USA > New York > New York City > Leslie's history of the greater New York, Volume II > Part 9
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people were wise enough to rebuild their village with houses not so easy a prey to the flames, being now mostly of stone or brick. In 1698 the population of the town had reached the number of two hundred and fifty-nine souls, of whom forty-eight were slaves.
Bushwick, as we saw, did not become a town until but a few years before the English conquest. Its settlement began in the vicinity of the old church, and mainly by Frenchmen. In 1670 we first find men- tion of a section which is now specially interesting as the center of business and activity of the old Williamsburgh section of Brooklyn. In that year David Jochems, of New York, deeded a farm to Teunis Jansen van Pelt, who did not actually occupy the land, or not for many years if at all, for in 1695 Jean Mesurolle (later spelled Meserole) died in possession of it, after occupying it, on the testi- mony of a witness, for twenty years. It is a little strange, however, that this testimony is the only evidence or proof of his possession, so it can not be stated how it passed to Meserole from its previous owner. Now this farm, thus deeded away once or twice, and thus oc- cupied, embraced a territory described in modern terms as bounded by the East River, Broadway and South Sixth Street to Havemeyer Street; thence to North First Street, and back along that to the river. It was a long time before Williamsburgh came into being; meantime the imagination can amuse itself trying to rehabilitate this distant past,-among the clanging bells of multitudinous trolley cars and thundering elevated trains, and thronged ferryhouses, on Broadway; or, while looking up with aching neck at the towering sugar refineries on Kent Avenue; or amid the busy scenes on Grand Street,-when on all this territory lived just one family, that of the estimable French- man, Jean Mesurolle.
To Bushwick, as to other towns, patents were re-issued by Nicolls in his term, and by Dongan in his. That of Dongan was given in 1687, and is an extremely formidable document, and by it were safely con- firmed to the good people " all and singular the houses, messuages, tenements, fencings, buildings, gardens, orchards, trees, woods, un- derwoods, pastures, feedings, commonage of pastures, meadows, marshes, lakes, ponds, creeks, harbours, rivers, rivoletts, runns, brooks, streams, highwayes, easements, mines, minerals, quarryes, fishing. hunting, hawking, and fowles ( Royal mines only excepted)." Sure- ly, if Bushwick contained all these things it was highly necessary they should be carefully guarded and guaranteed for their particular uses. King James II. was very kind in securing them in these posses- sions, some of which (especially mines) remain still to be discovered. Nevertheless the Bushwick people were not at all sorry when James was deposed, and superseded on the throne of England by William III. of Orange. The news of this portentous event was re- ceived with great joy in this town, and made the occasion of a notable celebration. A banquet or entertainment was given at the house of
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one of the citizens, and here Isaac Remisen made a speech, setting forth the disappointments experienced under the English rule, and expressing the expectation that under a Dutch prince the language of the Fatherland would be permitted to prevail again. Another en- thusiastic townsman, Jacob Ryersen, offered as a toast the health and long reign of William and Mary, which was drunk in good honest country cider, with perhaps more genuine good feeling and sincerity than many a one in expensive champagne.
There are one or two items of historical interest which do not speak
THE CORTELYOU HOUSE (1699). FIFTH AVENUE AND THIRD STREET, BROOKLYN.
so well for this town. The expectation that Dutch would again be made the official language for the former New Netherland was of course doomed to disappointment. It may be that William of Orange did not come up to their expectations in other particulars. For in September, 1696, we find a number of Bushwick men, combined with some from Brooklyn, engaged in decidedly riotous and seditious pro- ceedings at Flatbush. They forced an entrance into the Court House, tore down the King's arms, and destroyed them after other despite- ful usage. Once and again citizens of Bushwick were arraigned for seditious language; one by the name of Uriah Hagell being charged
1
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with an attempt at mutiny because he had proposed to two Brooklyn men to join him in a free fight with the militia while parading at Flatlands. It would seem though that the penalties adopted by the town authorities to inspire a terror of doing evil, should have had that effect more constantly. William Traphagen, in whom we recognize the first one to build and occupy a house in Bushwick, had so far for- gotten himself as to call one of the magistrates a false judge. He was sentenced to appear before the court with uncovered head, to beg pardon of God and of the insulted justice, and to pay a fine of thirteen guilders. A little later, John William van Iselsteyn, in a moment of passion, abused with his tongue an honorable magistrate of the town, and then with more deliberate purpose wrote him an insolent letter, which William JJansen Traphagen carried to its destination. Iselsteyn was condenmed to be fastened to a stake, with a bridle in his mouth, a bundle of rods under his arm, and a paper on his breast reading : " Lampoon writer, false accuser, and defamer of its magis- trate." This was followed by banishment. Traphagen, too, was pun- ished by being tied to a stake, and bearing the inscription : " Lamı- poon carrier." The people of Bushwick must have had as inveterate a hatred of militiamen as car conductors and motormen developed since the great strike of a later Brooklyn a few years ago. Hagell's proposed assault, nipped in the bud, yet punished, furnished an ex- ample for imitation to two women of this town, who in 1694 were in- dieted for having beaten and pulled the hair of Captain Praa while at the head of his company on parade.
There was an attempt made by Governor Nicolls to provide the Bushwick people with religious privileges, which was not at all appre- ciated by them. Without knowing, or else disregarding the fact that Bushwick was joined in ecclesiastical fellowship with the other Dutch towns, Nicolls proposed to send them a minister, and at the same time took measures to lay assessments for the payment of his salary. He wrote a very polite letter, breathing great concern for their spir- itual welfare, in October, 1665, in which he broached his plan. An item occurs in the records that on December 27, 1665, a minister sent by the Governor preached at a private house. But no mention of his name is made, nor in what language the services were held. Yet this exercise was kept up for eight years, and a tax of one hundred guild- ers collected from as many as twenty-six persons. It is intimated by some historians that this forced arrangement, which could not possibly benefit people unacquainted with the English language and averse to the Anglican service, was only meant to put a little ready money into the pockets of the Governor's favorites. It was not till the next century that church history really began for Bushwick, as a separate organization.
From that rich source of information, the journal of the two Laba- dist travelers who visited New York and vicinity in 1679, already cited
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in our previous volume ( pages 76 and 77), we gather a number of in- teresting hints as to the condition of things in the Long Island towns after the English rule had been finally established. We learn from them that Coney Island served as a cattle preserve in winter time. Ilorses, oxen, hogs, were turned loose upon it, prevented from stray- ing by the surrounding waters. There was enough for them to eat there. it is stated, and they found a sufficient shelter from the cold among the bushes. As the tourists went about from farmhouse to farmhouse in the various Dutch towns, they were hospitably received, and a royal abundance of eatables and drinkables placed before then. They were served with milk, cider, and tobacco, and alas! with " Kill devil rum." They speak of the fruit. and especially of the peaches, which here, as on Manhattan Is- land, loaded the trees to breaking. Here and there we can single out and identify a farmhouse which they visited. One of these was that occupied by Simon De Hart, on Gowanus Bay, at the foot of Thirty-eighth Street, better known as the Bergen House, and standing till within a few years. We gain a curious insight into the habits of the Indian at this time, and the relations between them and the white people. On the beach near De Hart's house our tour- ists once witnessed a regular Indian debauch; they were " all lust- ily drunk, raving, striking, shouting, jumping, fighting each other, foaming at the mouth." Some of the Indians, however, did not share in these proceedings, and had taken refuge with the women and chil- dren in De Hart's house, which, it seems, the savage rioters did not at- tempt to disturb. At " Nayack " the Labadists visited an Indian Long House, sixty feet in length and fourteen feet wide, occupied by several families, each with its own division and hearth arrangements. This Indian camp was near Mr. Cortelyou's house, where they were most frequently entertained. We read constantly of excursions to and from this honse, and learn how Breuckelen looked, and what the roads were like. It took three or more hours to go from Cortelyou's to the ferry, and vice versa. Once they started at nine in the morning and arrived at the ferry at one in the afternoon; then there was a wait of three hours before they could be carried over. We have an account of the weather in February, 1680, which was as pleasant as May. We are horrified to learn that small-pox prevailed in the towns, yet these men went from house to house, as if no contagion were about. At one place where they stopped, two were dead in the house then, and three sick, and one had died the week before. We get pleasant glimpses of our friend, Jacques Cortelyon, who lived at Nayack, near Denyse's ferry, or Fort Hamilton. He talked Latin and French with equal ease. It troubled our orthodox tourists greatly to find that he was a " Cartesian," that is, a follower of Des Cartes, thus a rationalist, or agnostic, of that day. But it is rather hard on their own orthodoxy and that of the church in general that they were compelled to testify
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in regard to him that while not a Christian by their standard. " never- theless he regulated all things better by these principles (of reason and justice only) than most people in these parts do who bear the name of Christians." It is to be carefully noted that the Cortelyon house, of which an illustration is found on page 67. is not the one made famous by the frequent stays of the Labadists. The former was not built till twenty years after their visit, and is now no more. But the house of Jacques Cortelyou is still standing on the old spot, a small portion of it probably the same as it was in 1679, with additions to it built some time during the last century. It is now used by the officers of the Engineer Corps at Fort Hamilton as an office and store honse.
CHAPTER IV.
APPROACHING THE REVOLUTION.
HIE Assembly which met Lord Lovelace," says Bancroft, " began the contest that was never to cease but with in- dependence." The Assembly of New York met this Royal Governor in April, 1709. It was thus quite early in the century that affairs were beginning to shape toward the Revo- lution. And as the vicinity of New York City furnished half the counties (New York, Westchester, Richmond, Queens, Suffolk, and Kings) whose delegates made up the Assembly, that spirit presaging independence must have been quite prevalently astir in these regions. It has been so fully shown in the preceding volume how that particu- lar Assembly came to take a stand so significant as to deserve the his- torian's observation, that we need not here again go into the details. Two of the counties, however, wherewith we are mostly concerned in the present volume, about this time came near losing that identity which only the latest municipal absorption has been able to affect or destroy. In 1717 a bill was introduced into the Provincial Legislature to combine the counties of Queens and Kings into one, giving the larger territory the name of "St. George's County." It does not seem to have been brought to a vote, and certainly was not carried into effect.
At the beginning of the century. 1703, important changes were made in the town governments. It continually appears, as we read the history of these towns, that the people were accustomed to as- semble frequently, and take up for discussion pretty much every matter of interest or importance belonging to the management of the town. Not only were these democratic gatherings-quite after the model of those of Athens of old .- content with electing their officers: they also undertook, within certain limits, to levy taxes upon them- selves, and to enact laws for their own immediate locality. Prof. John Fiske calls attention to the fact that such town-laws have orig- inated the familiar term " By-laws." " By." he says, " is an Old Norse word meaning town, and it appears in the names of such towns as Derby and Whitby, in the part of England overrun by the Danes in the ninth and tenth centuries." While thus investing themselves with these powers, the towns of New York Province prepared for themselves a perfect host of officers. We have noticed the constable.
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with eight, and later four overseers. But, besides, there were asses- sors and collectors of the taxes, the town-clerk, highway-surveyors. fence-viewers, pound-masters, and overseers of the poor. Now, in 1703, there was added the office of " Supervisor," and he was in- tended to be a sort of Chief Magistrate above all the rest. He was elected to serve one year, and the supervisors of the various towns of a county were to constitute a board to manage the affairs of the county, establishing thus a minor legislative or representative body. " The New York system," observes Professor Fiske, " is of especial in- terest, because it has powerfully influenced the development of local institutions throughout the Northwest." The principle established in 1703 was that only a town could have a supervisor. Settlements that had not yet attained the dignity or importance of a town could not have a supervisor of their own, but they were permitted to join their votes with those of some neighboring town in the election of a supervisor, and thus enjoy his services in their district. But, as we know, all the towns of Kings County were fully organized before this law went into force; the district of Flatbush called New Lots, how- ever, was afterward set apart and erected into a town.
When acts offering nine shillings for killing a wildcat, and five for a fox. were passed by Colonial assemblies, the population of the connty could not have been very formidable. A census of 1738 credits Brooklyn with the highest number -- 721 souls, and makes the total population of the county only 2,348, where now a million abide. A considerable proportion of this small number were slaves. But the slaves of the Dutch farmers were treated with kindness and consid- eration. There were no such outbreaks in the Long Island towns as frightened the citizens of New York in 1712, and again in 1741. It had become the practice of allowing slaves who wished to be trans- ferred to other farms or districts, or who had to be offered for sale in settling estates, to select their own masters, and the last public sale of slaves where these conditions were not observed took place in 1773 at the Wallabout, when four colored people belonging to a deceased widow were offered at a public anetion of her effects. Negroes were considered valuable farm-laborers, and usually living upon the estate of a family from generation to generation, a sense of family-ties and good fellowship grew np between masters and men, and mistresses and women, which furnished many affecting instances of devotion. Yet once in a while we notice in the newspapers of the day advertise- ments of runaways. When it came to that the master was naturally anxious to get his property back, for, according to an item dated 1719, while five cows, five calves, three young bulls, and two heifers were valued at only £20 together, a negro woman and her child were held to be worth just three times that amount.
The historian of Brooklyn labors under a great disadvantage in trying to present an account of the township of Brookland, or Brenck-
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lyn. or Breukelen, as it was variously written, between the years 1700 and 1777 or 1783. The town records, so complete in other towns of the county, are entirely missing for that period; and thereby bangs a tale. On the corner of the present Front and Fulton streets. there stands a fine, tall, iron building, " erected in 1868," as it reads upon its front. With difficulty one can decipher, running along the top. the inscription, " Long Island Deposit Company." It stands en- tirely unoccupied, left stranded in the flow of business away from the Ferry, and up beyond the Bridge entrance and City Hall. This was the precise site of the house of John Rapalje, which was a sub- stantial farmhouse, with a garden behind it reaching quite to the water's edge, a little inside the line of the present Water Street. The farm extended beyond or up to Sands Street, and quite a distance along the Strand toward the Wallabout or present Navy Yard. Now, as the Revolution approached, and men began to form opinions and to take sides, this John Rapalje decided that the mother country was right and the colonies wrong, and he became a stanch Tory. Yet he enjoyed the esteem of his fellow citizens. He had been their repre- sentative in the Provincial Assembly, and in the midst of the agita- tions that later embittered neighbors against each other. it was still said of him that " he had an honest heart, and never wronged or op- pressed a Whig, or other man." It is a little doubtful whether his heart was altogether honest, to judge from one supreme act of wrong which he perpetrated against the whole town. As men's dealings became sharper on the outbreak of actual war, the New York authori- ties brought a bill of attainder against Rapalje, and he was banished to New Jersey, in the earlier part of 1776. After the Battle of Long Island, he returned to his home and property. For many years he had been assistant to Leffert Lefferts, of Bedford, the Town Clerk. When the British occupation of Kings County was secured by their victory in August, 1776, the loyalist. Rapalje, was appointed County Clerk, serving until the evacuation, in 1783. On that occasion he found it convenient to take refuge in England, where he settled in Norwich, and was partially reimbursed for his losses. On the return of the Americans to their own, Leffert Lefferts was requested to turn over the town records to his successor, but the former Town Clerk was compelled to declare under oath that they had been removed from his office by a person unknown to him. He was not quite unknown to Mrs. Lefferts, however. John Rapalje had come one day to the house. and told her he wished to remove the papers to a safe place. Being perfectly familiar with them, he secured the most valuable ones, and rode away with a bag full. These he took to England. Meanwhile, the State had sold his confiscated estate to the brothers Comfort and Joshua Sands. In 1810 a certain George (or William) Weldon, came from England with his wife. a granddaughter of John Rapalje. and these old records were in their possession. They engaged as
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GOVERNOR ROBERT MONCKTON. (Commanding the Army on Staten Island during the French and Indian War.)
counsel D. B. Ogden and Aaron Burr, and inquired if they could regain their grandsire's property. The lawyers advised them that the effort would be in vain. They then offered to sell the records to the town of Brooklyn for $10,000. The town did not take up with
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the offer. But what was worse, showing how stupidly indifferent the authorities of Brooklyn were, they did not take the steps that were perfectly within their reach, of compelling the return of these records without a cent of ransom. Back they went to England, and, since they had been proved valueless in regaining for the family the con- fiscated property in Brooklyn, it may well be supposed that no great care was taken of them afterward, and it is more than doubtful if they are still in existence.
A few items of interest have been gleaned from those papers which the " honest-hearted " Tory left behind him. In 1706 a census re- vealed that Brooklyn contained sixty-four freeholders. The real and personal estate in the town was placed at £3,112 in the same year, the tax on this being £41. In 1704 the town carefully laid out the road which man and nature together had already long made and utilized, from the Ferry to Breuckelen hamlet. It curved up the hill toward the left, and on top of the hill toward the right, as Fulton Street does now, and then by another turn swept past the site of the present City Hall till it ran up against " the ugly little church in the middle of the road." In the year 1745, and again in 1752, while the frequent pest of the small-pox was ravaging New York City, the Provincial Assembly held its sessions in Brooklyn. The house is de- scribed as one built of Holland bricks, standing between High and Nassau streets, on Fulton. It later was again distinguished as the headquarters of General Putnam during the Battle of Long Island.
Our information as to church matters is not so meager, as Mr. Rapalje did not lay his hands upon the church records. In 1766, a hundred years after the first building was reared, a second was put npon the same desirable spot, the middle of the road, compelling people to stumble upon the church if they should have failed to see it otherwise. This church remained here until 1810. It was more rect- angular in shape, length exceeding breadth in good proportion, while a hip-roof gave more grace to the general appearance. At the southern extremity of the ridge rose a small belfry, "stuck on," of course, and not " growing " out of the architecture of the rest of the building. The front faced southward. There was felt in the church of Brooklyn, as elsewhere in the old Dutch settlements of New York Province, the baneful influence of the controversy between the party that wished to establish the Reformed denomination npon a separate American basis, and those who, for more than a hundred years after the English conquest. still insisted that the Dutch churches must be dependent upon, and subordinate to, the ecclesiastical authorities of Holland. Here, as elsewhere too, the abstract question took concrete form in the opposing factions calling rival ministers. In the Long Island towns Domines Freeman and Antonides were thus unhappily pitted against each other, of which more anon. As a result of these troubles, the Episcopal Church in New York was replenished by some
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of the best Dutch families, as the names of her Bishops, ever since the Revolution, abundantly show. It was doubtless this which stim- ulated Trinity Church to begin an organization under its auspices in Brooklyn in 1774, although even before this, in 1766, an Episcopal society is said to have existed there.
There was a proposition laid before the Governor and Council, in January, 1709, to add another ferry, so as to facilitate intercourse be- tween the two islands of Long and Manhattan. Cornelius Sebring. one of the Red Hook settlers, wished to establish a ferry between that section of Brookland and a point nearer the heart of New York than the other ferry touched. But the city corporation would have none of it, and the Council heeded its remonstrances. It was not till 1774 that the old ferry was supplemented by another, and that only for a short time. This second enterprise plied between the foot of the present Joralemon Street and Coenties Slip, and it was called St. George's Ferry. In 1776 it had already ceased to exist, its buildings burned to the ground, perhaps as a war measure. In 1723, and again in 1763, a curious division in the lease of the ferry was made, one party renting the east, or Long Island side, and another the west, or New York, side, and for the east side three times as much rental was paid. In 1721 the old road laid out in 1704 was the cause of some counter accusations and litigations between neighbors near the Ferry. The brick tavern and John Rapalje's house were both said to encroach upon it. As a remedy for these disputes the Council of the Province passed a law, defining the exact measurements of the " common road, or King's highway," between "Breuckland " and the Ferry. This was to remain a road " forever." But there was some apprehension that the increase of traffic might cause a congestion of vehicles near the ferry-landing. Such has certainly arrived in later years, and even now, with the drift of business away toward the entrance of the Bridge, the collection of cars at the ferryhouse is confusing enough, and not without peril to life and limb. To provide against a " jam " at the landing, the road near it might be widened, after a jury had decided on the value of the property to be purchased for that purpose. The town never got so far as that, however, and other ferries relieved the strain upon this. Besides the ferryman and John Rapalje, other people began to find it convenient to put up dwelling houses and reside in the vicinity of this only means of transportation to the cap- ital of the colony. On a map of 1766-7, both sides of the road from Sands Street down have rows of houses pretty close together. Shops were to be found here, one, Edward Joyce's, advertising for sale a balsam which was a prime remedy for coughs and colds, and acting with equal potency upon ulcers and wounds. The monotony of life was diversified here also in 1768, by a robbery committed at the house of the Widow Rapalje, who must have been John's mother. A neighbor's negro, Mr. Garret Middagh's-a name not yet forgotten
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