USA > New York > Bronx County > The Bronx and its people; a history, 1609-1927, Volume I > Part 12
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Four years of Van Twiller's administration had not given the West India Company any reason to change the opinion regarding the un- profitableness of New Netherland as a commercial venture; and al- though this was a shorter term than that of any of the other directors
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it was resolved in 1637 to recall him. There appeared to be good cause for adopting this measure for he had not developed very acceptable characteristics as the governor of the province. About a year after Van Twiller's arrival there occurred a quarrel between him and Dominie Bogardus. From all that appears in the conduct of Dominie Bogardus subsequently, he was a person of violent temper and enemies accused him of too great fondness for wine. In this respect Van Twiller was more than his match and it seems to be no injustice to him to conclude that his morality was none of the chastest. So fierce became the enmity between the two men that it was made a basis of complaint against the director in Holland. Other evidence of personal unfitness accumulated as time went on. The pages of De Vries' volume contain many ac- counts of drunken quarrels, originating in orgies which the director either himself promoted or in which at least he took part. It was inevitable that his administration of the colony should be unfavorably affected, much to the interests of the West India Company ; and to make matters still worse, while the company's farms yielded no satisfactory returns, on the other hand those which had come into the possession of Van Twiller and his partners were signally prosperous. These men, evidently profiting by their advantageous situation as the agents of the company, had liberally provided themselves with extensive grants of land in the vicinity of Manhattan Island. The director secured for him- self the island of Pagganck, or Nut Island, since called Governor's from this very circumstance; while several islands in the Hell-gate, now East River, were also added to his estates. This and a great deal more reached the ears of the company and the assembly in Holland. The records of the States-General indicate that the directors sent to Van Twiller the letter of recall some time after accusations had been made against him ; for on September 2, 1637, application was made to confirm the appointment and sign the commission of his successor, William Kieft, who was Director-General from 1638 to 1647.
Earliest Settlers in The Bronx-It was during the administration of Director-General Kieft that Jonas Bronck settled near the mouth of the river that was later to bear his name. In 1639 when we read of the first purchase of land in what was later to be The Bronx Borough the flats of Harlem had already been occupied as bouweries or farms by the Dutch settlers and it seems entirely probable that some of the farmers had already crossed the river and occupied new land "upon the Maine." In the year 1640 a second purchase was made of lands to the eastward of Keskeskeck; and in 1641, Jonas Bronck, whose name was written also as Bronk and Brunk, made a purchase of five hundred acres of land between the Harlem and the Aquahung rivers.
SIGNING OF THE FIRST DEED RECORDED IN NEW YORK CITY, OCTOBER 12, 1654 (REPRODUCED FROM THE HISTORICAL PAINTING BY JOHN WARD DUNSMORE)
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The latter soon lost its Indian name and became known after the proprietor as Bronk's River. Today "The Bronx," a natural derivative from "Bronk's," is the name borne by the borough.
Jonas Bronck was a Dane or Swede, who had taken up his residence in Amsterdam, Holland, where he married Antonia Slagboom. Learning of the fertility of the soil of New Netherland and filled with the spirit of adventure which permeated all classes in that age, he em- barked with his family, his servants, his cattle, and his other property for America and arrived in New Amsterdam in July, 1639. That Bronck had in mind to avail himself of the land newly purchased by the com- pany on the mainland and desired to avail himself of it is indicated in the records. One of the documents bearing on transactions made by him contains a lease made on July 21, 1639, by Jonas Bronck to Peter Andriessen and Lourent Dayts, by which the former agrees to show to the lessees a certain lot,
in which lot aforesaid they may cultivate tobacco and maize, upon the express condition that they shall clear and cultivate every two years a fresh spot for the raising their tobacco and maize, and then the spot which they cultivated before shall return again to Mr. Bronck aforesaid, to dispose of according to pleasure.
The lessees had the use of each field they cleared for three years, but at the end of that time it became once more at the disposal of the proprietor. The lease was made by Secretary Van Tienhoven. It was a case of what we should call today working on shares, by which the owner of the land gradually got it cleared without expense to himself, while the leases were entitled to the usufruct. On August 15 of the same year Bronck also leased land on similar terms to Cornelius Jacob- sen and John Jacobsen. Bronck bought his land from two Indian sachems, Ranaque and Tackamuck. He erected a stone house covered with tiles ; barns, barracks, and a tobacco house ; and, being of a religious bent of mind, named his house "Emmaus." The building was situated not far from the present Harlem River station of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, on Lincoln Avenue and East 132nd Street.
Bronck had barely taken up his residence at Emmaus before the Indian war broke out, which lasted with intervals for three years, during which the Weckquaesgeeks destroyed all the bouweries and houses in that section as well as in others. In the year 1643, Jonas Bronck, who was the first recorded white settler in Westchester County, died; and his estate was administrated by two of his friends in Harlem, Dominie Everardus Bogardus, the bitter opponent of Van Twiller, the husband also of the Annetje Jans, who figures prominently in Manhattan history, and Jochim Petersen Keyser. From the inventory of the estate it would appear that Bronck was, besides being a man of means, also
Bronx-7
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something of a scholar. A silver table service is enumerated, linen napkins, six linen shirts, and a number of books. The books were in the main of a religious or theological character, full of the sort of . polemical discussion dear to the heart of the reader and writer of that age, and were in several languages, so that it may be presumed that the proprietor was something of a linguist. Peter Bronck, the son of Jonas Bronck, afterwards settled near Albany, where his descendants long endured. The widow remarried, her second husband being Arendt Van Corlaer, sheriff of Rensselaerswyck, who sold "Brouncksland" to Jacob Jans Stoll. After passing through various hands the land came into the possession of Samuel Edsall about 1668-1670, who sold it in 1670 to Richard and Lewis Morris, merchants of Barbadoes. Captain Richard Morris was already located in New York and bought the land and took possession of it in behalf of his brother, Colonel Lewis Morris, as well as for himself. The bounds of "Brounckland" are hard to de- termine. The northern line probably did not extend beyond 150th Street. To the east the land extended to Bungay Creek; and in the southern direction, to the Harlem River and Bronx Kills. The site of Jonas Bronck's house, "Emmaus," became that of Colonel Lewis Morris, and later of the manor house.
The next settler within the borough was Mrs. Anne Hutchinson, who had gone from England to Boston in 1634. In Boston her peculiar religious notions and outspoken criticisms rendered her obnoxious to the theocratic authorities of that colony, so that she was banished from it shortly after Roger Williams had suffered a like fate at Salem. She went to Williams' new settlement at Rhode Island and founded Portsmouth and Newport; but not finding Rhode Island to her liking, she again migrated with her husband, family, and belongings to the Dutch colony of New Netherland, and settled in 1643, in what is known as Pelham's Neck. The Dutch called the Neck after her, Annes Hoeck, or Ann's Neck; the stream near which her house stood was called Hutchinson's River, a name that it has continued to bear. In the Indian war which broke out again after the signing of the treaty at Bronck's house, the savages made a descent upon her farm and wiped it out of existence, at the same time killing her and all her family and servants, except a granddaughter, who was carried into captivity, but who was afterwards restored, her two years captivity among the savages having converted her into a savage also, and she had no desire to leave the friends she had made among them.
In September, 1642, John Throckmorton, or Throgmorton, with thirty- five families, applied to the Dutch authorities for permission to occupy the Vriedelandt, or "land of peace," as it was called by the Dutch, on
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the shore of the Sound. This permission having been granted, in October, 1642, the colonists settled on the long neck lying south of Eastchester Bay, which, after the leader of the colonists, was called Throgmorton's Neck, later contracted into Throgg's Neck, and some- times known as Frog's Neck. Director-General Kieft gave them a patent, or ground brief, for the land in July, 1643. The colony was composed of Quakers and other malcontents from the New England colonies, who found the religious intolerance of these colonies unbear- able, and as a result, sought freedom among the Dutch. Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, was a personal friend of Throckmorton; and it is known he was in New Amsterdam in the winter of 1642-1643, sailing from New Amsterdam for Europe, whence he returned later with the famous charter for his colonies in Rhode Island. It is more than likely that he visited Throgg's Neck, as he was deeply interested in the success of his friend, Throckmorton, and his colony in the Vriedelandt. The colony thrived; but the Indian raiders who had destroyed the Hutchinson family attacked the Vriedelandt colony and destroyed it also. Eighteen persons were inassacred; but a passing boat fortunately landed at the neck at the time of the attack and the remainder of the settlers escaped in it. Before the war ended the whole section north of the Harlem River, as well as Long Island, became a wilderness, as those who escaped from the tomahawk of the savage left their bouweries and sought safety in the fort at New Amsterdam.
One of Throckmorton's companions at the Vriedelandt colony was Thomas Cornell, a native of Essex in England, who escaped at the time of the massacre. On July 26, 1646, he was granted by the Dutch authorities a patent to the land lying between "Brunk's Hill" and the creek, now called Pugsley's, which enters the mouth of Westchester Creek. The Indian name of the neck was Snakapins; but when Cornell settled on the land it took his name. He erected buildings and cultivated the land until again forced to vacate by Indian aggressions. After his two experiences, Cornell seems to have given up hope of establishing himself in New Netherland and returned to Portsmouth, Rhode Island, where he is recorded as being on a coroner's jury in 1653, and as commissioner of the town in 1654. His daughter, Sarah, who married Thomas Willett, on September 1, 1643, inherited the Neck, and it re- mained with her descendants for over a century and a half.
John Throckmorton did not return to his colony after the catastrophe which had overtaken it, but settled in New Jersey. On April 29, 1652, he petitioned Governor Stuyvesant for permission to dispose of the land; and in the following October he sold it to Augustine Hermans.
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Shortly afterwards, Hermans sold fifty morgens of the land to Thomas Hunt, who, after the English occupation, received from Governor Nicholls a confirmatory grant, or patent, under date of December 4, 1667.
These events serve to mark the social movement that was going on in the small population, fighting for life and wellbeing on the tip of the great continent and warned by no vision of the unparalleled results that were to flow from their modest efforts. The events that took place in the territory that was later to bear the name of The Bronx and which was at that time the most southerly portion of that part of the mainland which was to be called Westchester County, were of course, part of the warp and woof of the larger history that was going forward in New Amsterdam and in New Netherland and indeed in all the new colonies on the northern continent. It is only by the use of our disentangling and abstracting faculty that we are able to separate the one from the other. We can only understand the history of The Bronx, by understanding also the history of New Netherland and New York. That is why in telling the one we have also to tell the other since they are notes in the same chord of harmony. The Bronx in its beginning was a mere expansion of New Amsterdam, like Harlem, and from that beginning to the present its story has been part of the story of New York.
Van Der Donck as Patroon-The four most prominent family names in the earliest history of The Bronx were these of Bronck, Hutchinson, Throgmorton and Van Der Donck. The first three names have been already referred to. The fourth name comes into notice as a result of the establishment of the system of patroons by the West India Company. The attractions held out by the company found a consider- able number of takers, over six hundred patents being granted during the Dutch period. Jonkheer Adrien Van Der Donck first came to New Netherland as sheriff to Kiliaen Van Rensselaer, the diamond polisher and director of the West India Company, who was the greatest of the patroons. His arrival took place in 1641. He was a native of Breda, a graduate of the University of Leyden, and a lawyer by profes- sion, the first to settle in New Netherland. He served for five years with Van Rensselaer, with whom he had many differences, and who accused him of dishonorable transactions. On October 22, 1645, Van Der Donck married Mary, the daughter of the Rev. Francis Doughty of Long Island, and soon afterwards, disgusted over his ex- perience with Van Rensselaer, he withdrew from Beverwyck and settled in New Amsterdam. Van Der Donck desired to become a patroon himself; and being a man of education, as well as of wealth, he had little trouble in coming to terms with the West India Company.
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This was made the more easy from the fact that the company was under obligations to him for services rendered, as well as for money loaned. He was obligated, however, to obtain deeds from the Indians for any lands taken from them, which had not already been purchased by the company.
The area of the tract selected by Van Der Donck extended north about eight miles from the mouth of Spuyten Duyvil Creek along the east bank of the Hudson, thence in an easterly direction to the Bronx River, which was the eastern boundary. The southern boundary ran from the eastern entrance of Spuyten Duyvil Creek east to the Bronx River ; the southern boundary was Spuyten Duyvil Creek. The boundaries were about the same as those of the township of Yonkers as formed by the Legislature of 1788. The tract was called "Nepper- haem" in the deed; but was known popularly as "Colen Donck," that is Donck's colony, and sometimes as "De Jonkheer's," which latter by natural corruption became Yonkers, the"J" in Dutch being pronounced "Y." Van Der Donck would appear to have been attracted to the section by the fertility of the soil, its nearness to the fort at New Amsterdam and by the fact that there was a good running stream, the Nepperhan, which could be easily dammed so as to furnish power for the mills to be erected along its banks. From these mills the stream was called "De Zaag Kill" or "Saw Creek," or, as known in Yonkers later, the "Sawmill" River. The dams remained until 1892 when they were removed for sanitary reasons.
Considerable power and authority were given to the patroons and in some of them this delegated responsibility endowed them with an overwhelming sense and made them imagine themselves equal in status with the West India Company itself and independent of it. As a result there arose constant disputes between them and the governor. The governor usually did what he could to curtail the authority of the patroons and belittle their sense of their own importance and they on the other hand were apt to assume the attitude of defying his authority, and to complain that he was interfering in their property and business affairs. In these disputes the patroons were able to exert considerable pressure. Thus they were able to influence even the arbitrary-minded Director-General Stuyvesant who, after a protracted struggle with them and other prominent men, ultimately yielded their point as a result of which the Council of Nine was formed of which Van Der Donck was a member. Van Der Donck returned to Holland as the agent of the men opposed to the governor ; and the fact that he had been imprisoned by Stuyvesant for contumacious conduct gave additional weight to his feeling against the governor. It would appear that the friends of
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Stuyvesant in Holland were too strong for Van Der Donck and he became an object of suspicion to the authorities, who kept him under surveillance. Upon his attempting to return to the colony he was stopped, even after his family and property were aboard the vessel. His detention lasted until 1653. He wrote a history of New Netherland, but the part relating to the government was suppressed. In 1652 the University of Leyden conferred upon him the degree of "Doctor of Civil and Canon Law"; and the same year he received his patent for his patroonship from the States-General itself. The grant had been made in 1646. The delay of six years may have been caused either by his strenuous remonstrances against the governor, by which Van Der Donck became persona non grata, or by some difficulty in obtaining deeds from the Weckquaesgeeks and Manhattans, who had several villages on his tract.
Van Der Donck came back to New Amsterdam in 1653. He had sought permission from the company to practice his profession as a lawyer; but so distrustful were they of his ability to make trouble that they refused him any right to do so. All they would allow him was that he might give his opinion, if asked to do so. He returned to Holland and then came back to New Amsterdam, where he died in 1655. It would seem that he had never lived on his land; though that he purposed doing so would seem to be manifest by his purchase from the Indians of a tract of flat land for the laying out of a garden. The tract, called "Van Der Donck's Planting Ground," lies in the parade ground in Van Cortlandt Park, west of Tippett's Brook and the lake. This was also the site probably selected for his house. In accordance with the provisions of his grant, he established colonists upon his land, and these, in view of the Indian war of Kieft's administration, cultivated friendly relations with the Red Men, who still maintained their villages at Spuyten Duyvil and at the mouth of the Sawmill River. Van Der Donck likewise established a sawmill on the Nepperhan in 1649; but his death frustrated the plans he had drawn up for the develop- ment of his land. As to the family of the patroon we appear to have little that is reliable. His wife, Mary Doughty, may have built upon and cultivated the land and received some income from it. If there were any children their records have disappeared, though it is said there were Van Der Doncks on Long Island, but whether they were direct or collateral descendants is not known. His widow married Hugh O'Neale of Patuxent, Maryland, before the year 1666, and she went to live there in 1671.
We thus see that the names prominently associated with the settle- ment of the area in the region which at the present day bears the name
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of The Bronx had become thus conspicuously associated during the central years of the seventeenth century. Jonas Bronck, Anne Hutchin- son, John Throckmorton, Adrien Van Der Donck-all these names have endured with the southern part of Westchester County and the valley of The Bronx from those years to these. They have become identified with the locality. They have been fused in its history; they have been metamorphosed until the historian alone is able to recognize them in their later guise. But in the day of their bestowal they stood for real personalities, people who were as much founders and pioneers, foster-fathers and foster-mothers in the northern borough and the southern tip of the mainland as Block and Christiaensen and Minuit were Knickerbocker fathers in Manhattan. They are the first actors when the curtain lifts north of the Harlem and will ever remain the links between the modern and the aboriginal period.
CHAPTER IV INTERCOURSE AND CONFLICT WITH THE INDIANS
With the activities of Jonas Bronck, Anne Hutchinson and their con- temporaries on contiguous territory over the Harlem the history of what is now the territorial unit of The Bronx may be said to begin. But in those early days all was not as clear cut as it now appears. There was in reality no Bronx. There was not even a Westchester County. There was hardly an island of Manhattan. There were real delimitations. There were merely small and anxious groups of men and women posed uncertainly on tips of land here and there, near the sea over which they turned wistful glances towards their old European homes, and behind them a vast hinterland concerning which they knew very little, and in which they felt quite sure lurked perils of every kind. The island of Manhattan appeared in that early time a very different region from what it appears today. It was still largely forest land and merely to go from one end of it to the other called for a considerable measure of daring and perseverance. Localities that today appear to approach the southernmost tip of Manhattan appeared in those days to be far in the north country. Mid-Manhattan looked to the inhabitants of the wooden dwellings at what came to be called the Battery an al- most unknown wilderness, as distant as Philadelphia or Providence ap- pears to us today. People living in the valley of The Bronx could never have dreamt of a time when the locality they had made their home would be in common with the Battery merely parts of a great city. The land route to New Amsterdam appeared a formidable undertaking. That is why the early settlers kept close to the sea and the mouths of rivers. At least the water afforded a route, that, though long, was bereft of the infinity of obstacles and the hidden perils that clustered at every turn on land.
It was, as has already been said, during the term of office of Director- General William Kieft that what is now The Bronx began to be set- tled. Kieft arrived in New Amsterdam in March, 1638. It had for some time appeared to the directors of the West India Company that the lack of energy and experience of Director-General Van Twiller and his general incapacity made a change in the executive essential to the in- terests both of the Dutch colony and the company. A man of a differ- ent stamp was selected. There was a good deal that was dubious in the previous record of Kieft, but he had a reputation for energy and de-
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cision and this recommended him as a fit man for rulership of New Netherland.
Kieft's Administration-The sparse population on Manhattan and its contiguous territory at the time had little to show to the new director. Fort Amsterdam was in a dilapidated condition and the guns were for the most part dismantled. The public buildings were moreover in need of repair, and all but one of the windmills was out of order. The com- pany's bouweries were untenanted, and the cattle belonging to them had been scattered and appropriated, perhaps to a great extent by Van Twiller himself, whose farms at least were well stocked. A consider- able portion of the other property of the company also appeared to have been transferred to private hands. It was difficult for the directors of the West India Company in Holland to give very particular attention to the fortunes of the New Netherland colony. In truth some of the directors began to consider it a rather troublesome portion of the terri- tories under their administration, which included at this period a great many other possessions in North and South America and in Africa. While Van Twiller had been occupied in looking after his own inter- ests the public interest had been neglected and the new director soon understood that he had a considerable undertaking on his hands in set- ting things right. The company's employees had been trading in furs on their own account; smuggling was common; guns and ammunition had been furnished to the Indians, the town was in a disorderly state, soldiers were insubordinate and there were rioting and drunkenness and immorality. Against the chief of these irregularities Kieft enacted a number of ordinances. A regular guard or police was established and he gave evident indications that he intended to exercise the authority of his office with a good deal of energy.
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