Chapter V: Introduction: By Albert Shaw (3)

The business revival, however, came at last. For fifty years its locomotive works have been renowned, finding customers even in England. Now, that oldest of powers and newest of merchandise, electricity, has its greatest plant here, from which its products seek the ends of the habitable globe. These, with many other industries, disturb the city’s ancient repose. It no longer comprises a people exclusively of Dutch, English and Scotch ancestry, but embraces a polyglot assemblage. For more than a century Union College, founded in an age less tolerant than our own upon the basis of Christian unity, implied by its name, over which the celebrated Doctor Nott presided for sixty years, and the accomplished Doctor Raymond now presides, has been sending forth year by year its graduates. Among them—as the College justly boasts—is a long list of leaders in Church and in State, in the halls of learning, among the votaries of science, where industrial and professional skill achieves the worthiest triumphs, and where human needs require the wisest methods of helpfulness; and every sign indicates that this long list will continue to lengthen.

If there is any lesson, it is simple. The town was founded in the spirit of liberty and justice; the people cherished and cultivated the spirit so well that the Mohawk Indian for one hundred and twelve years respected and reciprocated. May the spirit long prevail!

NEWBURGH

THE PALATINE PARISH BY QUASSAICK

BY ADELAIDE SKEEL

MR. SECRETARY BOYLE TO LORD LOVELACE

WHITEHALL, 10th Aug’st, 1708.

_My Lord:_—The Queen being graciously pleased to send fifty-two
German Protestants to New York and to settle ’em there at
Her own expenses, Her Majesty as a farther act of Charity
is willing to provide also for the subsistence of Joshua de
Kockerthal their Minister and it is Her Pleasure that you pass
a grant to him of a reasonable Portion of Land for a Glebe not
exceeding five hundred acres with liberty to sell a suitable
proportion thereof for his better Maintenance till he shall be
in a condition to live by the produce of the remainder.

I am, my Lord

Your L’dshp’s Most faithful humble servant

H. BOYLE.

LORD LOVELACE.

A bridge of sighs spans the distance between the coming of Newburgh’s earliest settlers, the German Lutherans from the lower Palatinate on the Rhine, to the later arrival of the English, Scotch, French and Irish. The Lutherans were religious exiles, whose villages had been burnt, whose homes had been destroyed and whose strong Protestant faith alone survived the wreck of their fortunes. Of this poverty-stricken company, nine with their wives and children were sent up Hudson’s River to occupy the present site of Newburgh.

The first intention of Queen Anne of England to send these Germans to Jamaica where white people were needed, was set aside “lest the climate be not agreeable to their constitutions, being so much hotter than that of Germany.” Apropos of the intelligent consideration of these Commissioners of Emigration in 1709, one questions if the half-clad travellers who are described in an old document as “very necessitous,” found the climate of Hudson’s River agreeable to their constitutions in winter-time.

In winter time! Sailing up the river in summer-time past Sleepy Hollow and Spuyten Duyvil, beyond the wide Tappan Zee, through the Gate of the Highlands where the waters narrow and the mountains cross, where the fairies dance on old Cro’s Nest, and Storm King dons and doffs his weather cap, on into Newburgh Bay where the Beacons guard the Fishkill shores, and the Queen City of the Hudson rises in green terraces on the western bank, the tourist idly wonders if these Palatine pilgrims, worn by the ravages of persecution, had eyes to see the beauty of the land they were about to possess. It is possible, notwithstanding the ice-bound waters and snow-covered country, that their homesick hearts may have been warmed by the sight of a river not unlike their Rhine. As yet no Irving, Paulding, Cooper, Drake or Willis had cast the magic witchery of his tales over these scenes, yet a century before, the _Half-Moon_ had passed this way and perhaps the stories Henry Hudson’s crew brought back of red devils dancing in rocky chambers amused the children aboard the sloop of the German Lutheran exiles.

More pertinent in historical research than such imaginings is the contrast between the temper of these voyagers and those others who sailed in the _Mayflower_, and before landing covenanted with one another “to submit only to such government and governors as should be chosen by common consent.” The shores of the Hudson were no less fertile than those of Massachusetts, yet the Palatines showed far less aggressiveness than the Pilgrims, and far less courage to stand alone. The story of these Lutherans here in Newburgh is a story of petitions first to one Right Honorable Lord and then to another,—petitions which, alas! were too often unheeded, although the petitioners sorely in need of help never failed to sign themselves

Your Honours
Most Dutyfull
and most obedient Company
at Quassek Creek and Tanskamir.

In one letter to the Right Honourable Richard Ingoldsby Esq’ʳ, Lieutenant Governor and Commander-in-Chief over Her Majesty’s Provinces in New York, Nova Caesaria and Territories depending thereon in America &c. as also to Her Majesty’s Honourable Council of this Province &c. they plead that “they do not know where to address themselves to receive the remainder of their allowance of provision at 9d per day.”

Again, in their search to find “a Gentleman who might be willing to support said Germans with the Remainder of their allowance the entire summ of which is not exceeding 195 lbs, 3sh,” they but succeed in finding a gentleman whose offer of assistance they considered only as “fine talke and discourse out of his own head”—by which one learns the supplicants were left hungry and cold on their hilly farms, waiting for help which came slowly and for crops which yielded but scantily.

Whoever institutes a comparison between the Palatines and the Pilgrims must remember the Pilgrims came to America, a compact society fortified by friends at home soon to follow, while the Palatines, beggared by the most terrible of religious persecutions, were sent, as individuals, by Queen Anne to her colonies, as to-day dependent children of the State are sent to the far West. They were absolute paupers, yet such was their moral excellence that a writer on Dutch Village Communities on the Hudson River indirectly commends these poor Germans.

“From the banks of the Rhine the germ of free local
institutions borne on the tide of western emigration found
along the Hudson a more fruitful soil than New England afforded
for the growth of those forms of municipal, state and national
government which have made the United States the leading
Republic among nations, and thus in a new and historically
important sense may the Hudson river be called the Rhine of
America.”

The patent granted the Lutherans known as the Palatine Parish by Quassaick contained within its boundaries forty acres for highways and five hundred for a Glebe. The Glebe is bounded by North Street on the north and by South Street on the south. Across its western border ran Liberty Street, then the King’s Highway, although no king save Washington, who refused the title, ever trod its dust. The Glebe was “for the use of the Lutheran minister and his successors forever,” but they really possessed it only about forty years,—thus liberally was “forever” interpreted two centuries ago.

“Here’s a church, and here’s a steeple,
Here’s the minister and all the people,”

says the nursery rhyme. Here the evolution of a parish has for its germ the church and steeple, the minister and all the people being a later development. The germ of this Lutheran parish was the minister, Joshua de Kockerthal,[21] whose missionary labors on both sides of the river cannot be overestimated. After the minister came not the church nor the steeple, but the bell, a gift from no less a lady of quality than Queen Anne herself. It was highly prized by these Lutherans and loaned to a church in New York on condition that “should we be able to build a church at our own expense at any time thereafter then the Lutheran Church of New York shall restore to us the same bell such as it now is or another of equal weight and value.”

The church was built probably in 1730, and the Reverend Michael Christian Knoll was appointed to minister in the parish, a part of his salary to be paid in cheeples of wheat, sustenance certainly more nourishing than the codfish received by the minister on Cape Cod in lieu of pew-rent in gold coin of the realm. The church itself, which was standing in 1846 within the memory of a few of Newburgh’s citizens, was about twenty feet square without floor or chimney. The roof ran up into a point from its four walls, and on the peak a small cupola was placed in which hung Queen Anne’s bell. This bell, evidently not cast in the mould of the one unalterable Confession of Augsburg, but bewitched by its donor with Episcopacy, presently rang out changes and ceased to “call the living, mourn the dead and break the lightning” exclusively in behalf of the German Lutherans.

The English were now buying farms from the discouraged Germans whose complaint that their patent was all upland can hardly be denied by any one who, aided by a rope, climbs Newburgh’s hilly streets to-day. The story, however, that the United States Government located the city’s post-office on a shelf-like site so that shy lovers in search of a billet-doux need not call at the window but may look down the building’s chimney from a street above is probably apocryphal.

The Palatines abandoned Newburgh for a more fertile soil in Pennsylvania and elsewhere about 1747. The newcomers, who were mostly of English and Scotch descent, took their places, so that nothing remains to tell of the early settlers save the streets they laid out and the church in the Old Town burying-ground whose site is now marked by Quassaick Chapter, Daughters of the American Revolution.[22]

According to history, the few remaining Lutherans did not give up their church without a struggle. On a certain bright July Sunday the two congregations met, each with its minister at the head, accompanied by many people from both sides of the river and the Justices of the Peace who carried staves of office. Birgert Meynders, a burly blacksmith and bold defender of the Lutheran faith, fell crushed by the falling door, and then the jubilant English rushed in to hold the fort. It was after this memorable riot that the Reverend Hezekiah Watkins,[23] a most excellent clergyman, preached his first sermon in Newburgh, possibly from a text in the psalter for the day, “Why do the heathen so furiously rage together?”

Legend says some Lutheran boys on a moonless August night stole the bell and buried it in a swamp where, punished for apostasy, it lay for years tongue-tied in the black mud while hoarse frogs croaked their pessimistic comments over it. The defeated Lutherans would doubtless have been pleased could they have foreseen half a century later when all that savored of England, were it book, bell or candle, was out of favor, the Anglicans in their turn ejected, the building used as a schoolhouse, and the rent of the Glebe lands pass entirely from the Church.

The swamp in which the bell was hidden has of late years been transformed into one of Downing Park’s lakes, and from its smooth waters one may hear on summer evenings the ghostly tolling of bells, as bells toll in the buried cities beneath Swiss lakes. The tolling has a martial sound, a call to arms, as if the little bell had forgotten the smaller church squabble in the larger quarrel between King George and his Colonies. Some authorities insist that the bell was dug up, and that it gladly used its long silent tongue in Freedom’s cause as behooved a Liberty Bell. It hung during the present century, old inhabitants tell us, in the cupola of the Newburgh Academy, and was at length sold and melted for a new one by an iconoclastic school Board.

At the breaking out of the war for American Independence there were but a dozen or more houses on the Glebe, and a few to the south. Among these was the stone residence of Colonel Jonathan Hasbrouck which had been built in part by Birgert Meynders. Lieutenant Cadwallader Colden had his home near and there were many among his satellites willing to drink damnation to the Whigs when asked by the ever vigilant Committee of Safety to sign the pledge.

It may be thought strange that Newburgh has been considered of great Revolutionary importance when no battles were fought nearer its vicinity than those of Stony Point and Forts Clinton and Montgomery, but, although the place had an hereditary tendency to toryism, its geographical environment filled it to overflowing with plucky patriots. It is well known that it was the design of the British to get possession of the Hudson, and by cutting off the New England States to weaken the forces of the Continental Army. Appreciating this fact, Washington came up the river in 1776 as far as Constitution Island and, at the suggestion of Putnam, fortified West Point. Newburgh came under the same military direction, so that one leading officer after another made his headquarters in the vicinity.

At Vail’s Gate, four miles south of Newburgh, is the Thomas Ellison house built by John Ellison, the headquarters of Generals Knox, Green and Gates, and of Colonels Biddle and Wadsworth. Here too the pretty Lucy Knox gave a dance at which General Washington tarried so late as to incur the displeasure of his wife. The names of Maria Colden, Gitty Wyncoop, and Sally Jensen, the belles of the ball, are scrawled on a window-pane in the dining-room.

Following Silver Stream down to Moodna Creek, three or four miles south of Newburgh, we find the Williams house, the residence of General Lafayette, in the cellar of which the Dutch loan lies buried past finding, while opposite are the remains of the forge at which were made parts of the obstructions thrown across the river to prevent British ships from sailing up.

Westward at Little Britain, six miles from Newburgh, is Mrs. Fall’s house, the headquarters of George Clinton, and here on the floor is the stain where the spy who swallowed the bullet took the emetic and revealed the proposed treason. The old homestead of the Clinton family was in Little Britain, and hither James Clinton, after the attack on Forts Clinton and Montgomery, returned, his boots filled with blood. One of his great-grandchildren relates that he entered the dining-room where the family were eating breakfast, and requesting his mother and sisters to retire lest they faint from the sight of his wounds, as was the habit of gentlewomen of the last century, told the story of his escape to his father. The statue of his distinguished brother, George,[24] stands in Newburgh’s business centre on the Square which oddly enough bears the name of Colden, the leading family of colonial days. The distinguished Coldens, although not patriots, added a lustre to the town, and the Clintons will not quarrel with their shades.

Mad Anthony Wayne, the Rough Rider of his day, had his headquarters on the Glebe near the present corner of Liberty Street and Broad. Weigand’s tavern, with the whipping-post in front of the door, a rendezvous of soldiers, stood on Liberty Street not far from the Lutheran Church.

Revolutionary interest in Newburgh focuses on the coming of Washington to the Hasbrouck house in March, 1782, although recent research discredits the story pictured on the covers of our copybooks in school days of the disbanding of the whole Continental army on these grounds. In 1779-80 Washington had lived in the Ellison house, no longer standing, in New Windsor, a small village to the south on the river, separated from Newburgh proper by the Quassaick Creek, but after the surrender of Yorktown, he and his family with his staff became the guests of Colonel Jonathan Hasbrouck in the stone house, on the corner of Washington and Liberty Streets. Here Washington wrote his reply to the Nicola letter, which in popular parlance offered him the crown. Here is the chair in which he sat when he took his pen in hand and dipped it in ink to put on paper words which after more than a hundred years glow with the fervor of their author’s single-hearted purpose.

NEWBURGH, May 22d, 1782.

COLONEL LEWIS NICOLA,

SIR:—With a mixture of great surprise and astonishment, I have
read with attention the sentiments you have submitted to my
perusal. Be assured, sir, no occurrence in the course of the
War, has given me more painful sensations than your information
of there being such ideas existing in the army as you have
expressed, and I must view with abhorrence and reprehend with
severity. For the present the communication of them will rest
in my own bosom, unless some further agitation of the matter
shall make a disclosure necessary.

I am much at a loss to conceive what part of my conduct could
have given encouragement to an address, which to me seems big
with the greatest mischiefs that can befall my country. If I am
not deceived in the knowledge of myself, you could not have
found a person to whom your schemes are more disagreeable. At
the same time, in justice to my own feelings, I must add that
no man possesses a more sincere wish to see ample justice done
to the army than I do, and so far as my powers and influence,
in a constitutional way, extend, they shall be employed to
the utmost of my abilities to effect it, should there be any
occasion. Let me conjure you then, if you have any regard for
your country, concern for yourself, or posterity, or respect
for me, to banish these thoughts from your mind, and never
communicate, as from yourself or anyone else, a sentiment of
the like nature. With esteem, I am sir,

Your most obedient servant,

G. WASHINGTON.

Leaving Washington’s Headquarters at Newburgh one turns southward and crosses Quassaick Creek, at one time known as the Vale of Avoca, to hear above the whirr of to-day’s many intersecting railroads the echoes of Indian paddles. It is said the ghosts of Indians still linger here in their canoes waiting to carry away Washington, for near is the site of the Ettrick house whose host treacherously invited the Commander-in-Chief to dinner with intent to kidnap him.

“General, you are my prisoner,” said Mr. Ettrick, pushing aside his wine-glass and rising from the table.

“Pardon me, sir, but you are mine,” was the quiet answer, and instantly the life-guards appeared and poor Ettrick was put in chains, his pretty daughter escaping on account of the timely warning she had given her father’s guest.

BARON STEUBEN’S HEADQUARTERS, WHERE THE “NICOLA LETTER” WAS WRITTEN.]

Standing on the slopes of Snake Hill, to the west of Newburgh, where was the last cantonment of the American Army on the site of the Temple, a building used for Sunday services, for Masonic purposes and as a gathering-place for social entertainment, a site now marked by a monument, one hears again those words spoken by Washington when in March, 1783, the circulation of the Newburgh letters caused unrest among the unpaid troops.

“You see, gentlemen,” he said as he arose to read his address,
putting on his spectacles as he spoke, “that I have not only
grown grey but blind in your service....

“Let me conjure you,” he continued, “by the name of our common
country, as you value your own sacred honor, as you respect the
rights of humanity, as you regard the military and national
character of America, to express your utmost horror and
detestation of the man who wishes under any specious pretense
to overturn the liberties of our country and who wickedly
attempts to open the flood-gates of civil discord....

“By thus determining and thus acting you will pursue the plain
and direct road to the attainment of your wishes ... you will
by the dignity of your conduct afford occasion to posterity to
say when speaking of the glorious example you have exhibited to
mankind, ‘Had this day been wanting, the world had never seen
the last stage of perfection to which human nature is capable
of attaining.’”

Crossing the river by the ferry sloop to Fishkill one finds in this Revolutionary centre of military supplies much of interest. Here were Baron Steuben’s headquarters in the Verplanck house, where the Nicola letter was written and the Society of Cincinnatus in part was formed; here at Swartwoutville the headquarters of Washington; here on the Wicopee, in the James Van Wyck house, the residence of John Jay, and at Brinkerhoff, in the home of Matthew Brinkerhoff, the roof which sheltered Lafayette when he lay ill of a fever. The Dutch Church in Fishkill has been made famous by Cooper’s _Spy_. Trinity Church was a hospital, and on the banks of the Hudson at Presqu’Ile one rests under the oak which shaded Washington when he waited for his letters to be brought to him from Newburgh.

“I cannot tell what you say, green leaves,
I cannot tell what you say;
But I know that in you a spirit doth live
And a message to me this day.”

Is it not a message of courage and patriotism which lives on in the descendants of the Hasbroucks, the Belknaps, the Williamses, the Fowlers, the Deyos, the Townsends, the Carpenters, the Weigands and others whose records emblazon the pages of Newburgh’s history?

In this last century not only material wealth has come to Newburgh, but the richest treasures of the town have been brought hither by its idealists, men to whom has been granted the gift of vision. Among these are numbered preachers, poets, artists, historians, novelists, physicians, lawyers and philanthropists, and on this roll of honor are written the names of the Reverend John Forsythe, N. P. Willis, H. K. Brown, A. J. Downing, S. W. Eager, E. M. Ruttenber, J. T. Headley, E. P. Roe, Carroll Dunham, E. A. Brewster and Charles Downing.

TARRYTOWN-ON-HUDSON

ITS HISTORIC ASSOCIATIONS AND LEGENDARY LORE

BY HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE

Tarrytown-on-the-Hudson is interesting from many points of view. It is beautiful in itself, with a touch of that ripe, old-world beauty which is the rich deposit of a long association of man with nature; a beauty which reveals its depth in the fulness of foliage, the girth of ancient trees, the texture of the grass, and that atmosphere of ancient and familiar use which, although invisible and impalpable, lends a peculiar charm to settled towns and countries. For Tarrytown has a long history—as history is reckoned in this new world—and an ancient date. It wears the air of a locality which was in full life in Colonial times. The old houses are few, but the modern village is embowered in a landscape which has known human companionship and care these two centuries and more. A road may show the latest skill in road-making, but if it was once a highway along which coaches ran in the brave days of the old inns and the ancient whips and hostlers, there is always the suggestion of long use about it. It has been for so many decades a part of the landscape that nature seems to have had a hand in its making. The grass grows down to it and the earth slopes away from it as if these things had always been as they are. No one can walk through Tarrytown along its chief thoroughfare, without recognizing on every hand the signs of the old highway on which coach horns were once heard, and later the bugles rang as redcoats flashed through the trees or marched along the ancient way.

FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY F. AHRENS.]

The village rises from the water’s edge to the summit of the low hill which runs parallel with the eastern shore of the Hudson for many miles; it has one main thoroughfare, bisected by many cross streets of a later date; it is, for the most part, carefully kept, as befits its age, its intelligence, and its wealth; and, looked at from the river, it is almost buried in a wealth of foliage. It has at all times an air of repose, as if it had done long ago with the hard work of settlement and organization, and had earned exemption from the rush and turmoil which characterize new communities. In this country a town which has passed its bicentennial has a right to conduct life with a certain dignity and repose. It is doubtful if Tarrytown ever knew any great bustle or uproar; from the beginning it is probable that its inhabitants did not suffer themselves to be driven into undue energy of mood or habit. A placid temper, a disposition to keep on easy terms with life and neither give nor ask more than becomes a man of a quiet habit of mind, have left their impress on the community. It is a place in which history is preserved rather than made, although when it had occasion to make history, the work was done with picturesque effectiveness.

When Hendrik Hudson broke the quiet waters of the Tappan Zee for the first time, in September, 1609, with the keel of the _Half-Moon_, he saw along the eastern shore of the noble river which was to bear his name an unbroken forest. The region was singularly beautiful, with a stillness which it has not wholly lost; for rivers carrying deep currents always convey an impression of stillness. Mr. Curtis has spoken of the lyrical beauty of the Rhine and the epical beauty of the Hudson; the first passing, with rapid movement, through a long series of striking and romantic localities, the second flowing sedately through a landscape of larger compass, of more massive composition, of a beauty sustained through a hundred and fifty miles of noble scenery. It is, of course, a matter of pure fancy; but there seems to have been some kinship between the men who settled the continent and the localities they chose for their homes. The hardy French adventurers were peculiarly at home along the St. Lawrence and the trails from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi; the stern soil of New England would not have given its rare smile to men of a temper less strenuous than that of the Puritan and Pilgrim; the waterways of the James, the Potomac, and the Chesapeake lent themselves readily to the habits and occupations of English gentlemen in the new world; Florida and Louisiana seemed to find their elect explorers and settlers in the Spanish adventurers and gold-seekers; while the quiet of the Hudson was hardly broken when the Dutch settlers began to till the land north of Manhattan Island and to build their substantial homes. They could be voluble and noisy when occasion required, but they were of a phlegmatic temper and leisurely by habit.

The reports sent abroad by Hudson’s men when they found themselves once more in Holland in the late autumn of 1609, were repeated and passed from town to town among merchants who were as eager for trade as they were stolid in manner. Small ships were soon plying westward, bent upon trade with the well disposed Indians whom Hudson found scattered from Manhattan Island to the place where Albany now stands. The possibilities of profit in the fur trade were quickly discovered by these shrewd merchants; the nucleus of a settlement was made on the island, and rude huts hastily put together were the beginnings of one of the greatest of modern cities. The traders bought furs, tobacco, and corn in exchange for trinkets and rum; they hunted, fished, and lived after the manner of their time and kind, but for the most part on good terms with their Indian neighbors; at long intervals tiny ships from the old world crept into the harbor, and went back again laden with the skins of the beaver, the otter, and the sable. In 1621 the West India Company received a charter from the States-General of Holland, with the monopoly of the American trade, and a grant of the vast territory discovered by Hudson, which was called the New Netherlands. The great trading company, one of a small group of commercial organizations of almost sovereign powers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, drew its profits not only from barter with Indians, but from the sacking of cities on the Spanish Main and the capture of Spanish treasure-ships.

In 1624 families arrived on the island and community life began in New Amsterdam; two years later the first governor of the Colony arrived with a company who brought their wives, children, cattle, and household goods of all kinds with them and, by giving these hostages to fortune, committed themselves irrevocably to the new world and its destinies. Manhattan Island was bought from the Indians for twenty-four dollars, and the name of New Amsterdam reminded the settlers of their blood and their history. It was not, however, until Peter Stuyvesant took up the reins of government with a firm hand and in a somewhat choleric temper that the little community ceased to be a trading-post and became a Dutch colonial town. The first comers were largely penniless; the later comers were men of position and substance. Many races were soon represented in the new town, but the Dutch remained for many years the ruling class. In 1664 the Colony passed into English hands and New Amsterdam became New York.

The territory north of the island early attracted attention, and energetic and far-seeing men set about acquiring title and adding acre to acre until great estates were created. In Westchester County, which then bounded the city of New York on the north, six manors, including the greater part of its territory, were granted; that of Fordham leading the way in 1671. The largest of these manors were Phillipsburgh and Cortlandt, and Tarrytown became the residence of a great landowner who secured manorial rights in 1693. This territorial magnate, a true lord of the manor so far as greatness of estate was concerned, was a man of humble birth, and a carpenter by trade. He came to New Amsterdam in 1647, and being a man of sagacity and foresight, soon found his chance in the opportunities of the new world, became a fur trader, married a rich widow, and in course of time became probably the richest man in the Colony. Vredryk Flypse, or Frederick Philips,[25] knew how to take occasion by the hand when English rule was established in New York. He foresaw the increased value of the lands along the Hudson, and in 1680, by the first of a series of grants, pieced out by various purchases, he became the owner of a noble domain, stretching from Spuyten Duyvil to the old Kill of Kitchawong, or Croton, and from the Hudson to the Bronx.

The Dutch settlers in the new world were less adventurous than their fellows of English and French blood, but they had early established trading-posts as far north on the Hudson as the present site of Albany, and they had crept quietly up the eastern shore of the river, and small farms were beginning to break the long line of forest. The beginnings of Tarrytown probably date back as far as 1645, but of its earliest history no authentic records remain. In 1683, when Frederick Philips began the building of a manor-house on the quiet Pocantico, he found a small community of farmers, living in a quiet, frugal way, and carrying on the business of life with thrift and industry but in a spirit of great tranquillity. The broad waters of Tappan Zee could hardly have caught the reflection of the primitive farm-houses hidden among the trees. These houses were unpretentious in dimension and appearance, but they had a substantial air. There was nothing provisional in the aspect of the scattered settlement; it struck tenacious roots into the soil from the very start.

“In the bosom of one of those spacious coves which indent the
eastern shore of the Hudson,” writes Irving, in his vein of
quiet humor, “at that broad expansion of the river denominated
by the ancient Dutch navigators Tappan Zee, and where they
always prudently shortened sail, and implored the protection of
St. Nicholas when they crossed, there lies a small market-town
or rural port, which by some is called Greensburgh, but which
is more generally and properly known as Tarry Town. This name
was given, we are told, in former days, by the good housewives
of the adjacent country, from the inveterate propensity of
their husbands to linger about the village tavern on market
days.”

This derivation of the name of the delightful town which Irving loved so well, has probably as much authority behind it as many derivations which have come to be unquestioned; but if Irving’s genial humor leaves some sceptics dissatisfied, they may take refuge in an alternative derivation, which traces the modern name to the more credible legend that one Terry was the earliest settler, whose name became fastened upon the little hamlet first as Terry’s town, which afterwards was naturally metamorphosed into Tarrytown. Be this as it may, a spirit of peace seems to have reigned in the region from the beginning, and the sturdy Dutch farmers kept the peace with their Indian neighbors. There are no traditions of midnight alarms in the early story of the community. Indian canoes were seen for many a year on Tappan Zee, and it is said that Indian hands assisted in raising the walls of the quaint and venerable church which still keeps watch over its earliest worshippers in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. These pioneer settlers had few wants, and supplied them with home-made articles or hand-woven fabrics. Manhattan Island was too distant in time to be accessible for daily supplies; shops were still to come; and the peddler, with whose figure and habits Cooper was subsequently to make the whole world acquainted, distributed finery and small wares through the section.

FROM A PHOTOGRAPH.]

Under the royal grant and license which authorized Frederick Philips to acquire certain tracts of land in Westchester County, says an old chronicler, the grantee agreed “to let any one settle on said land free, for certain stipulated years, in order that it should as soon as possible be cultivated and settled.” These terms seem to have been accepted by the few settlers already on the ground, and by others who were attracted by the impulse which the lord of the manor (for such Philips was in influence and authority) gave to local industry. The great estate was not secured in a day; it was consolidated by a series of purchases covering a period of years, and among these purchases was the site of the present village of Tarrytown, which was paid for in rum, cloth, tobacco, and hardware. The great proprietor laid the foundations of permanent community life by building, within a comparatively short time, a mill, a manor-house, and a church. The Pocantico flows into the Hudson just beyond the northern boundary of the Tarrytown of to-day; and on the shores of the quiet bay which puts in at that point, protected by a long and heavily wooded promontory which extends well into the river, Philips chose a sheltered and beautiful site for his home. His own ships brought building materials from Holland and unloaded them on the wharf built on the premises. The architecture of the manor-house was of the Dutch order so familiar along the Hudson; the heavy walls were of stone; the roof was spread on great hand-hewn rafters; the doors were divided into upper and lower sections, and swung on ponderous hinges; from the end of the wide hall, stairs ascended by easy rises to the upper floor. Through openings in the foundation walls on the southwest side small howitzers commanded the approach by land or water. A mill was quite as essential as a house, and the substantial structure which still resists the assaults of time in placid old age, bears witness to the thoroughness with which Philips did whatever fell to his hand. Beside its ancient pond the venerable mill still witnesses to a past which cannot be wholly lost while the little group of buildings remains.

FROM A DRAWING BY EDGAR MAHEW BACON.]

FROM A DRAWING BY W. J. WILSON.]

To complete this interesting group, which Tarrytown ought to preserve with pious care, and at no great distance from the manor-house, stands the old Dutch church, one of the most quaint and best preserved monuments of early history on the continent. He would be a bold man who would venture to state definitely the date at which the building of this ancient edifice was begun; on that point a wide latitude must be permitted and discreet silence preserved. It answers all purposes of intelligent curiosity to be told that the foundations were probably laid as early as 1684, and that the building was completed, probably, not later than 1697. The bell which still hangs in the little steeple and which may be heard on quiet Sunday afternoons in the late summer or early autumn, when services are held in the ancient structure, was cast in 1685, and bears the inscription, “Si Deus pro nobis quis contra nos.” The church was built with characteristic solidity, the walls being more than two feet thick; a great pulpit with a sounding-board projected from the eastern end; the benches on which the congregation sat were without backs; and the doctrine expounded from the sacred desk was of a kindred soundness of fibre. Some concession to human weakness was shown to the lord of the manor, in the comfortable and imposing arrangement of the large pews on the right and left of the minister. The farmers filled the body of the little church, while slaves, redemptioners, and other obscure persons, with the choir, sat in the tiny gallery. In 1697, the Rev. Guiliam Bertholf began a kind of visitorial ministry in the new church, coming three or four times a year to preach and administer the sacraments. He was a native of Sluis, in Holland, emigrated to the new world in 1684, and became a preacher nine years later. His ability and zeal gave him wide influence, and he was instrumental in organizing a number of churches of the Reformed faith and order. From this initial ministry until the present time, although the congregation has moved to a larger and modern edifice, the succession of faithful preachers has never been broken, and the historic pulpit of Tarrytown has never been more thoroughly identified with generous devotion, high character, and unusual gifts of nature and speech than during the last twenty-five years. During the stormy years of the Revolution the church was frequently closed; and at the close of the struggle the trappings which had distinguished the pews of the lord of the manor were torn down, and elders and deacons sitting in the seats once set apart for the local aristocracy emphasized the triumph of the democratic idea in Church and State. Not long afterwards another innovation was made by the substitution of English for Dutch in the services.

FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY F. AHRENS.]

In October, 1897, the two hundredth anniversary of the church was celebrated with services which recalled, with unusual completeness, the varied and instructive history of the old building and of the community.

The modern village lies to the south of the church, which is hidden beneath ancient trees, and is still enveloped in an atmosphere of old-time silence and repose. The Pocantico flows beside it, almost unseen when the midsummer foliage is spread over it; while to the north, climbing a gentle slope and sinking softly down to the brook, is the ancient burying-ground, in which the first interments were made about 1645. The place is singularly peaceful and of a rare and gentle beauty; the gradual slope dotted with ancient graves, protected on the east by wooded heights, overhung with old trees, and commanding on the west glimpses of the broad expanse of the Tappan Zee, and, from its higher levels, the tree-embowered village, the long line of shining water, and the distant front of the Palisades. There is probably no other locality in America, taking into account history, tradition, the old church, the manor-house, and the mill, which so entirely conserves the form and spirit of Dutch civilization in the new world. This group of buildings ranks in historic interest, if not in historic importance, with Faneuil Hall, Independence Hall, the ruined church tower at Jamestown, the old gateway at St. Augustine, and the Spanish cabildo on Jackson Square in New Orleans; and the time will come when pilgrimages will be made to this ancient and beautiful home of some of those ideals and habits of life which have given form and structure to American civilization.

It was the misfortune of Tarrytown to lie in the path of both armies for many dreary months during the Revolution; and no section of the country felt the uncertainty and terrors of war more keenly. When Cooper looked about for an American subject for his second novel, his interest in the history of Westchester County, in the lower part of which he was for a number of years a resident, led him to a fortunate choice, and _The Spy_ remains not only one of the best of American novels of incident, but a vivid report of the suspense and misery of the country between the Highlands of the Hudson, held by the American forces, and the city of New York in the hands of the British. That section was mercilessly harried by friend and foe. The few families which made the little hamlet of Tarrytown, never knew whether the Skinners or the Cowboys would appear next; the only certainty in the situation seems to have been that, sooner or later, whatever was portable and valuable would be carried off. There was much quiet courage in the form of patient endurance in those years when church and school were closed, crops gathered by hands that had not sown, houses burned in the dead of night, and all normal community life at an end. Caught in the centre of the storm of war, Tarrytown not only suffered severely but bore her losses with conspicuous fortitude and courage. In many sudden forays, as well as in the larger movements of the American forces, the men of Tarrytown played their parts with notable pluck and daring.

FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY F. AHRENS.]

The devotion of a majority of the people of the place to the American cause had its reward in the lasting association of the town with the most romantic and tragic episode of the war; and the incorruptible patriotism of three Westchester County men not only averted what might have been a crushing calamity, but immortalized the scene of their resistance to temptation. On the 24th day of September, 1780, Major André, bearing dispatches of a treasonable nature from General Benedict Arnold, then in command of the American forces at West Point, was captured on the highway at a place now marked by a monument, by John Paulding, David Williams, and Isaac Van Wart. These obscure militiamen, soon to become famous, were watching the road, when a horseman appeared riding toward the south. He was promptly challenged, ordered to dismount, and examined as to his business and destination. His answers to the questions put to him by his captors confirmed their suspicion that something of unusual importance was in the air. The determination to search the unfortunate young officer more thoroughly was met with offers of a large sum of money; but the militiamen were not to be bribed, and to their fidelity is due the discovery of the plot to place West Point in British hands. The moral effect of Arnold’s fall was counteracted in large measure by the incorruptibility of André’s captors, and the monument which marks this historic site commemorates the integrity of the American militiamen quite as much as the dramatic episode which ended the careers of Arnold and André.

THE HOME OF WASHINGTON IRVING.]

Tarrytown has had the double good fortune to be the scene of the most striking act of the drama of Arnold’s treason, and to be the custodian of one of the few American legends. In his youth, Washington Irving knew the region intimately. He was given to solitary walks, for he was a dreamer by nature and habit. Wolfert’s Roost was even then an old farm-house, built close to the water’s edge, where the glen broadens to the river. It had colonial and revolutionary associations, and, above all, it had the charm of a situation of singular beauty. Irving seems early to have fallen under the spell of the shaded waterside and the romantic glen. In 1835, after an absence of seventeen years in Europe and an extensive journey through the South and West, which bore fruit in _A Tour on the Prairies_, the recollections and affections of his youth drew him to Sunnyside, now about a mile and a half south of the railway station of Tarrytown, and he became the possessor of a home which will always be associated with our early literary history. The house was enlarged, and began to take on that air of ripe and reposeful beauty which made it an ideal home for a man of letters. Under this roof his later books were written, and here he was sought by the most interesting men of his time.

NOW OCCUPIED BY THE NEW WASHINGTON IRVING HIGH SCHOOL. FROM A DRAWING BY EDGAR MAHEW BACON.]

Irving’s familiarity with the Hudson River and its historical associations had already borne fruit in the _Sketch-Book_ in two original and characteristic legends. Like his illustrious contemporary, Sir Walter Scott, Irving was a born lover of traditions of all sorts; a man with a genius for getting the poetry and romance out of the past. In _The History of New York_, impersonated in Diedrich Knickerbocker, he created a legend; in _Rip Van Winkle_ and _The Legend of Sleepy Hollow_ he gave lasting fame to two stories full of the Dutch spirit. Sleepy Hollow lies to the north and east of Tarrytown, within easy walking distance. It is still secluded and quiet and the stir of modern times has not broken in upon its ancient seclusion.

“A small brook glides through it, with just murmur enough to
lull one to repose; and the occasional whistle of a quail, or
tapping of a woodpecker, is almost the only sound that ever
breaks in upon the uniform tranquillity.... A drowsy, dreamy
influence seems to hang over the land, and to pervade the very
atmosphere. Some say that the place was bewitched by a high
German doctor, during the early days of the settlement; others,
that an old Indian chief, the prophet or wizard of his tribe,
held his pow-wows there before the country was discovered
by Master Hendrick Hudson. Certain it is, the place still
continues under the sway of some witching power, that holds a
spell over the minds of the good people, causing them to walk
in a continual dream.”

Since the days when these words were written the air of Sleepy Hollow has not escaped the general stirring of a more hurried age; but on summer afternoons the meditative visitor still finds the valley a place of silence and peace. The master of the spell which has brought so many pilgrims to Tarrytown sleeps in the ancient graveyard; the home which he loved with a love deepened by years of exile, still stands, somewhat enlarged, but not despoiled of its secluded and ivy-clad loveliness.

Great estates have been formed about Tarrytown and stately homes line the shores of the river, but the place has kept something of its old simplicity and repose. It has never lacked the presence of those to whom its traditions of refined social habit and generous intellectual life have been sacred; and its distinction is still to be found in an atmosphere which is in no sense dependent on its later and larger prosperity.

NEW YORK CITY

THE COSMOPOLITAN CITY

BY JOSEPH B. GILDER

By comparison with London, New York is a city of the second size, lacking some millions of the population of the modern Babylon. Even Paris, though less populous, outranks the American metropolis in many of the elements that go to the making of a great city. But in drawing these comparisons it must be remembered that only three centuries ago, when the French and English capitals had been places of importance for over a thousand years, New York was a wooded island, criss-crossed by innumerable streams, indented by morasses and infested by Indians and wild beasts. European civilization was wrinkled with age long before a permanent roof was erected on the island of Manhattan; and three lives such as that of ex-Mayor Tiemann, who died here in his ninety-fifth year, in the summer of 1899, would have spanned the entire history of the town from the Dutch discovery to the reign of Richard Croker.

The first white man’s habitation in what is now New York was a grave; for the crew of Hudson’s _Half-Moon_, after their fight with the aborigines on the mainland above Spuyten Duyvil Creek, in September, 1609, buried their dead before sailing homeward from their voyage of discovery up the great river named for their commander.

Four temporary dwellings, presumably little better than wigwams, housed Skipper Block and the crew of the _Tiger_ near the lower end of the island, while they rebuilt their burned vessel, during the winter of 1613-14. The site of the present city was bought from the Indians on May 6, 1626, for trinkets worth sixty guilders, or four-and-twenty dollars—less than one tenth of the rate paid a few years since for a single square foot of land. Building was begun at once and pushed with vigor. Fort Amsterdam—a blockhouse partly shielded by palisades—marked the extreme southern limit of the island; and the first bark-roofed cottages were clustered close together under its harmless, necessary guns. A warehouse with stone walls and a thatched roof sprang up as soon as a stronghold had been built; and a horse-mill, with a loft fitted up for the simplest form of religious services.

Fort Amsterdam was a fortress in name only. Scarcely had it been completed when it began to fall into disrepair; and the pigs were forever rooting in its sodded earthworks, and threatening its very foundations. Thus early was it that these four-footed scavengers made their appearance in the history of New York, playing as picturesque, though not as patriotic, a part therein as that of the legendary Roman geese. Not till well forward in the present century did they disappear from the streets and the annals of the city.

Peter Minuit, the first Director of New Netherlands to hold his place for more than a year, and the first to organize a permanent provincial government, sent home hopeful reports, and backed them with shipments of fur and timber; but the expenses of administering the colony ultimately exceeded its earnings, and the West India Company was disappointed of the revenue it had counted upon receiving from the new settlement.

The little village grew but slowly. When it had spread so far northward as the line of what is now Wall Street—which is so far down-town to-day that many a New York woman, native-born, has yet to see it for the first time—a stockade was set up across the island, narrower then than now, to fence off the village from the farms (bouweries) of the more adventurous pioneers, and the forest that bordered them. This defense, completed in 1653, consisted of palisades and posts, twelve feet high, with a sloping breastwork of earth and a ditch on its southern side. In less than two years its height was doubled to keep the Indians from leaping over it.

But neither the Fort with its stone guns, nor this high wooden wall, was ever called upon to withstand a vigorous attack or resist a siege; for whenever the place was seriously threatened, its flag came fluttering down, and its keys were turned over to the enemy. This happened first in August, 1664, when Col. Richard Nicolls appeared in the bay, as deputy of the Duke of York, to whom Charles II. had granted all the territory between the Connecticut River and Delaware Bay, and demanded the Fort’s surrender. The claim of the English was nebulous to the last degree. As Freneau neatly put it,

“The soil they demanded, or threatened their worst,
Insisting that _Cabot had looked at it first_.”

But the flimsiest pretension, if vigorously backed, outvalues the strongest if less sturdily maintained; and Director Stuyvesant found his people unwilling to support him in defying the intruder. So down dropped the Dutch colors and up ran the British.