We have now come to the high and rocky Bear or Beeren Island, which in
New York's early days was the southern boundary on the river of the
domain of the great Patroon, Killian Van Rensselaer. It marks the
limit of two counties on either bank, Greene and Columbia below,
joining Albany and Rensselaer above. Here stood the proud castle of
Rensselaerstein, cannoned and fortified, where the Patroon's agent,
the bold and doughty Nicolas Kroon, compelled all the Dutch sloops
coming up from New Amsterdam to dip their colors in token of his
sovereignty, and pay tribute for the privilege of entering the sacred
domain. We are told that all passing craft yielded homage excepting
two large whales, which in 1647 swam by and went up to the Mohawk,
greatly terrifying the honest Albany burghers. Above the island, the
Normanskill and other streams come down from the Helderbergs, making
the shoals of the "Overslaugh," which the Government has improved by
an extensive dyke system to deepen the river channel up to Albany.
There are long and narrow alluvial islands on these flats, among which
tows of Erie Canal barges thread their careful way; and ahead, the
city of Albany comes into view with its bridges in front, and the
grand new Capitol building elevated high on the hill above the town,
its red-topped pyramidal roofs seen from afar.
We are now at the domain of the great Patroon, the region around
Albany and Troy. When Hudson anchored his ship below the shoals, he
came with five of his sailors up to Albany in a row-boat and examined
the location. The result was that from his report Albany was actually
settled, five years later, in 1614, by the "United Nieu Nederlandts
Company," who built a trading-post, thus making Albany, after
Jamestown in Virginia, the oldest European settlement in the original
thirteen colonies. The post was located on an island just below the
city, near which the Normanskill flowed out through the forest on the
western bank--the Indian Tawasentha, or "place of many dead." This
island was called the "Kasteel," and in the "castle" a garrison of
about a dozen Dutchmen conducted a profitable fur-trade with the
Mohicans. Ultimately a freshet drove them to the mainland and they
built a fort at the mouth of the Normanskill, and in 1623 a stockade
was constructed above, at Albany, named Fort Orange in honor of the
Prince of the Netherlands. In 1629 colonists were sent out from
Holland, and the patroon system established. The Dutch West India
Company made arrangements for extensively colonizing the New
Netherlands, and passed a charter of exemptions and privileges to
encourage patroons (or patrons) to make settlements. Every patroon
establishing a colony was to have there within four years, as
permanent residents, at least fifty persons, over fifteen years of
age, of whom one-fourth were to arrive the first year. A director of
the company, Killian Van Rensselaer, a pearl merchant of Amsterdam,
was granted a patroonship, and got the officials at Fort Orange to buy
extensive tracts from the Indians. He thus, with three others,
acquired a manor extending twenty-four miles along the Hudson, from
Beeren Island up to the Mohawk River, and this manor, which
afterwards became the sole property of his family, was subsequently
enlarged to extend twenty-four miles back from the Hudson in both
directions, and contained over seven hundred thousand acres. The
Patroon was a feudal lord, possessing absolute title to the soil, with
power to administer civil and criminal justice, and enjoying other
rights that reduced his colonists to a condition little better than
serfs. His son Johannes inherited this patroonship from Killian, and
it went by entail through five generations, when the United States
laws barred further succession. The last Patroon, General Stephen Van
Rensselaer, died in 1839, and his son Stephen, the sixth of the line,
still styled by courtesy "the Patroon," died in 1868, aged eighty
years. The original settlement of Fort Orange in the manor of
Rensselaerwyck, as it was called, became a centre of the fur-trade,
and a town quickly grew around the fort, which the English, upon their
occupation in 1664, named Albany.