur trade with the Indians had been started, and one or two forts for its protection had been built upon the river. Knowledge of these facts at last aroused the States-General, and on the 27th of March they offered to grant exclusive rights and priv- ileges to any company that would undertake special commerce with the Manhattans. Upon this a eom- pany was quickly formed at Amsterdam, which fitted out two ships and sent them here for exploration. 'Their commanders having returned with glowing re- ports, the company submitted to the government a

I Brodhead, historian of the State of New York (vol. i. pp. 28, 29), affirms that on the night of the 13th of September, while on his journey up lho river, Hudson anchored his vessel just above Yonkers, in sight of "a high point of land, which showed out five leagues to the north." This "high point " Brodhead makes lo have been "Verdrietig Hook, " or " Tedious Point," just north of Nyack. At the suggestion of the his- torinn Dawson, who made special study of This matter years ago, we have carefully examined Juct's "Journal of Hudson's Voyage," and are convinced that the anchorage on the night of the 13th was so far from being "just above Yonkers," that it was really below Manhattanville. The journal of the 14th, the day afterwards, compared with that of the 13th, makes this clear. It is as follows :

" Sept. 14th .- In the morning we sailed up the river twelve leagues . . and came to a strait between two points, and il (the river) trended northeast by north one league. The river is n mlle broad ; there is very high land on both sides. Then we went up northwest a league and a half, deep water; then northeast five miles ; then northwest by north Iwo leagnes and a half. The land grew very high and mountainons, etc."

So says the Journal. The course of the river and the conformmlion of ita shores make it certain That the "strait between Two points, " here spoken of, was the strait between Stony Point and Verplanck's. The point of anchorage on tho night of the 13th had heen Iwelve leagnes (thirty-six miles) south of this strult. The tables of the Hudson River Railroad give the distance from Montrose Station (Verplanck's) to Man- hattanville as about thirty four miles. The point of anchorage, there- foro, was two miles lower, or at least us far south as Eighty-fifth Street.

And now, going back to the journal of the 13th, we have This state- ment, -" We anchored all night and had n high point of land, which showed ont to us, bearing north by east, five leagnes off from ns." What was this point ? Not "Tedions Point, " above Nynck, but the north end of the l'ulindes, nearly opposite Dobbe Ferry. This point was about "five leagnes off " from Eighty-fifth Street. And If any one will take an olservation of the direction of the river line northward from Eighty- fifth Street, ho will discover that though the Palisades are on the west able of the river, yet they lwar strongly upward to the northeast from the point at which we have assumed that lindoon lay.

the promised grant. Their map and the charter they received first gave the name "New Netherland " to an immense region extending from the Atlantic coast indefinitely inward, and from the latitude of Phila- delphia to the latitude of Montreal. In 1621 a war between Holland and Spain, which had been held in suspense by a truce for twelve years, was resumed. To strengthen itself for the coming conflict, the Hol- land government resolved to organize an armed mer- cantile association of gigantic power to "build forts, plant settlements, proseeute trade and assist in crush- ing piracy and the common enemy." From this act sprang into being the West India Company, to which was committed the government of the New Nether- land already mapped out, and which continued to control it till 1664, although its monopoly was abol- ished in 1638. The central power of this company was vested in the five chambers of Amsterdam, Zeal- and, the Maeze, North Holland and Friesland. The five chambers, however, committed the general management of the company's affairs to a board of nineteen directors, in which board each chamber was represented according to the proportion it owned of the general stock. The special interests of the New Netherland province were put under the control of the strongest of the five chambers, that of Amster- dam. As to all matters on which the charter did not speak, the will of the company was to be the law here. The charter gave the company enormous powers, but bound it to the strictest responsibility in regard to treaties with the Indians, settlement of the country and measures for promoting trade, foreshadowing in this act an unswerving integrity for which all the national acts of Holland were distinguished during the control of the West India Company.

In 1623 the company formally set up the province of New Netherland, and with this act began the true settlement of Manhattan Island by Holland people. They had no idea of making the mapped-out territory their own, except by purchase. In fact their mapping out had been to their minds a mere defining of bounds within which they meant to work up trade, and the West India Company never seriously thought of formal colonization here till after its famous capture of the Spanish Plate (or Silver) fleet in 1628. That capture brought to Holland about five million dollars from the nation that had for sixty years been rob- bing it of its people and means. Taking advantage of the good feeling kindled by this success, the com- pany asked and obtained of the government the celebrated " Charter of Privileges and Exemptions," which bears date June 7, 1629. When it received this charter, the Board of Nineteen at once issued propos- als under it for a settlement of the province. These proposals contemplated a strictly feudal basis of colo- nization, after the usage of the Fatherland, by which we mean a basis of immense landed proprietorships and small subordinate tenantries, not at the time

YONKERS.

designed, however, to carry with them the oppression that characterized English feudalism. Whoever would, within five years, plant a colony of fifty per- sons over fifteen years of age, might become absolute owner and lord of any manorial tract he might colo- nize. Such tract might extend to the length of six- teen miles, or if along a river, of cight miles on each side, and as far into the interior as circumstances might require. Queinflexible condition was to go with each grant, viz., that no land, even after being granted by the company, should become the grantee's, except as he should also purchase it of the Indians. Through this insistenee on moral principle in land transactions, the Holland government gained the confidence of the Indians and established a elaim to the enduring rc- spect of the world. It never seized an aere of land or broke a business contract. Every direction from the Statcs-General, cvery act of the Board of Nineteen, every step of the chamber of Amsterdam and every executive act of a Director-General, so far as business dealings went, emphasized this moral integrity. The annals that illustrate it throw glory on the Holland name.

On the 6th of May, 1626, under Director Minuit, they bought Manhattan Island of the Indians, for a priee, indeed, that now seems to us ridiculously small, viz., twenty-four dollars,-but still a price that satis- fied the Indians, and was then fully up to the island's worth. Subsequently they bought, in the same way, Long Island, Staten Island, Governor's Island, the shores of New Jersey opposite New York, all the county of Westchester, large tracts along the Hudson and large tracts on the Connecticut and Delaware besides. Many of the Indian deeds of these pur- chases still exist, and many now lost are referred to in later deeds still extant. The earliest preserved Indian eonveyanee of lands in Westchester County is of a tract it ealls Kekeshick. This tract, down to 1872, was within the town of Yonkers. It was at that date set off with the town of Kingsbridge. The Indians conveyed it to the West India Company August 3, 1639. But they had sold Westchester tracts to the Hollanders before that. The deeds of all earlier sales, however, are lost. But passing now from Indian deeds to Holland settlers, to the grantings of manorial patents by the West India Company, we have to say that the oldest such grantings, of which deeds still remain, are those of Staten Island and Hoboken to Michael Pauw in 1630, and that of Rensselaerwyck to Kiliaen Van Rensselaer in 1631. O'Callaghan eites more than six hundred land grants, many of them manorial patents, bestowed before the close of the Dutch rule in 1664.

We have showu that down to 1623 all movements on Manhattan Island and along the Hudson were by private traders. In these the territory of the Week- quaskeeks did not become involved. Even down to the close of the Dutch rule in 1664, but few white persons probably settled on it. With 1623, however,

formal government of the province had been set up. Its seat had been established on Manhattan Island, and was ealled New Amsterdam. At this seat from that year the West India Company was represented, as to authority, by sucecssive Dircetors-General of its own appointment. The last four of these men. Peter Minuit, Walter Van Twiller, William Kieft and Peter Stuyvesant, are best known to history. Beyond the responsibility it imposed on them for integ- rity in business transactions, the company laid searcely any check upon these men. As to details of government, they were left almost wholly to their own will. So each director in his turn ruled with au ar- bitrariness that would rarely brook advice. This greatly retarded the growth of the Ilolland popula- tion. Especially it held it back from extensiou over neighboring territory. As to Weekquaskeck ground, probably few white people came to reside upon it even down to the elose of the Dutch period. Isolated families would not come here in any event. Trade interests and fear of the Indians would keep them in the city. Then, too, the Dutch system did not encourage single farms. It looked to manors. And this brings us to a manorial grant during the Dutch period, which began the shaping of Yonkers. A Hollander named Van Der Donck secured such a grant from the West India Company in 1646, under the conditions of the charter of 1629.

SKETCH OF VAN DER DONCK .- Adriaen Van Der Donck, born at Breda, in Holland, was educated at Leyden, and afterwards studied law and was admitted to practice in his native country. His standing at home may be inferred from the fact that the Patroon Van Rensselaer selected him and brought him to this country to become sheriff of Rensselaerwyck. He came late in 1641, aud held that office for the next five years. It is not surprising, however, that a man of his intelligence and fine eulture, and of no mean monetary resources, became ambitious for a manor of his own. On the 22d of October, 1645, he married Mary, daughter of Rev. Franeis Doughty, a rich Long Island patroon, and soon afterwards, drawn by his new relatives, and driven by troubles in his Rensselaer- wyck experience,1 eame to live iu New Amsterdam. He was not long in perceiving the eharms and advan- tages of the lower Weekquaskeek region, and when he applied to the West India Company for it, the company being under obligations to him for moncy loaned and services rendered, readily granted his application, only binding him to pay the In- dians for any parts of the ground which they had not already released to the company itself. The deed of the tract granted to Van Der Donck called the traet " Nepperhaem." The Hollanders sometimes

I We have not thought it necessary to encumber these pages with the details of his life as an employé of Van Rensselaer, which have been so often written. The histories of Brodhead, O'Callaghan and Mrs. Lamb, consulted by index, will give what any one may desire in reference to these details,

HISTORY OF WESTCHESTER COUNTY.

called it " Colen Donck," or " The Colony of Donck," and sometimes " De Jonkheers,"-a fact out of which grew, as has been stated, the singular name of the later town.

The northern boundary of Van Der Donck's land extended from the mouth, on the Hudson River, of a little stream then called Amackassin (three miles or more north of the present Yonkers Hudson River Railroad Station) to the Bronx River, and its southern boundary, beginning at Spuyteu Duyvil, ran over to the same river by an irregular line, taking in at least some of what was subsequently known as the Manor of Fordham. His manor was therefore nearly coin- cident with the town of Yonkers, as subsequently set off by the act of March 7, 1788. Van Der Donck undoubtedly chose this land for its natural beauty, the qualities of its soil, its wood, the water-power of its Nepperhan River and its nearness to the trading post and market. It was not formally erected into a manor till 1652, six years after the date of the grant. He was out of the country during a large part of these six years. This may in part account for the delay, but it is further possible that it took most of the interval to secure the release of all the parts of the territory from the native owners of the soil.

Van Der Donck lived till 1655. From 1649, how- ever, he was embroiled, with many others, in a con- flict with the direction of the West India Company. In the spring of that year he was chosen one of Stuy- vesant's "Nine Men," an auxiliary and advisory company, to the constitution and annual popular election of which Stuyvesant had consented the year before, in order to allay a discontent which, by his imperious conduct, he had excited among the people. Deeming the director tyrannical, Van Der Donck, after his election, at once took ground against him. Stuyvesant, enraged at his course, was so impolitic as to have him arrested and imprisoned. In August, having been released, he was sent to Holland with a remonstrance against the New Amsterdam direction, prepared by himself at the request of his associates of the " Nine," who all signed it with him. The paper still exists. He was met in Holland by agents of Stuyvesant, who, of course, vehemently denied its charges. These agents had the ready ear of the home authorities, and Van Der Donek was defeated. The steps he had taken only drew upon him ill-will and persecution. When he wished to return to America, he was stopped by the government, even at the moment when he was about leaving with his family. He was detained till 1653. During the interval he was regarded with suspicion and watched. Yet, while abroad, he received, in 1652, from the Uni- versity of Leyden, the honorary degree of "Juris utriusque doctor," or " Doctor of civil and canon law." And in the same year he secured the erection of his Yonkers land into a manor, and its confirmation to him by that highest authority, the States-General. But he was still, for a time, not allowed to come

home. He employed his forced leisure, however, in writing part of a history of New Netherland, still extant. Yet the most interesting part of the history he had meant to write, the part respecting the ad- ministration of the New Amsterdam government, the West India Company prevented him from writing, by refusing him access to its records. Then, also, he sought to send over colonists, but was not allowed to do so. And when, in 1653, he was about leaving for America, to a petition for leave to practice law in New Amsterdam, he received answer that he might do so only to the extent of giving asked advice. He came home in the summer of 1653, but went back to Holland in December. What time he last returned does not appear, but he died in New Amsterdam in 1655. We have not the light for judgment between him and Stuyvesant, but all testimony says he was one of the ablest uren of the province. And his his- tory, his "Remonstrance " and his other papers, still preserved, throw much light upon his time. It is not probable that, in business and political transactions, he was without fault. The history of his connection with Rensselaerwyck, as detailed by O'Callaghan and others, shows that Van Rensselaer had fallen out with him for what he deemed dishonorable business acts. But we know no more about his personal and private character than this.

Van Der Donck, we think, never became a resi- dent upon his manor, unless he did so within a year of his death. In a paper written in Holland, he says that before 1649 he had built a saw-mill here, and laid out a farm and plantation, and adds that he had resolved to fix his own residence at Spuyten Duyvil, and had really begun to build there and cultivate the soil. He also speaks of intending to complete the work. But there is reason to believe that death de- feated his purpose, and that he had not put many colonists on his manor or derived income from it in the form of land rents, though he may have succeeded in doing something through his mill. During his time the name "De Jonkheer" had obtained that foothold from which it has never been dislodged, and the "Nepperhan " had come to be called by the Dutch name "De Zaag Kill" (Eng. The Saw Creek), which was subsequently lengthened into "The Saw- Mill Creek " (or river), a name even yet quite as frequently given to it as the name Nepperhan of its earlier days.

Of Van Der Donek's relatives or descendants we have nothing trustworthy. His mother Agatha, and his brother Daniel are said to have come to America in 1652, and we read of an Anna and a Guisbert Van Der Donek, who may have been Daniel's wife and son. That Adriaen had himself a chikl or children seems im- plied in the statement that in 1649 he was prevented from coming home with his family. One Cornelis Van Der Donck received land from Stuyvesant in 1655. This may have been a brother. It is said that there are still Van Der Doncks of Adriaen's stock ou

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Long Island. Before 1666 his widow married Hugh O'Neal of Patuxent, Maryland, and in 1671 she went to Maryland to live. Colendonck remained in her possession till 1667, as we shall show. But whether she carried out Van Der Donck's building project at Spuyten Duyvil, or herself ever derived any income from the manor, cannot now be known.

About this time the Dutch period closed. Charles II. of England, coming to the throne in 1660, spon turned his thoughts to New Netherland, to which he regarded England as having a claim. In 1664 he patented the whole province to his brother James, Duke of York and Albany, and in the same year he sent Colonel Richard Nicolls to New Amsterdam with a fleet to demand its surrender, with instruction, if this should be refused, to take it by force. The Dutch were not prepared for defense, and soon surrendered. Nine years later, in 1673, they retook the city. But in the next year a treaty between England and Hol- land gave it over conclusively to the former. So the period of Dutch rule virtually ended in 1664, and the English rule began, which continued really to the date of our Declaration of Independence, but nomi- nally even till September, 1783. At that date the treaty was signed at Versailles, in which England recognized American Independence, and from this event we strictly compute the beginning of our dis- tinct national life.

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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. II, Part 2

Author: Scharf, J. Thomas (John Thomas), 1843-1898, Publication date: 1886 Publisher: Philadelphia : L.E. Preston & Co. Number of Pages: 1286

Author: Scharf, J. Thomas (John Thomas), 1843-1898,
Publication date: 1886
Publisher: Philadelphia : L.E. Preston & Co.
Number of Pages: 1286