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Last time:
To commemorate the 1761 Cambridge Patent, we circled back
four and a half centuries to the Age of Exploration centered
in 1561, then discussed the earliest American colonies.
Chapter IX:
350 Years Ago – 1661, New Netherland
Before visiting the first European culture firmly
established in New York by 1661, let’s back up to a
neighboring society also transplanted from across the seas,
which likewise affected the settlement of Cambridge. As
every schoolchild knows, 1620 was a milestone in the story
of America. Inside a cape hooking into the Atlantic, seeds
were sown for the birth of an Anglo settlement, lending the
name Mayflower, so it seems, to everybody’s family line, as
well as a line of moving vans and the Massachusetts state
flower, the ground laurel. English Separatists were bound
for Virginia but beached a bit north one dreary autumn day,
and only half of the hundred or so Pilgrims made it through
the bitter winter. With spring, though, a compact was
written, friendships were forged with the locals, corn,
cranberries and turkeys filled tummies and legendary thanks
were given to God. By 1623, Plimouth Plantation flourished
while 80 miles up the coast folks from Old Hampshire felled
trees for the British market, and likewise the next year,
1624, in later-named Maine. In 1629 five ships with several
hundred Puritans aboard anchored off what became
Salem-Beverly (including the author’s ancestor, a Richard
Raymond of Essex, a mariner and one of 30 founders of The
First Church of Salem.) By the mid-‘30s, after the Mass Bay
Colony was sanctioned by the Crown, the population center
had shifted into a harbor later called Beantown. Settlements
popped up in Connecticut (‘34) and Rhode Island (‘36) with
fleets flooding harbors, and by 1645 royal cartographers
were inking New England on their charts.
To the west 200 miles, another story emerged. Though
France had beaten the Dutch and Brits into the Owlkill
around 1540 (almost 500 years ago now), it wasn’t Paris, but
Amsterdam and London who’d forge a culture here that
displaced red man. Explorers found a land of untapped
resources and four dramatic seasons, of forested hills and
hollows, crystal clear kills and ponds. A region skirted to
the north by a long, narrow lake descending from Kanata and
on the east a wall of verdant mountains; to the south lay
the watershed of the Hoosick clan of the Mahicans, and along
the western bound a major river ran straight and deep.
Streams were found crawling with furry little critters, so
in 1614 Dutch adventurers tacked 150 miles up Hudson’s River
and built an outpost at today’s Albany, the first lasting
white presence in the region. Goods of iron and glass were
swapped with the Indians for beaver pelts; stacks of furs
became legal tender.
By 1622 Holland chartered New Netherland to the Dutch
West India Company, a venture that claimed a range from the
Fresh River (the upper Connecticut), over the Green
Mountains and into our own valley, then down to the South
River, today’s lower Delaware. Two years later New Amsterdam
was founded as the territory’s capital on Nut (Governor’s)
Island off the lower tip of the largest island of the
Manathans tribe. Other settlements sprang up, at Haarlem,
Bronck’s estate, Breuckelen. The colony was secular,
multicultural and multinational, unlike the faith-based
havens of the English also taking hold in America in the 17th
century. But ongoing bloodshed with the natives drove the
colonists in 1626 to vote a military commander, Pieter
Minuit, as leader of New Amsterdam. He planned to forge the
colony into a “new American society”, but a dream that died
with his death in a Caribbean hurricane in ‘38. Also in
1624, French Walloons, escaping religious persecution in
Belgium, sailed to New Netherland and upriver to establish a
colony near the decade old post, naming it Fort Orange for
Holland’s House of Orange. By ‘29, the Dutch West India
Company set up a larger goods exchange there, and by ‘36 one
Kiliaen Van Rensselaer, a diamond merchant and founding
director of the DWIC, purchased land for himself from the
Mahicans surrounding Fort Orange, which extended a “two
day’s hike” away from and nine miles up and down both sides
of the river. Names from Holland were planted in the region
that live on today, like Tappan Zee and Rotterdam, mingled
with those of the natives like Saraghtage (Saratoga), and
later British imports, from Argyle to Williamstown.
Down-province by 1638 Willem Kieft, a Dutch lawyer,
assumed governorship of the colony, a stormy tenure rife
with conflicts with the Swedes encroaching on the South
River (near present day Philly), not to mention the Indians
around New Amsterdam, the colonists themselves and, finally,
the home country, not a healthy mix for political tenure. So
in ‘47 Pieter Stuyvesant, the original Peg-leg Pete, arrived
with legal authority from the Dutch Republic and the muscle
of a regiment of soldiers aboard four ships. Under his
leadership Manhattan and the colony of New Netherland
prospered through the 1650s. In
‘52 he changed the name of Fort Orange to the village of
Beverwyck, stripping Van Rensselaer’s private authority
(America’s first step toward creeping European socialism?)
Rensselaerwyck lay just
across the river and other Dutch settlements were founded in
the area. Three land grants were awarded by Holland: Hoosic,
Saratoga, and Walloomsac, all later honored by the English.
The story of New Netherland was artfully documented
in 1655 by jurist Adriaen Van der Donck in his
Beschreyvinge van Nieuw-Nederlant, penned in the Old
Dutch cursive (not translated into English until the 19th
century). A Description of New Netherland is
considered an early American literary classic since it’s
replete with raw details of the territory, the 17th
century American wilderness, and the tribes encountered. But
because it was authored by an arch-rival of the English, and
not in their language, for generations it lacked the cachet
of e.g. William Bradford’s Of Plimouth Plantation.
In 1661 all was well on the western front for the
Dutch, but in ’64 they were expelled by the English from New
Amsterdam without a shot fired; Holland was jammed up with
warfare in Europe and couldn’t assist in the settlement’s
defense. Richard Nicholls assumed the first governorship of
the new British Crown Province. The Dutch regained control
of New Amsterdam briefly in 1673, but the following year all
their holdings in America were ceded by treaty to England
bringing the colony under the authority of the Duke of York
and Albany, hence today’s names. Little did the Duke know
that his newly acquired island at the mouth of the Hudson
would one day become “the center of civilization”, renowned
for banking, bagels, baseball, and the bright lights of
Broadway. Up the lazy river in 1686
the newest Provincial Governor, Thomas Dongan, granted a
Royal charter to the City of Albany and assigned Pieter
Schuyler its first mayor. Since then, over 70 have served
the office, 34 of which were of Dutch decent. The fur trade
declined with fashion sense in the early 1800s, but other
area raw materials like lumber and grain amply filled the
coffers of Europe.
Over in New England, meanwhile, unrest had boiled over
between the Indians and the English that would find its way
into the Cambridge District. In 1634-38 the
 Pequot War
erupted between an odd alliance of the Mass Bay/Plymouth
colonists and the Narragansett/Mohegan tribes arrayed
against the Pequots over fur trade access. The latter were
defeated in southern New England and dispersed, some
surviving for a time. In 1675
warfare broke out again, between a confederation of all
the New England Indians against the colonists, called “King
Phillips War”, a derisive name given to the major chief.
The NE Indians found friends in the French to the far north
– “the enemies of my enemies are my friends” – and led
captured whites up the Great Northern War Trail (see photo).
Hundreds of settlers and thousands of Indians
perished, firearms the difference, before a treaty ended the
hostilities. By the 1680s some Pequots had
escaped over the Taconics and were camping in the White
Creek area east of Cambridge, calling their settlement
Pompanuck (corrupted into Pumpkin Hook.) Eventually the
Pequots were completely wiped out as a living, breathing
tribe.
300 Years Ago – 1711, The Great Awakening
As New York Province moved toward the new century,
Albany County was established in 1683 to include the Hoosic,
Owl and Batten kills, the latter known as Ondawa to the
locals. Dutchman Bartholomew Van Hogleboom had earlier
trapped the stream, known to the literate as Bart’s Kill,
then Botskill, and eventually today’s name. The 18th
century saw a new age of social and spiritual maturity
unveiled across English-America, but as the darkest hour
always precedes the dawn, in 1692 over in the Mass Bay
Colony at Salem, religious zeal overtook reason. The Witch
Trials left a trail of horror and shame (gladly for the
author’s line, Richard Raymond had relocated to Saybrook,
Connecticut Colony, by 1660.) After the turn of the
century, in 1704 the New England settlement of Hebron was
established just southeast of Hartford, which in another six
decades would birth our own valley’s Anglo population. In
1707 England, Scotland and Wales formed the United Kingdom,
an event of epic measure for the British, indeed for all of
World History, as Britannia was now set to rule the waves
and Western Civilization for 200 years.
By 1711 the census of the British colonies reached more
than 250,000, and in 1712 Albany County was parsed into
districts. The area north of Schaghticoke and east of
Saratoga appeared on the map for the first time as the
Cambridge District; the precise reason for the name here is
uncertain. Poverty in Europe and opportunity in America
packed ships leaving Portsmouth, Glasgow and Dublin,
including a lass, Sarah McConnell, one of the Cambridge
area’s oldest recorded emigrants. Born in Ireland in 1711,
she married Thomas Green in 1739, and they booked passage
and arrived in the Owlkill, where they raised three sons.
During Europe’s “Age of Enlightenment” (1700-1760),
America realized her own such period, “The Great Awakening”,
as our Founding Fathers were delivered into families of both
wealth and common standing, born to parents or raised by
mentors who ensured their education in the arts and letters.
Ben Franklin was a babe in Boston in 1706, but we know his
mark was made in Philadelphia and Paris as a preeminent
scientist and inventor, printer and postmaster, diplomat and
spy, and the eldest of the framers of our enduring national
experiment. Sam Adams followed in 1722, also in Boston, a
political philosopher and statesman of note. In 1731 George
Washington saw the light of day on February 11 (Old Style
Calendar) in Westmoreland County, VA, and became our first
great wartime general and initial Chief Exec. John Adams,
1735, was born in north Braintree (Quincy), MA. The others
followed in the ‘40s and ‘50s. As our future leaders
matured, political and religious thought evolved during the
decline of Puritan orthodoxy in America; in 1734 the Rev.
Jonathan Edwards delivered his “hellfire and damnation”
sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, in
central Mass, about a hundred miles from Cambridge.
We leave this chapter in 1739 when the Walloomsac
Patent was legitimized by the Crown for Stephen Van
Rensselaer. Dutch and Walloon descendents accepted the
authority of Great Britain but the Indians were divided in
sympathies of acquiescence or resistance to the whites.
Indeed, the Canadian Francs actively enlisted the natives
to push back, and the Seven Year’s War, the French and
Indian, was just around the corner.
Next time:
Chapter X: 250 years ago, 1761, The Cambridge Patent and
the Prelude to Revolution
Sources:
The Island at the Center of the World, (R. Shorto,
2005); Old Cambridge District (A. Moscrip, 1941);
photo: Ken Gottry. (The author may be contacted at
tmraymond4@gmail.com
)
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