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!
[Illustration: SEAL OF SCHENECTADY.]
[Illustration]
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.
[Illustration: WASHINGTON’S HEADQUARTERS AT NEWBURGH.]
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.
[Illustration: JOEL T. HEADLEY.]
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.
[Illustration: THE LUTHERAN CHURCH.]
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.”
[Illustration: ANDREW J. DOWNING.]
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?”
[Illustration: HENRY KIRKE BROWN.]
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.
[Illustration: HEADQUARTERS OF MAJOR-GENERAL KNOX AT VAIL’S GATE.]
[Illustration: CLINTON’S HEADQUARTERS AT LITTLE BRITAIN, NEAR NEWBURGH.]
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.
[Illustration: CLINTON STATUE IN COLDEN SQUARE, AT NEWBURGH.]
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.
[Illustration: THE WILLIAMS HOUSE.]
“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.
[Illustration: MONUMENT ON TEMPLE HILL, NEAR NEWBURGH.]
[Illustration: THE VERPLANCK HOUSE.
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.
[Illustration: WASHINGTON’S HEADQUARTERS AT FISHKILL.]
“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?
[Illustration: CHARLES DOWNING.]
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.
[Illustration: SEAL OF NEWBURGH.]
[Illustration]
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.
[Illustration: BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF TARRYTOWN.
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY F. AHRENS.]