USA > New York > New York City > Leslie's history of the greater New York, Volume II > Part 21
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to be ferried over and to buy lots and live. Yet they kept saying with strange persisteney that it was " Williamsburgh " to which they were bound when starting with their produce from the back country for the city markets, or when bound for a day's excursion over to Long Island from New York. Thus " Yorkton " passed into utter forget- fulness, and all that was left of Mr. Woodhull's dollars and carefully surveyed lots for him to glory in or benefit by was the name immortal- izing his surveyor. It became the title applied to all the territory from Broadway to Newtown Creek, and absorption by Brooklyn has by no means quite obliterated the name from common speech. These transactions had all been accomplished (resulting in ruin to the first and success to the second) before the War of 1812 broke out. The return of peace in 1815 did not immediately realize the great hopes of the speculators at Williamsburgh. In 1814 there was a population of 759. Six years later, in 1820, there were only 934. As the years went on men of enterprise began to come. In 1819 the "Father of Williamsburgh " made his abode there, so called because the place owed much to his intelligent interest in its welfare, and to his material assistance in days of stress. This was Mr. Noah Waterbury. He came to Brooklyn when a mere lad in 1789, being apprenticed to a shoemaker. When released at twenty-one, he assumed the lease of Catharine Street Ferry; went into the lumber business, and passed from that to ropemaking. When he came to Williamsburgh he estab- lished a distillery, but, leaving that again, he took to real estate, later to banking, and, when the village received incorporation, became the first President of its Board of Trustees. Another " founder " was Da- vid Dunham, who died in 1823, a merchant of New York, whose enter- prise had sent the first steamship to trade to Havana and New Or- leans. In 1825, real estate promoters again took hold of property here. The Furman Brothers of New York bought twenty-five acres, reaching from South First Street, along Second Street (now Wythe Avenue) to South Third Street, and stretching eastward as far as Sixth Street ( now Roebling Street ). The price paid was $300 per acre. A wise plan was to offer a lot one hundred feet square to the Dutch Reformed Society when that was organized in 1828. The building was ready for occupancy almost simultaneously with the organiza- tion, and stood on the corner of Fourth Street (now Bedford Avenue) and South Second. It is the same church ( First Reformed of Will- iamsburgh) which is now to be found on the corner of Bedford Ave- nue and Clymer Street. It may just be remarked here that the first church organized within the bounds of Williamsburgh was of the Methodist persuasion, and dates from 1807.
Meantime the conditions that were now being realized seemed to justify the place in aspiring to incorporation as a village. This was accomplished in 1827. As in the case of Brooklyn, it was the ferry that held in proximity to it the people and their dwellings. In 1827
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New York exceeded two hundred thousand in population, and the open country on and about Corlear's Hook was beginning to disap- pear and make way for streets actually built upon instead of being merely indicated on surveyors' maps. Ten years before, Williams- burgh Ferry had begun to rejoice in a " team-boat," thus facilitating and inviting increased travel across the river at this point. Not long after a new impulse to ferry transportation was given by Mr. Dun- ham, who, with one or two others, bought up all the land which had originally been Woodhull's. He supplanted the horseboats by more commodious ones propelled by steam power. Population grad- ually grew, and with more residents certain mistaken policies fol- lowed by those domiciling here were emphasized to an unpleasant degree. The people built along the roads or streets as they were, and all attempts at general improvements were frustrated by the dis- inclination of many householders who on several of the streets were unwilling to join their neighbors in the expense or labor involved in grading or paving. The town government of Bushwick offered no remedy for this evil, being without sufficient head or concentration of authority. It was obvious that a system of government with offi- cers, and power to compel compliance with general demands for im- provement, would bring Williamsburgh into a better condition, and induce people from New York to make their homes there. So agitation began for a village charter, which was finally obtained from the Leg- islature at Albany on April 14, 1827. All the authorities state the precise description of the limits of the village to have been as follows : " Beginning at the bay or river, opposite the town of Brooklyn, and running thence easterly along the division line between the towns of Bushwick and Brooklyn, to the land of Abraham A. Remsen; thence northerly by the same to a road or highway at a place called Swede's Fly; thence by the said highway to the dwelling house late of Jolin Vandervoort, deceased; thence in a straight line northerly, to a small ditch or creek against the meadows of John Skillman; thence by said creek to Norman's Kill to the East River; thence by the same to the place of beginning." Withont following minutely all these indicated turns and lines we can make the general reader understand readily that the village contemplated by this charter did not take in all of the town of Bushwick, even as Brooklyn village was only a part of Brooklyn township. This distinction was made all the sharper in a very peculiar manner in 1840, when Williamsburgh village was also made Williamsburgh township. It is hard to see why such a piece of supererogation was perpetrated. At once the village officers were supplemented by a set of town officers whose jurisdiction covered ex- actly the same territory. Each of this set of officers required a sepa- rate election, with the machinery and cost appertaining thereto. The part of Bushwick that Williamsburgh covered may be read from the above description to have been confined between Norman's Kill
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or Bushwick Creek, and the Wallabout. Thus it excluded the por- tion of the later city known as Greenpoint at the north. On the south the line ran partly along the present Division Avenue. It is also to be remembered that the portions now popularly known as South Bush- wiek and New Bushwick did not come within the village bounds. Mentioned in the charter of 1827, and, therefore, by the passage of it, constituted as the Board of Trustees, were five gentlemen hitherto largely identified with the development of the settlement. They were Noah Waterbury, John Miller, Abraham Meserole, Lewis Sand- ford, and Thomas T. Morrill. These men ( with the exception of John Miller, who declined to serve) were installed by taking the oath of office on April 26, and on April 30, they met and organized, electing as President Mr. Noah Waterbury. By a vote nearly unanimous, the charter-officers were re-elected by the suffrages of their fellow-vil- lagers in November, 1827, Peter C. Cornell being put in the place of Miller. The meetings of the Board were held in a small frame house, fronting with gable to the street, located on what was then called First Street (now Kent Avenue), about seventy-five feet north of Grand Street. The rooms not needed for the business of the village magnates were devoted in part to the accommodation of a justice of the peace, and in part to the sale of articles of tinware and of stoves! In 1829 the population had advanced to 1,007, not a great leap from that of 1820. There still seemed to be something in the way of prog- ress. The greatest injury to the place was done by land speculators. Between 1828 and 1836 several traets embracing one or more farms were bought up by parties in New York. They were laid out (on paper) into streets and lots; sometimes a street would be actually opened, and some dwellings more or less pretentious erected upon it. But whether in actual condition for building or existing merely ou paper there was a lively trade in Williamsburgh lots. The center of this traffic was at two offices in New York City, 142 Fulton Street and 5 Nassau Street. Here men would flock eagerly to catch a chance at real estate holdings, as they were auctioned off like furniture at a vendue, or wheat and stock on the exchanges. " At public and private sales," writes one, " large numbers of lots were disposed of, moneys were paid for margins, and mortgages were taken back for part of the purchase money to twice the intrinsic value of the property. All went merrily, the land-jobbers were reputed to have become wealthy, and their customers saw fortunes in their investments. And the pasture- lands and fields, which then made up nine-tenths of the territory of Williamsburgh, were clothed in the hopeful imaginings of the holders of lots with all the incidents of a busy, bustling town." The unsound- ness of the basis upon which all this speculation proceeded became manifest all too soon in the great panic of 1837. The extravagant ex- pectations might have been realized if time had been allowed for the improvement of conditions, but when the financial crash came, and
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credits vanished in every direction, the mere emptiness of the claims as to the value of the property dealt in was at once revealed .. Two years before the panic, in 1835, the village charter was amended by act of Legislature. This enlarged the village boundaries, so that what are now the Sixteenth and Eighteenth wards of Brooklyn were added to its territory, extending the line southward along Flushing Avenue, and eastward to Newtown Creek, still leaving out the South Bush- wiek and Greenpoint portions of the old township. The number of Trustees was increased from six to nine, and Edmund Frost was elected President of the enlarged Board. These changes had a bene- ficial effect upon the prospects of the town, and gave it an impulse to- ward its later remarkable prosperity after the panie of 1837 had spent its effects, and the bad results of the speculative fever had been over- come sufficiently to make a new start possible. The Board was very active in the building of wharves and docks, inviting commerce and in- dustry to its own doors; also a ferry was established to Peck Slip, striking more nearly into the business center of the metropolis. This brought many residents to Williamsburgh who could do business in the city and breathe the air and enjoy the prospects upon the high ground of the village after the toils of the day. Indeed, with an im- proved government and real estate no longer fraudulent or deceptive, there was an awakening to the real advantages of this locality. Peo- ple were surprised that they had not before noticed or appreciated these, applicable alike to the " successful prosecution of every species of manufacture and commerce, and the erection of pleasant and con- venient private residences." Accordingly, we find that by 1840 there had come to be a great increase in population. The 759 of 1814 had become only 934 in 1820; and in 1829 the latter figure had just crept above the one thousand. But in 1840 the population had grown to 5,094, and only five years later this had been more than doubled, reaching 11,338. Commenting on these statistics, the historian Prime is led to call it (reminding us of the fact that the place covered no more than two square miles of ground), " the most populous town in proportion to its territory on the island; and the increase of its in- habitants during the last few years is almost without a parallel." Yet while commending its admirable situation as " a peculiarly pleas- ant and desirable residence," a locality which nature seems to have formed for " the site of a beautiful town," he complains that man has marred nature's work by a very bad method or plan of laying out streets. " It will be a matter of lasting regret," he says, " that the streets were not laid out in exact parallels and perpendiculars; and it is difficult to imagine on what principles so many veering and con- verging streets could have been laid down on a tract of land that pre- sented no obstacles to a perfectly regular plan." Perhaps this enthu- siasm for " a perfectly regular plan," consisting of " parallels and perpendiculars," will not be shared by every one. There may be ideas
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of picturesqueness and variety which are served better by a little shifting of the " regularity." If only these " veering " streets, as now seen in this section of Brooklyn, had been built upon with elegant or substantial houses, instead of presenting a perfect wilderness of com- monest and flimsiest wooden structures, perhaps the oblique angles and triangular plazas thereby secured would have decidedly added to the attractiveness of the city. As it is, a glance at the map of Brooklyn reveals patches of " parallels and perpendiculars " leaning against one another where they start out occasionally from some wild- ly diverging thoroughfare. Those who sigh for rigid regularity, how- ever, will be able to sympa- thize with the ancient histor- ian in his regret that a golden opportunity has here been so wantonly neglected: " In the whole circuit of the City of New York there is not a spot of ground of equal extent, where a village could have been laid out with such perfect regularity, in both the direc- tion and the grade of the streets, as within the entire limits of Williamsburgh." It is a matter for deeper regret, however, that the speculators who brought ruin to so many persons, and who retarded the progress of the town for so many years, should have been immortalized by streets that bear their names. It is well GOVERNOR DANIEL D. TOMPKINS. enough to recall original set- tlers by the names of Conselvea Street or Skillman Ave- mme, or Meserole Street. Village President Waterbury has been honored, and also President Frost. We might have looked for some such remembrance of Woodhull, to whom we owe the name of Williamsburgh, and the first enterprise that led to the later development. But neither he nor Morrell, of the "Yorkton " venture, were thus brought before the minds of later generations until quite recently, since the historical spirit has ex- tended its sway even over the counsels of aldermen. History would have quite readily excused, however, the burying in oblivion of names that now attach to many prominent thoroughfares in what was for- merly Williamsburgh city. One of the agents for the speculators was a William P. Powers, " a handsome, amiable, and honest young man."
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He occupied the exalted position of law clerk in the office of John Lorimer Graham. Honest though he may have been himself, he was made a dummy by a company of land speculators who did not care to be known, and who put all the titles to the property they acquired in the law clerk's name. To this memorable business we owe Powers Street, Lorimer Street, and Graham Avenue. The good Mr. Dunham had a desire to perpetuate his name by giving it to Grand Street, but the latter title was not one so easily wiped out. As population in- creased and scattered itself over these streets, means of communica- tion between the more distant ones and the ferries naturally appealed to somebody's enterprise. The demand was responded to by a Mr. Williams, who is described as a painter. We are to presume he was a house painter, as the records of American art do not contain his name among the devotees of the mimic brush and the glowing canvas. A more likely guess would be that he was a carriage painter, whereby he would have become acquainted with the quality and cost of vehi- cles. At any rate, he procured a number of omnibuses, or stages, and started a line of them between some remote part of town and Peck Slip Ferry. We may, perhaps, be able to rescue from oblivion their precise starting point. Painstaking chroniclers have been careful to furnish us with Mr. Williams's residence. It was on South Fifth Street, near Twelfth Street, that then was. Now Twelfth Street was the extreme limit of the system of streets thus numbered, begin- ning at the East River and running parallel thereto. The exigencies of later events, soon to be related, necessitated a change in the names of all these numbered streets, and under this necessity, the name of Hewes Street was extended to Twelfth Street. But its very designa- tion (Twelfth) would indicate its remoteness; it was near the out- skirts of the town as it was then. Hence, the trip from the residence of Mr. Williams would pretty nearly cover all the inhabited parts of the village. Unfortunately his stages did this in a sense too literal; they did actually attempt to cover the whole village instead of follow- ing one clearly marked course of travel. Like the stages in Brooklyn before the advent of Mr. Montgomery Queen, the Williamsburgh ve- hicles would deviate from the prescribed line to any length up side streets, wherein they deseried a passenger waving a handkerchief. Perhaps, too, signals had been arranged between citizens and drivers. whereby a house anywhere, displaying such in a side street, could draw the omnibus to its front, where it would wait till the inmate desirous of travel should step out prepared for the trip. This was exceedingly neighborly of Mr. Williams, but it did not commend the omnibus service to the public of Williamsburgh as a time-saving de- vice, or as a means of getting anywhere in particular. So the end of six months saw also the end of this laudable enterprise, and rapid transit for Williamsburgh was postponed for many a weary day.
In the days before prosperity came with a rush, Williamsburgh
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had but little to show in the lines of commerce, industry, and manu- factures. Statistical records tell of five ropewalks, one distillery, one slaughterhouse, one hay scale, and three lumber yards, in 1830. Wharves and docks brought business to the city after 1837. In 1839 an attempt was made to establish a bank, to be called " The Bank of Williamsburgh." But the provisions of its charter seemed to furnish no guaranty against the most reckless or arbitrary proceedings of its directors, and no man of substance and reliability could be found to become President of it. It opened business on the corner of First Street (now Kent Avenue) and Grand, but its sign announcing its existence was displayed, we are told, but for one day. Dr. Stiles grows quite facetious over the abortive venture. " Tradition asserts," he says, " that the same signboard, repainted and relettered, after- ward indicated the whereabouts of a much sounder concern, known as Lemuel Richardson's Lock Factory. Plates for bills were en- graved, a few notes were printed, and it is even said that one was signed, but quien sabe? It is among the mysteries of our history." Several years later, in 1851, a much more successful venture was in- augurated in the shape of the Williamsburgh Savings Bank. In 1850 a gaslight company was inaugurated, and the first directory of the city, published that year, contained 5,300 names. Just as the vil- lage was about to become a city, two banks started upon their career, the " Farmers' and Citizens' " and the " Williamsburgh City." The first fire insurance company also began its operations. In 1829 a post- office had been established for Williamsburgh, with Lewis Sanford as the first Postmaster.
It is not to be supposed that Williamsburgh would long remain without that indispensable and never-failing feature of an Ameri- can community-the newspaper. The first attempt to furnish the vil- lagers with this medium of expression for their sentiments and con- veyaneer of information, was made in 1835, when the Williamsburgh Gazette, a weekly, began its career. It was non-political, or at least non-partisan, until the cry of " Tippecanoe and Tyler, too," was in the air, when it heartily echoed this battle-ery, went in for Harri- son, and became the Whig ( precursors of the Republicans) organ in 1840. This taking of sides seems to have brought it prosperity, and, in 1850, it was issued as a daily. But after that its career was short, for it suspended in 1854. A second journal was the Williamsburgh Democrat, which seemed a necessity in 1840, when the Gazette came out squarely as a Whig partisan. The Democrat ceased to exist in 1848. The year before (1847) saw the beginning of another news- paper enterprise, The Morning Post. Its life was not greatly pro- longed, but it gave occasion to the rise of another paper, which oc- cupies a leading position in Brooklyn to this day. This was the Williamsburgh Daily Times, as then it was called, originating in 1848, and said to have been started as the result of a quarrel among
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the owners of the Post. It imitated the Gazette, in commencing as a neutral paper, but the trend of parties was too strong, and sides had to be chosen. The Times then espoused the Republican (or Whig) cause. Whether before or after this step, it soon gained a firm hold upon the esteem and confidence of the Williamsburgh people, which it has not only not lost, but increasingly secured. In 1854, at the consolidation, it began to assume its present name, the Brooklyn Times, and is still for this section of the enlarged city what the Eagle is for the other, as aside from its political affiliation it is the paper for every home. Yet another paper was established in 1850 called the Independent Press. There was a Municipal Reform Asso- ciation even in those early days, the very year when New York's al- dermen, with Tweed among them, were placed under arrest. Hence the Press seemed to fill a need, and success was immediate. But it did not last long. From the high plane of independence it descended to partisanship, became a Democratic organ and suspended anima- tion as well as circulation in 1857. A German newspaper must also be credited to Williamsburgh-the Anzeiger, in 1851, which became the Long Island Zeitung in a few months. It also started independent, became Democratie, and died in 1854.
Williamsburgh was never known as the city of churches, but it had ecclesiastical features of some interest, which deserve to be noticed. It has already been stated that the Methodists were the first to organ- ize a society, in 1807. Their building, erected in 1808, stood on North Second Street, between Fourth (Bedford Avenue) and Fifth (Driggs Avenue ) streets. This primitive house of worship, plain and in keep- ing with their small beginnings, was followed by a more pretentious one of brick on South Second Street, between Fifth and Sixth streets (or Driggs Avenue and Roebling Street ), in 1840. From this mother church all the M. E. churches have gone forth. - The next denomina- tion to occupy ground in Williamsburgh was, as already noted, the Dutch Reformed Church about 1827 or 1828. The first Episcopal Church was St. Mark's, on Fourth Street (Bedford Avenue), corner of South Fifth. It started in 1837 with twelve communicants. In 1839 a small brick chapel was built, the space cleared for it being taken from a farmer's cornfield, where the stalks nodded in silent as- sent around the worshipers within. In 1841 the church itself was completed. A year later the Presbyterians organized their first church of the New School. The society was disturbed once or twice by discussions of abolition and union with the Old School. Yet they kept intact, and in 1848 a substantial church was built on South Fifth Street, corner of Sixth (or Roebling) Street. Meantime, the Old School division of the denomination had organized, assembling at first in a public schoolroom in 1844. In 1845 a church building was begun on the corner of South Third and Fifth ( now Driggs Ave- nue) streets. The Rev. E. P. Stevenson became the first pastor in
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1845, to be succeeded by the second, the Rev. John D. Wells, in 1850, who is still in the pastorate, assisted by his son. Under the rather imposing title of the Williamsburgh Bethel Independent Baptist Church, the first congregation of that order was instituted in 1839. In 1842 or 1843, a building was erected on the corner of Fifth ( Driggs Avenue ) and South Fifth streets, and in 1846 the simpler designation of the First Baptist Church of Williamsburgh was assumed. The first Congregational society was formed in 1843. It was partly the result of the agitation of the question of abolition in the New School Presbyterian Church, which indneed four men and three women to ask for their letters of dismissal, and who thus became a nucleus for the new organization. There were enough to join them to make pos- sible the erection of a brick church on South Third Street, corner of Eleventh ( Hooper) Street. A second Congregational Church was the New England Society, organized in 1851. After worshiping for a year or two in a hall, a building was put up on South Ninth Street, about midway between Fifth and Sixth streets (Driggs Avenue and Roebling Street). Its first pastor was the Rev. Thomas K. Beecher, a brother of the famous pastor of Plymouth Church. The Univer- salists of Williamsburgh began their history in 1845. In 1847, a neat, plain church was erected on Fourth Street (Bedford Avenue), cor- ner of South Third Street, which has since been succeeded by one on South Ninth Street, between Bedford and Wythe avenues. The Ro- man Catholics of Williamsburgh, like those of Brooklyn, were at first (since 1838) visited by the clergy of St. Peter's on Barclay Street, New York. In 1841 two Roman Catholic churches were organized-one, for the German-speaking portion of the people, called the Church of the Holy Trinity, located in Montrose Avenue, near Ewen Street. A new building was put up on the same site in 1853, the expense of it being borne entirely by its first pastor, the Rev. JJohn Raffeiner, who remained in office till his death in 1861. The other church, organized the same year (1841) was St. Mary's, as first designated. It is now known as St. Peter and St. Paul's. A man who deserves to take his place among the many notable clergymen Brooklyn has produced, became its first pastor. This was the Rev. Sylvester Malone. In 1844, he began his ministry at St. Mary's, and ere long the handful of com- municants had increased to three thousand. A larger edifice was now imperatively needed, and, in 1848, under the new name of St. Peter and St. Paul, arose the church on Second Street (Wythe Avenue), be- tween South Second and Third streets. Father Malone has remained pastor until this date, other clergy having acted as his assistants. Not long ago he celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of his consecration to the priesthood. His genial presence and benign countenance are wel- comed at gatherings of other communions than his own. His voice is always heard on the side of righteousness and thorough American patriotism, and in an unusual degree he fraternizes with Christians
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