USA > New York > New York City > Leslie's history of the greater New York, Volume II > Part 20
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beauty, and solemn grandeur of the place. The surface is admirably diversified by hill and dale, while every now and then a beautiful little lake is spread out in the valley. The greater part of the area is deeply shaded with dense forest trees, without underbrush, which give to the whole scene the somber aspect of the habitation of the dead. The grounds are not eut up into squares and parallelograms. No such figure is to be seen throughout the whole extent. But spacious ave- nues, neatly graveled, wind through every valley, encompassing num- berless hillocks, and intersecting each other at every turn. The main avenue, called the . Tour,' in numerons windings, forms a circuit of three miles. And, besides this, there are many others. Yon might travel for hours within this hallowed inclosure, with a fleet horse, and yet at every turn enter a new road."
Not content with one great cemetery even then, at another extrem- ity of the city. Cypress Hills, also well known, was initiated in 1847. In 1848 the first body was there interred. It, too, crowns a noble range of hills, even at that distance from the ocean commanding a view of it over the intervening levels. Lying along the Jamaica Road, some miles beyond the historie " Pass," it had no part in the Battle of Long Island, and it is difficult to understand how cannon balls could have been exhumed there, as is stated, unless the British afterward used the face of the steep hills as a target for artillery practice. One hundred and twenty-five acres were secured for cemetery purposes, which have been largely left to their natural advantages to attract the visitor or the purchaser of lots. " Evergreens " began its exist- ence in 1849, and lies npon the utmost ridge of Long Island's backbone, nearer the city than Cypress Hills, from one part commanding a view of the ocean, from another vantage point overlooking nearly the whole city (now borongh ) of Brooklyn, including also the Brooklyn Bridge and New York City beyond, which is now, of course, only Manhat- tan Borough. From the viewpoint just mentioned, too, the eye could look in olden times upon the hollow between the hills through which the Jamaica Road passed on its way to Bedford and Brooklyn ham lets. So hither lloward and his son, of Howard's Tavern, or Half- way Honse (standing in the fullness of its historie glory in 1849), forced by the enemy, led his stealthy steps to reveal to him the folly of the Americans and the utter defenselessness of that prime strategie point. And thus, lovely Evergreens, growing ever more a thing of beanty to palliate the wounds of death, is entitled to historie interest as well as its sister cemetery in Gowanus.
From the places of repose of the dead, we turn to some of the many associations among the living, which largely interested the population of Brooklyn during its earliest phase of city life. The crack regiment of Brooklyn, the Thirteenth, had its origin during this period. It was a combination into a more united whole of several military fragments. Its Company A was organized in 1827 as the
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Brooklyn Light Guards. Later, there arose other military bodies by the names of City Guards, Continental Guards, after the manner of the citizen soldiery of New York, as has been noted in our previous vol- ume. In 1854 a movement was made to organize these separate asso- ciations into one regiment, but not till 1856 was this accomplished, and the Thirteenth began its career. The Fourteenth had been organ- ized in 1846, we are told, but how it could be recognized as a regiment, when each of its companies had a different uniform, it is hard to comprehend for a mind accustomed to later conditions. Institutions whose main object was to save life, not to cut it short by bullet or sword, rose up by the side of these others. In 1844 was formed the Association for Improving the Poor; four years later the Brooklyn City Hospital, by a donation of $25,000 from Mr. Augustus Graham, was placed upon a permanent foundation; and, by the munificence of Mr. John B. Graham, the " Old Ladies' Home " was enabled to build a house for itself in 1851. As to another phase of social life, amuse- ment, entertainment, instruction for the public, the period now in hand naturally brought with it much improvement. In 1848 the Brooklyn Dramatic Association was formed, which exhibited its tal- ent at Prest's City Hotel, next to the Military Garden, upon the ground now occupied by the County Courthouse. The longroom, or assembly-room, was transformed into a little theater seating about five hundred people, and thus altered, the place was named the Brook- lyn Concert Hall. In 1849 it passed into professional hands, and the name was changed to the Brooklyn Athenæum, but it served the pub- lic as a theater only from May to September. The next year was erected, on the corner of Fulton and Orange streets, a brick structure called the Brooklyn Museum. On the second floor a museum of nat- ural history was maintained, while upon the third floor people who recovered their breath had leisure to perceive that here was a theater. The latter was called a " lecture-room," which was a happy subterfuge in days when religious people frowned on the drama. A revival of the name Athenæum occurred in 1852, applied now to a building on the corner of Clinton Street and Atlantic Avenue. Here opera and drama were both given to a long-suffering public, who did not know what they missed in personal comfort and in the musical effect from the poor adaptations of the Athenaeum until later the Academy of Music opened its doors. A fact worth noting in this connection is that in the Brooklyn Museum, on July 8, 1850, Joseph Jefferson made his debut in the " Jealous Wife." "Rip Van Winkle " was then, as yet, asleep.
After its incorporation, the City of Brooklyn rapidly justified and increasingly deserved the title which distinguishes it among the cities of the land as the " City of Churches." A city of homes is apt to be a city of churches. Here thousands of men came to rest from the strains of business every evening not only, but here they remained over Sunday to taste the sweets of home-life as well as of repose. It
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WORKING ON THE MAINE AT BROOKLYN NAVY YARD.
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was the time to give thought and heart to things invisible indeed, but just as real and necessary as the visible material affairs with which they came in contact during the week over in the big metropolis, with its whirl of business. No wonder, then, that churches multiplied apace as Brooklyn grew in population. The old Dutch Church main- tained itself and grew to larger proportions as the years went by. In 1835 the congregation were able to place upon the site on Joralemon Street a handsome structure of the Parthenon style, which is familiar to Brooklynites of middle age, as it stood until somewhere in the "eighties." Then the ground was sold, the building demolished, and, after some vicissitudes, the present little space was left there, ill- tended for a park, but not yet assuming much of the looks of one, except that a few benches adorn a circular space in the center. About 1890, a handsome modern structure was erected on Seventh Avenue and Carroll Street, at a goodly distance, therefore, from its earliest site in the middle of Fulton Street. It therefore approaches in its pres- ent location the third Dutch Church established in Brooklyn city, in the Gowanus section ( where the First is now ), organized in 1839, and which is now called the South Reformed Church. A building was erected on Third Avenue and Forty-third Street in 1840; it has since put up a brick structure at the corner of that avenue and Fifty-sec- ond Street. Meanwhile the second Dutch Church had been organized in 1837, now called the Church on the Heights, on Pierrepont Street, its present building being the second one, erected in 1850. This church was made famous by the ministry of the Rev. George W. Be- thune, who was considered the foremost orator of his day, whether in pulpit or on platform. We can not follow every individual church thus minutely. To the list of Episcopalian churches were added dur- ing this period, Trinity, in 1835, and Holy Trinity, in 1844; Christ Church, in 1835; Calvary, in 1840; St. Luke's, and others. St. Mary's was organized at the Wallabout in 1836, and, in 1847, St. Michael's was erected in a neighborhood of religious destitution by the munifi- cence of the Rev. Evan M. Johnson, who went there himself to labor without remuneration. In 1845, against but three Dutch Reformed Churches, there were eight Episcopalian, equaled in number by the Methodist Episcopal body, which also had eight. In 1846, there was much agitation as to the expediency of creating a Diocese of Long Island. The Presbyterians also kept on growing and multiply- ing churches, there being seven of them in 1845. In 1844, the first Unitarian Church (" of the Saviour," organized in 1834), erected their building on Pierrepont Street; and the first Universalist Church was organized in 1841, going to a church of their own on Adams Street after holding services in a rented hall. The history of Congregation- alism in Brooklyn began, as we noted, in 1785, when an " Independ- ent " or " Union " society worshiped in a building which afterward be- came St. Ann's. No serious attempt at organizing a Congregation-
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al Church was made after that first enterprise failed, until 1844, when the Church of the Pilgrims began its career. In 1846 the pres- ent edifice on Henry and Remsen streets was opened and dedicated, and, in the same year, a call was extended to its present pastor, the Rev. Richard S. Storrs, Jr., later D.D., and whose name and fame are over all the Union. The next year saw the beginning of a church which has made the name of Brooklyn a familiar term not only on this continent. but throughout the Christian world; and this by reason of the extraordinary man who became its pastor immediately. Nine members of the Church of the Pilgrims were set apart to organize this other Congregational society, which was named Plymouth Church. The buildings and grounds of the first Presbyterian Church on Orange Street were purchased, and here, on May 16, 1847, a service was held at which the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, of Indianapolis, Ind., was invited to preach. He had come on from the West to attend and speak at the May meetings of the American Home Mission Society, in New York City. His remarkable powers were at once noted, and a few progressive gentlemen, with John T. Howard (the father of the " Tyro " journalist > at their head, determined to seenre him for Brooklyn. On June 14, 1847, Mr. Beecher was called to be the pastor of the new church, and on October 10, 1847, he began those labors of which the fame is now widespread and unsurpassed. Mrs. Howard had not taken her dismission from the Church of the Pilgrims with her husband. On the morning of October 10, as they both left the house together to go to their respective churches, this lady, feel- ing aentely the anomalous situation of going a different way from her husband, turned and remarked that she would go with him, as very likely there would be but few in his church anyhow, and she wanted " to help make out an audience." As she lately remarked, she was probably the only person who ever went to hear Mr. Beecher with the laudable desire to " help make out an audience " for him. She was so charmed with his power and eloquence that she forthwith followed the example of Mr. Howard, and became an active member of Plymouth Church. In 1845, the Free Congregational Church was organized, the Clinton Avenue in 1847, and the Bed- ford Congregational in 1848. As was said, there were eight Metho- dist Churches in 1845. One was organized at Gowanns in 1842, Carl- ton Avenue in 1844, and Pacific Street in the same year. In 1849, First Place began its work, and in 1854 Fleet Street was added to the number. The Roman Catholic Churches had also increased in a re- markable degree, so much so that in 1853, Long Island was created a Diocese, of which the Very Rev. John Loughlin became Bishop. In 1852 there were fifteen public schools in Brooklyn. Before the end of the period now in hand, the Packer Institute (1854) had suc- ceeded the abortive female academy scheme, achieving a success which has extended its fame beyond the city's bounds. In the same
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year of its origin, the boys of the city were provided for in the cele- brated Polytechnic Institute. Many private schools flourished in the city. Besides this, mental improvement was furnished by several libraries, such as the Apprentices', directly established as such, or connected with the Athena um, Lyceum, Brooklyn Institute, and Lit- erary Association, an account of which more properly belongs to a subsequent chapter.
A brief glance at the surrounding towns, destined to become com- ponent parts of the city now organized, must conclude the present chapter. The threads of narrative must include these rural districts because the great city has made them her own so lately, but very little history was making among farming communities keeping " the even tenor of their way, far from the madding crowd's igno- ble strife." Yet it is rather a pessimistic view of the situation to con- clude that the strife of the crowd so near them, hastening on a devel- opment of municipal glory which would ere long sweep them within its meshes, was altogether ignoble. But it requires too many in convenient punctuation marks to alter a citation, hence the suggestion that there was anything ignoble about it had to go down, and may be useful after all. We shall content ourselves with noting that in Flat- lands a. Primitive Methodist Church was organized in the Canarsie section in 1840; and in 1851, presumably in the same neighborhood, at a safe distance from the stronghold of Dutchdom and Calvinism, a Methodist Episcopal Church arose in the township. A few more nug- gets of historie lore come to us from Flatbush, as becomes so aristo- cratie a community. In 1848, a movement, begun some years before, to open Flatbush Avenue from Brooklyn to the village, was again agitated, but occasioned what seems an unreasonable opposition on the part of the inhabitants of the latter. Fulton Avenue was about the same time laid out toward Bedford. In 1854 the road from Brook- lyn to Flatbush was finally surveyed, laid out, paved. and graded as Flatbush Avenue, and a year later it was extended to Flatlands as a plank road. Several streets were opened upon Mr. Adrian Vander- veer's farm, near the Clove Road, in 1835, and more of them were mapped on paper for future auction. The accommodating gentleman who carried people's letters back and forth to Brooklyn, was super- seded by regular postoffice facilities not long before 1840, Flatbush deriving that benefit from a line of stage coaches running through it from Brooklyn to Fort Hamilton. As to school matters, Erasmus Hall continued to flourish and several select schools also sprang up in the village on account of its salubrious and retired situation. The publie school for a long time occupied a part of Erasmus Hall, but in 1845 a separate building was erected and utilized for this, which thus became Public School No. 1. The Old Dutch Church occupying the fine building it does to this day, experienced no special changes, and its pastor, Dr. Strong, inducted in 1822, remained with it for many a
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year beyond this period. But Flatbush, with an increased popula- tion, naturally began to realize a diversity in religious faiths, and so we notice that an Episcopal Church (St. Paul's) was established in 1836, and a Methodist Church in 1844. Other nuclei of population in the township also came into existence. A village was formed in the extremest southwestern corner, adjoining the boundaries of Graves- end and New Utrecht, in 1851, called Greenfield then, and Park- ville now; while Windsor Terrace, situated between Prospect Park and Greenwood Cemetery, in the northwestern corner, was
NAVY YARD. MORNING DRILL AFTER ROLL CALL.
started in the same year. A movement of considerable interest was the separation of nearly one-half of Flatbush township into a town- ship by itself. This was the part long known as the New Lots, having been allotted to proprietors later than the other portions, and it re- ceived that name as a town. Its development was extraordinarily rapid, so that it became annexed to Brooklyn as a ward several years before any of the other outlying towns, except, of course, Bushwick, of which we shall speak in the next chapter. New Lots was made a town in 1852, but in 1837 began an enterprise within its borders which led to this march of progress in municipal existence just alluded to. Then was created " on paper " a city that was intended to outrival New York, and was defiantly named, in advance of that proud
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achievement, " East New York." A tract two miles long by one mile wide was purchased from the farmers living along the New Lots Road by a Mr. Pitkin, who laid out the territory thus acquired into lots which he sold at the modest price of from $10 to $25 apiece. The panic of 1837 was a fatal blow to this enterprise, and the city on paper was reduced to the homely uses of the farmers again. But in 1853 the scheme of Pitkin was revived by others, small dwellings were put up and sold at reasonable rates, and population soon came to fill up the level lands of a few years before, especially when street cars came to supplement the transportation furnished by the steam railroad, and the easier town government made East New York a place of revelry and free beer on Sundays. The Reformed Church of New Lots, in 1839, threw off a branch at East New York, of which Principal Camp- bell, of Erasmus Hall, acted as pastor for two years.
Gravesend was yet slow in its progress during these earlier years of the century. From 1700 to 1738 it had made an increase in popu- lation of sixty-four persons; from 1738 to 1838 its gain was all of four hundred and twenty-seven. But its days of "rapidity "-all too much of it, perhaps,-were yet to come; yet even in 1845 there were premonitions of its later destiny, for its Coney Island was already ap- preciated. Prime writes of it: " It has become a place of great re- sort in the hot season for the luxury of sea bathing, and the enjoy- ment of the ocean air." In 1844 the exploitation of the island began, two gentlemen from New York leasing the westernmost extremity and building a pavilion upon it, as well as a dock for the landing of steamers at Norton's Point. Two or three modest houses of entertain- ment were also put up at this point, and it is recorded that on a Fourth of July of one of these early years, which happened to be a Sunday, the toll-gatherer on the " Shell Road " counted three hundred vehicles that passed his gate on the way to the island. Gravesend was also invaded by the Methodists, who established a church at Sheepshead Bay in 1840, and one nearer the old Dutch Society in 1844.
In those days of small things, New Utrecht could put in a claim of serious rivalry not only, but of superiority as a summer attraction, over Coney Island. Fort Hamilton was drawing a settlement around itself, where St. John's Episcopal Church was organized in 1835. In 1836 a company was incorporated for the purpose of constructing a railroad from Brooklyn to Fort Hamilton, Bath, and Coney Island, which did not materialize till later, and then left out Fort Hamilton. In the same year the New Utrecht Dock and Steamboat Company was established. Bath, a village, and Bath House, an excellent public house, drew many people hither during the summer heat. The house had a lawn in front of it beautifully shaded and sloping down to the bay waters. As it was the nearest watering-place to two cities, it was largely patronized. Shad fishing continued to yield profitable returns to the inhabitants of New Utrecht, as it had done in earlier days.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE FIRST CONSOLIDATION.
E have left out of the range of our vision for some time the good old town of Bushwick, so closely linked with the other Dutch towns of Kings County in all things, both civil and ecclesiastical. This is because Bushwick sooner than they became identified with its sister Brooklyn. A part of it became an incorporated city; and then throughout its whole extent as a township (without, of course, retaining its name), shortly after this section of it had arrived at that distinction, it was merged into the other city. Therefore, it becomes entitled to a careful treatment of the events that led to such an issue, as forming part of the history of the Greater New York.
At the opening of this century the town of Bushwick stretched its cultivated territory, with occasional woodlands, in peace and quiet- ness from the Wallabout to Newtown Creek, resting at the rear against this natural boundary between itself and Queens County, as it turned southeastward from the East River. The road from Brook- lyn to Flushing traversed it, and a road ran past the old Church from the north to join this Flushing Road. Bushwick Creek ran up into this territory, setting apart the Greenpoint portion. Locating their village center where they did, the people of Bushwick seemed to have been a little shy of the river. Yet there was a section known as " the Strand," where the houses of the farmers clustered a little closer to- gether. In the far southwest corner, where the Broadway ferries are now, dwelt the descendants of that Jean Mesurole, who had some- how got possession of a farm there, as we saw in a previous chapter. Bushwiek had done its part toward sending its men to the front in the Revolution, and had itself bravely endured hardships and insults during the British occupation. On December 2, 1783, exactly a week after the Evacuation of New York, the villagers gathered at the vil- lage green, near the church, and enthusiastically celebrated the happy event. At the dawn of day the Stars and Stripes were flung to the breeze, and a salute of guns awakened the few who could be tardy at a time like this. A barbecue encouraged the hilarity of the day, and the ox roasted whole provided hearty viands for the hungry who had flocked together from a distance. It was a day of happy reunion for those who had fought for their country, and had for that reason been
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banished from homes occupied for seven long years by the enemy. The more solid part of the feast over, thirteen toasts were drunk, each punctuated by a salute of guns, hearty cheers, and patriotic music. As an eyewitness wrote of the celebration : " Every countenance dis- played in the most lively manner the joy and gratitude of their hearts upon this most happy and important event; and what added to the cheerfulness of the day was the once more beholding the metropolis of this State emerging from that scene of ruin and distress which it has severely experienced, during the late contest, from a cruel, un- relenting, and insulting foe." Thus the city newspaper did full jus- tice to Bushwick's celebration, and did not forget to take glory to its own town by making it appear that the villagers' chief joy was occa-
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sioned by the happy release of New York. Again, in the War of 1812, we find Bushwick foremost among those laboring in the trenches of Brooklyn. Its quota was headed by Domine Bassett of the Dutch Church, who led his followers in prayer ere they struck spade or pick- ax into the yielding soil upon Fort Greene. This Mr. Bassett had come to the Bushwick Church as its first English pastor in 1811, at which time the society became separate from the collegiate arrange- ment of the county towns, although here, as elsewhere, Domine Schoonmaker preached at stated intervals in the old mother tongue until his death in 1824. In 1829 the octagonal 'church, with its pyra- midal roof, was replaced by a more modern structure, and in 1840 the
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church that now crowns the knoll of green, amid its uninviting sur- roundings, was erected.
But we are getting away from the opening years of the century, when Bushwick lay in rural repose, its people diligently tilling the portions of the earth allotted to them severally, and which had come to them in the course of years as their forbears quietly passed away to fields that need no cultivation. The main evidences of enterprise were such as other Kings County towns were wont to exhibit, and which the inflowing and outflowing tides naturally suggested. Where Newtown Creek (or Maspeth Kill) forced the rising waters into in- lets or ponds, the wary mill owner constructed dams and sluices to catch them at their flood, and let them out only on condition that they should do the work of turning a wheel for him, whose revolutions then communicated the movements proper to millstones in grinding grain into meal. From descriptions of these mills they do not appear to have been handsome; but their usefulness can not be questioned. Thus farmers tilled the soil and reaped the crops and the millers ground their meai, undisturbed by the whirl of business that was growing louder and londer upon the little island across the river-when all at once, in 1802, one of these indefatigable New York merchants turned his eyes to Bushwick, and saw here possibilities which less far-sighted people never dreamed of. He bought by proxy about fifteen acres of the old Meserole farm, part of which, by descent and purchase, had passed into the hands of the Titus family. When, finally, Mr. Richard M. Woodhull did openly claim ownership, he brought over an engi- neer of the United States Army, a Colonel Williams, by whom the tract (at the foot of North Second Street ) was surveyed and laid out into city lots. A ferry was also by him established, running its boats from the foot of North Second Street to Corlear's Hook, on Manhattan Island, where Grand Street reaches the river now, but where no Grand Street appeared then. A hay press was also erected by Mr. Woodhull near his ferry, and everything was done to induce popu- lation to gather. This local habitation of course would be much served by a name, and Woodhull gave it that of Williamsburgh, in honor of his surveyor. But his scheme did not work well; or rather there were too many to work the same scheme. A Mr. Thomas Morrell, of New- town, also bought a part of the old Meserole farm, his acres lying southward of " Williamsburgh," and centering about the foot of the present Grand Street in Brooklyn. These were likewise transformed into city lots, and the name of "Yorkton " given to the prospective settlement. A ferry must of course be established to vie with the other, and it ran from the foot of Grand Street to the same point at Corlear's Hook as Mr. Woodhull's. Somehow or other success at- tended Morrell's scheme, and deserted his predecessor's in the field. The ferry and lots at North Second Street were not patronized by the Long Islanders or New Yorkers, but to Grand Street they would come
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