The civil, political, professional and ecclesiastical history, and commercial and industrial record of the county of Kings and the city of Brooklyn, N. Y., from 1683 to 1884 Volume I, Part 5

Author: Stiles, Henry Reed, 1832-1909, ed. cn; Brockett, L. P. (Linus Pierpont), 1820-1893; Proctor, L. B. (Lucien Brock), 1830-1900. 1n
Publication date: 1884
Publisher: New York : W. W. Munsell & Co.
Number of Pages: 1114

USA > New York > Kings County > Brooklyn > The civil, political, professional and ecclesiastical history, and commercial and industrial record of the county of Kings and the city of Brooklyn, N. Y., from 1683 to 1884 Volume I > Part 5

Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).

The lodges or wigwams of the Long Island Indians were fifteen or twenty feet wide, having a frame of two rows of poles bent together and covered with rushes, except along the ridge, where an opening was left for smoke to cscape. This frame of poles was interlaced with the bark of trees, and continued to a length of 180 fect or more, as the families conjointly occupying the wigwam might require. Fires were built along the floor, each family having its own for cooking and for comfort in cold weather. The principal household

utensils were earthen pots and gourds for holding water.

The original fur and feather clothing of these savages gave place to cloth after the advent of Europeans. At first a blanket about the shoulders and a cloth hanging from a belt about the waist composed their costume, but they afterwards imitated the dress of the whites. All were fond of decoration. In carly deeds from them there is a. peculiar reservation of "the trees in what eagles do build their nests," doubtless in order to secure to them the feathers of the royal bird, which were among their valued adornments.

Their canoes were of different sizes, from the light shallop to those of sixty feet in length. They were wrought out of logs with stone axes, with the help of fire. Their pottery, of which specimens are found in the shell heaps, is of clay, mixed with water, hollowed out by the hand and baked. Most of the specimens are. very inferior. Private collections abound in arrow- leads, stone axes, and the pestles and mortars which served them for mills. The Long Island Historical So- ciety has a collection of Indian relics, in which the only metallic instrument is an ax of native copper, unearthed a few years ago at Rockaway, together with a few stone axes and a quantity of spear heads, apparently buried for preservation.

Long Island was the great source of the supply of wampum or scwant-the Indian shell money, as well as the beads which they wore as ornaments or fastened to their clothing. Along the shores of the island immense deposits of shells once existed (some of which yet re- main), from which the blue portion forming the eye was carefully removed for making blue beads ; these were worth three times as much as the white, which were made from the inner pillars of the conch shell or peri- winkle.

Long Island will always be a monumental point in history as the place to which Hudson and his mariners first came as the key to open a world in commerce and civilization, to which the discoveries of Columbus were but the vestibule. The earliest account of the Indians of the island is that given by Hudson in the narrative of his voyage in 1609. On the 4th of September of that year he came to anchor in Gravesend Bay. He says the Canarsie Indians came on board his vessel without any apprehension and seemed very glad of his coming. They brought with them green tobacco and exchanged it for knives and beads. They were clad in deer skins, well dressed, and were " very civil." On a subsequent visit some of them were dressed in "mantles of feathers " and some in "skins of diver sorts of good furs." Hudson states that "they had yellow copper and red copper to- bacco pipes, and ornaments of copper about their necks;" also that they had currants and "great store of maize or Indian corn, whereof they made good bread." They also brought him hemp. Some of his men landed where is now the town of Gravesend and met many men, wo-

WARS OF THE ISLAND INDIANS-THEIR SACHEMS.

men and children, who gave them tobacco. They described the country to Hudson as " full of great tall oaks, and the lands as pleasant with grass and flowers and goodly trees as they had ever seen."

Doubtless the natives presented their very best festal appearance to the great captain of the "big canoe ; " though when, seventy years after (in 1679-80), they were visited by the Labadist agents, Dankers and Sluyter, after contact with the early settlers, they had sadly degenerated ; and the best collection that has been made of their utensils and adornments fails to show any of the yellow copper ornaments.

The Dutch and English found the river Indians and the Long Island tribes greatly reduced by their conflicts with the more warlike Iroquois or Five Nations, who had laid them under tribute. The powerful Pequots of Connecticut did the same before their own extermina- tion. After the coming of the Dutch, under a promise of protection by them, the Canarsies neglected to pay their tribute to the Mohawks, representing the Five Na- tions, and in 1655 the latter made a descent on Staten Island, where they killed 67 of the natives, and going thence to Gravesend, Canarsie and other places made a thorough butchery. A bare remnant of the Canarsies escaped to Beeren Island, and Mrs. Abraham Remsen left the statement that she made a shroud for the last individual of them. The consistory of the Dutch church at Albany, thereafter, for many years acted as agent for the Indians down the Hudson in the payment of their tribute to the conquerors.

The settlers at the east end of the island found Wyandanch, the grand sachem, at war with Ninigret, the sachem of the Narragansetts of Rhode Island. There had been retaliatory massacres on both sides. Ninigret struck the finishing blow on the occasion of the marriage of a daughter of Wyandanch to a young chieftain of his tribe, at Fort Pond, on Montauk. Knowing that all precaution would be overlooked in the revelry of the festive occasion, Ninigret came down in force upon his unprepared enemy ; slaughtered half the tribe, including the bridegroom, and bore away the bride as his captive to the mainland. This blow broke the power and the spirit of Wyandanch, who then, by a cession of Montauk, came under the government and protection of Easthampton.

Hereby hangs a romance which can not be done away with by any captious objectors, like those who have sought to resolve the story of Pocohontas into a myth. It is secured by deed. On a square bit of paper, written plainly in the old English character, framed and placed in the noble building of the Long Island Historical Society, is a conveyance to Lion Gardiner, then lord of the Isle of Wight or Gardiner's Island, of the great part of Smithtown, as a consideration for his services in regaining from Ninigret the captive daughter of Wyandanch ; the last named signed the deed, as also did his son Wyancombone, and the latter's wife.

Thompson ascribes the war between the Montauks and the Narragansetts to the refusal of the Montauk monarch to join in the plot for exterminating the Europeans. Roger Williams traced the war to the pride of the contending sachems. The Long Island chief, he said, was "proud and foolish ;" Ninigret, " proud and fierce."

Lion Gardiner, in his notes on Easthampton, says the Block Island Indians, acting as allies of the Narra- gansetts, attacked the Montauks during King Philip's war and punished them severcly. The engagement took place on Block Island, whither the Montauks went in their canoes, and the latter on landing fell into an ambuscade. He says : "The Montauk Indians werc nearly all killed ; a few were protected by the English and brought away ; the sachem was taken and carried to Narragansett. He was made to walk on a large flat rock that was heated by building fires on it, and walked several times over it, singing his death song ; but his feet being burned to the bones he fell, and they finished the tragical scene as usual for savages."

The Long Island Indians joined the neighboring mainland tribes in the hostilities between them and the Dutch, which grew out of the murder of an Indian at New York in 1641. In 1643 some Dutch farmers on the island ventured to seize and carry off two wagon loads of corn belonging to the Indians ; the owners attempting to defend their property, two of them were killed.

The Long Island and Hudson River Indians burning to avenge such outrages, more than two thousand of them rose in open war and made the greatest possible destruction of the property and lives of the settlers. A transient peace was patched up, the Canarsie chief Penhawitz being one of an embassy to New Amsterdam for that purpose. In a few months war broke out again, this time, it is said, on account of Governor Kieft's embezzling the presents for the natives by which the treaty should have been ratified. The savages, crossing to the island from Westchester county, de- stroyed the settlement of Mespat, now Newtown ; also the first house built in Brooklyn, that of William Adriance Bennett, near Gowanus. They then fell upon the settlement of Lady Moody at Gravesend, but were beaten off by a company of forty men, who had been recruited and disciplined by Nicholas Stillwell, and who were concealed in Lady Moody's log house. From the neighboring villages more than a hundred families flocked to New Amsterdam for protection. From these was raised a company of fifty men, who, under the famous John Underhill, participated in the massacre of over five hundred of the Indians in March, 1644, at Strickland's Plain, on Horse Neck, near Greenwich, Conn. As one of the results of this decisive blow, several of the Long Island chiefs went to New Amster- dam and made a treaty of peace.

In 1655 Hendrick Van Dyke, the late " schout fiscal "

GENERAL HISTORY OF LONG ISLAND.

of New Amsterdam, shot and killed a squaw who was stealing peaches from his garden. He was soon killed by the Indians in revenge. At the same time they per- petrated terrible massacres on Staten Island and in New Jersey, and spread terror on Long Island, though doing no damage there. Governor Stuyvesant ordered all persons living in secluded places to gather and "form villages after the fashion of our neighbors of New England," but little attention was paid to his command.

On the division of the island in 1650 between the English and the Dutch, the English taking the eastern, and the Dutch the western part, the jurisdiction of Grand Sachem Wyandanch was nominally divided, Tackapousha being elected sachem of the chieftaincies in possession of the Dutch, namely, those of the Marsapequas, Merricks, Canarsies, Secatogues, Rock- aways and Matinecocks. In the winter of 1658 the smallpox destroyed more than half the Montauks ; while Wyandanch lost his life by poison. The remain- der of the tribe, to escape the fatal malady and the danger of invasion in their weakened state, fled in a body to their white neighbors, who entertained them for a considerable period.

Wyancombone succeeded his father in the sachem- ship, and, being a minor, divided the government with his mother, who was styled the squaw sachem. Lion Gardiner and his son David acted as guardians to the young chief by request of his father. At Fort Pond- called by the Indians Konkhongank-are the remains of the burial ground of the chieftancy, and here once stood the citadel of the monarch Wyandanch.

From the numerous array of tribes mentioned on a preceding page it is evident that the island was in the earlier periods of its history thickly settled by the Indians, who found support and delight in its ample resources of hunting, fishing and fowling ; but their position exposed them to invasion, and their stores of wampum tempted the fierce tribes of the mainland. They were evidently in constant fear of aggression, and at two points-Fort Neck, at Oyster Bay, and Fort Pond, Montauk-forts were built, capable of sheltering five hundred men. Governor Winthrop in 1633, refer- ring to Long Island, which had just been reconnoitred by his bark, the "Blessing," says, doubtless upon mere report : "The Indians there are very treacherous, and have many canoes so great as will carry eighty men."

But the natives soon dwindled in numbers and power upon contact with the whites. The Dutch at the west- ern end of the island, covcting their corn lands, soon found means to purchase and appropriate them ; while at the east end the Narragansetts drove the tribes into the arms of the English. All over the island their lands were bought at a nominal price from the too easy owners.

Their inordinate fondness for "fire-water" had a large share in their ruin. Rev. Azariah Horton was a

missionary to the Long Island Indians in 1741-44. He states that in 1741 there were at the east end two small towns of them, and lesser companies settled at a few miles distance from each other through the island. Up to the close of 1743 he had baptized 35 adults and 44 children. He took pains to teach them to read, and some of them made considerable progress ; but, not- withstanding all this, Mr. Horton in 1744 complained of a great defection by a relapse into their darling vice of drunkenness, to which Indians are everywhere so greatly addicted that no human power can prevent it.

In 1761 the Indians had so diminished on Long Island as in some places to have entirely disappeared ; and the once powerful Montauks could muster but 192 souls. This number was reduced by the withdrawal of many who went to Brotherton with Rev. Samson Occum. This celebrated Indian preacher went, about 1755, to Montauk, where he preached and tanght some ten years. He went to England and raised £1,000 for establishing schools among the Indians.

Rev. Paul Cuffee was another Indian preacher on the island. He was buried about a mile west of Canoe Place, where the Indian meeting-house then stood, and a neat marble slab has been erected to his memory by the Missionary Society of New York, which employed him. The writer has conversed with persons who gave testimony to his piety and the fervor of his eloquence.

The Indian kings at Montauk have, for a century and more, borne the name of Pharoah or Pharo. This was doubtless conferred upon them by the first missionaries, who are also responsible for Solomons, Tituses and other Christian and classic names. A squaw who died recently at Easthampton, at a very advanced age, was named Hannah Hannibal. One of the Montauk Pha- roahs died about three years ago and his brother suc- ceeded him. He bore the traits of pure blood in the sallow complexion and long straight hair of his race. With the advance of settlements on the island the Montauks have faded away, till but a remnant of scarcely a dozen pure bloods remains on the reserved "Indian fields " on the promontory of Montauk. Sub- ject to their reservations the whole promontory was recently sold in partition sale of the property to Arthur WV. Benson, of Brooklyn, for $151,000.

The influence of their friends at Easthampton kept these Indians from taking part in King Philip's and other wars, and from being violently blotted out like most of their brethren. Elsewhere many of them have succeeded in whaling enterprises, and they have been ingenions in basket making. Some of those remaining around Montank are useful sailors or domestics.

The Shinnecock tribe, much modified by negro inter- marriages, still cluster about Southampton to the number of about 200. They are in general a worthy and industrious people, with a good school and much pride of character. Many will recollect the mourning which went abroad on the loss, in the wreck of the

DISCOVERY AND SETTLEMENT.

" Circassia," of that fine corps of sailors of the Shin- neeock tribe, whose courage and manliness were of a high heroic type.

CHAPTER III.

DISCOVERY AND SETTLEMENT OF LONG ISLAND-111STORY OF COLONIAL TIMES.

T THE names by which Long Island was called by the Indians were various. Among them were Mat- tanwake, Meitowax, Sewanhacky (Island of Shells), Paumanake, etc. By reason of its form the early settlers applied to the island its present name. The Colonial Legislature in 1693 changed it to Nassau, in honor of William of Nassau, Prinee of Orange, and required that all legal instruments should recognize that name. It never acquired more than a partial use, and though the act is unrepealed the name is obsolete.

It has been thought that this island was visited by John de Verazzano, in 1524, and from some of his descriptions it is surmised by some that he entered the harbor of New York, while others insist that his journal gives no foundation for such a belief. The first absolute discovery of Long Island by Europeans was made early in September, 1609, by Henry Hudson, an Englishman in the employ of the Dutch East India Company. He had sailed in the " Half Moon," from Amsterdam, on the 25th of the preceding March, in search of a northwest passage to India. After touch- ing at various points on the coast north he sailed south to the mouth of Chesapeake Bay ; then, passing north, entered Delaware Bay, from which he again sailed northward and entered New York Bay on the 3d of September. During the week that he remained there a boat's crew, engaged in making explorations, landed at Coney Island-the first portion of Long Island pressed by the foot of a white man. On the 6th, John Colman, of a party that was sent up the river to sound and explore, was killed and two others were wounded by a party of twenty-six savages in two canoes. The next day Colman's body was buried on the shore, and the place of his interment was named Colman's Point. By some this is believed to have been Sandy Hook ; by others, Coney Island. After the discovery of the island by Hudson the region was visited by pri- vate adventurers to trade, but in 1614 a decree of the States General forbade this and gave to the East India Company monopoly of this trade. In that year Adrian Block and Hendrick Christiance visited this region under the East India Company and built a fort and some dwellings on the island of Manhattan or Man- hattoes, as it was called by the Indians. Captain Block passed with his vessel through Hell Gate and sailed through the sound, and first discovered the insular con- dition of Long Island. Block Island, which was called

by the Indians Manissees, was named in honor of him. It is said that his vessel was accidentally burned, and that he built another on or near Manhattan in the sum- mer of 1614. If so, it was the first vessel built in the United States.

When English settlements were made in New Eng- land a rivalry at once sprang up between the English and the Dutch, each power striving to strengthen its authority by extending its settlements. Under these circumstances the settlement of the western end of the island by the Dutch commenced. It is not known who was the first actual settler on Long Island. Settlements were made in Flatlands, Kings county, as early as 1636, possibly earlier. It is not probable that any settlement was made at the Wallabout prior to 1636. The name of this bay is corrupted from "Wahle Bocht" or "Waale Boght," which, according to the late Hon. Tennis G. Bergen, means " the Beach or Shore of the Cove ;" Sam- uel Ogden renders it " the Bend of the Inner Harbor." Settlers eame and located as caprice or circumstance seemed to dictate, without any provision for local gov- ernment. At nearly the same time permanent settle- ments were made on the west of the island by the Dutch, and on the east by the English. Both pur- chased their lands from the Indians ; the English di- rectly, and the Dutch through their governors, who first extinguished the Indian title, then parceled out the land to individuals in various ways, or gave permits to pur- chase from the Indians.

On the west end of the island the Dutch in 1636 set- tled Brooklyn, first named Breuckelen after a town of that name in the province of Utrecht, in Holland; Flat- lands, first New Amersfort, after a place of the same name in Holland, also in 1636; Flushing, or in Dutch Vlissingen, also after a place of the same name in Hol- land, 1645; Flatbush, originally Midwout, after Mid- wout in Holland, 1651; New Utrecht in 1657, and Bush- wick, or Woodtown in 1660.

English immigrants were permitted to settle on terri- tory claimed by the Dutch on taking the oath of alle- giance to the Dutch government. Of the English towns under the jurisdiction of the Dutch, Hempstead was set- tled in 1643; Gravesend in 1645; Jamaica, originally Rusdorp, in 1655, and Newtown, first called Middlebury, in 1656. The jurisdiction of Oyster Bay, which was settled in 1653, was not during many years determined, but it finally came under Connecticut.

The Dutch towns appear to have been wholly under the control of the governor, whose will in all matters- general and individual, civil and ecclesiastical-was ab- solute. The English towns under Dutch jurisdiction were allowed to choose their own officers, subject to the approval of the governor, to hold their town meetings, and manage their own matters as nearly like the eastern towns as circumstances would permit.

It was hardly to be expected that, in the exercise of power so nearly absolute, the representatives of their

GENERAL HISTORY OF LONG ISLAND.

High Mightinesses, as the States General was termed, should not at times yield to their caprices, their sympa- thies or antipathies, and do arbitrary and oppressive acts. In the case of Governor Stuyvesant, his tyrannical disregard of the people's rights led to the assembling (1653) of delegates from N. Amsterdam, Brooklyn, Flat- bush, Flatlands, Gravesend, Newtown, Flushing and Hempstead, and the adoption of an address to the gov- ernor and couneil and States General, setting forth their grievances, and asking that they be redressed. To this no reply was given, though a protest was entered on their minutes against the meeting. When, in the same year, a second meeting assembled, the governor ordered them " to disperse and not to assemble again on such business."

A line had, in 1650, been established between the Dutch towns on the west and the English on the eastern end of the island, by four commissioners-two from the Dutch government and two from the united colonies of New England, although the New England colonists had at that time no jurisdiction on the island. This line ran southward across the island from the " westernmost part of Oyster Bay." Notwithstanding this arrange- ment, the Dutch governor continued to claim jurisdic- tion over Oyster Bay.

The people at about this time were sorely troubled by what were known as "land pirates " or outlaws, who had been banished from New England, and against these the Dutch governor failed to afford them protec- tion.

It may here be remarked that the administration of Governor Stuyvesant, from about 1656 to the conquest in 1664, was disgraced by a degree of religious intoler- ance, and especially by persecution of the Quakers, which rivaled, but which did not equal, that of the Puritans of New England, of whom it may truly be said that the principle of religious liberty never dawned on their minds. For this persecution he was rebuked by the authorities in Holland. These persecutions were re- newed about the commencement of the eighteenth cen- tury under the administration of Lord Cornbury, who in religious intolerance was fully equal to Peter Stuy- vesant.

In 1662 a new charter was granted to Connecticut, and this charter was interpreted to include the whole of Long Island. The eastern towns gladly availed them- selves of this interpretation, and in 1663 the English towns under Dutch jurisdiction resolved to withdraw from it and place themselves under that of Con- necticut. Soon afterward two commissioners were appointed by Connecticut to organize the government of that colony in these towns ; but it does not appear from history that they fulfilled their mission, and this unsatisfactory condition of things continued till the con- quest in 1664.

As has been stated, the settlements of the Dutch were limited to the western end of the island, and their

jurisdiction to a comparatively small portion of that end. The eastern end was settled by English immi- grants, under different auspices, and its settlement com- menced a few years later.

In 1620 King James I. of England granted to the Plymouth Company a charter for all the land between the 40th and 48th degrees of north latitude, extending from " sea to sea," which territory was termed New England. In 1636, at the request of King Charles I., the Plymouth Company conveyed by patent to William Alexander, Earl of Stirling, the whole of Long Island, and the adjacent islands. Earl Stirling appointed - James Farret his attorney for the sale of his real estate, and authorized him to select for himself twelve thous- and aeres of the territory. Farret selected Shelter Island and Robbin's Island in Peconic Bay, and in 1641 sold these to Stephen Goodyear, of New Haven. Soon after the death of Earl Stirling and his son in 1640, the heir of the latter, grandson of the earl, for a considera- tion of three hundred pounds, surrendered to the crown the grant from the Plymouth Company, and it was em- bodied in the grant to the Duke of York, April 2d, 1664, which thus described it: " And also all that island or islands commonly called by the several name or names of Meitowacks, or Long Island, situate, lying and being toward the west of Cape Cod and the narrow Higansetts, abutting upon the mainland between the two rivers, there called or known by the several names of Connecticut and Hudson's River."

Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.

The civil, political, professional and ecclesiastical history, and commercial and industrial record of the county of Kings and the city of Brooklyn, N. Y., from 1683 to 1884 Volume I, Part 5

Author: Stiles, Henry Reed, 1832-1909, ed. cn; Brockett, L. P. (Linus Pierpont), 1820-1893; Proctor, L. B. (Lucien Brock), 1830-1900. 1n Publication date: 1884 Publisher: New York : W. W. Munsell & Co. Number of Pages: 1114

Author: Stiles, Henry Reed, 1832-1909, ed. cn; Brockett, L. P. (Linus Pierpont), 1820-1893; Proctor, L. B. (Lucien Brock), 1830-1900. 1n
Publication date: 1884
Publisher: New York : W. W. Munsell & Co.
Number of Pages: 1114