Part 6
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!
[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