The Dutch Legacy

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Michael McCann Student I. D. # 0604206 History of New York State The Dutch Legacy in New York Most people who read history have the same secret: they want to go back there. Inserting oneself amongst Washington’s frozen troops, at Valley Forge, while Thomas Paine exhorts the masses to stay the course, being there, feeling it, smelling it, touching it. Imagining these times gone by becomes especially alluring if the setting has been completely transformed from what it once was. Surely, no landscape has undergone a more complete change than Manhattan Island. The Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, on the southern tip of what the Delaware tribe called “Manna Hatta,” was a wilderness of forest and field, teeming with bears and beaver; Mother Nature…show more content…
He is a lawyer for the Department of Education and helped me gain access to the archives in the state library. I decided to follow the path from Nieuw Amsterdam to Beverwijck(Albany); the same trail that peg-leg Stuyvesant and Minuit and Dutch farmers and Native’s alike would have used. I travelled north from Breede Weg(Broadway) at Fiftieth Street. At Dykman Avenue and 204th street, I stopped at the Dykman House; the only original storied farmhouse in the city. Its gabled roof, stoop and “Dutch” front door were built c.!784. To see this relic, of another time, parked on this busy urban intersection is an amazing sight. Breede Weg became the Post Road(Rt.9 to us) just south of here, crosses the Haarlem River Ship Canal via the Breede Weg Bridge, and crosses into Marble Hill(only part of Manna Hatta on the mainland). Continuing into the Bronx, named for Dutch Captain Jonas Bronck who settled there in 1639, lies 1100 hundred acres known as Van Cortlandt Park. First owned by Adriaen van der Donck, the not so mythological hero of Gehring’s New Amsterdam translations and Russell Shorto’s historical novel, he was contracted by Kiliaen Van Rensselaer to be the Jonkheer; a rural lawyer/sheriff type position that gave him legal jurisdiction over the patroonship. The name, Yonkers, comes from this title and the first man who held it. Continuing north, under the Tappan Zee Bridge, I came into Sleepy Hollow, home of…show more content…
Fort Nassau became Fort Orange in 1624, competing with the French and English trade centers in Canada and the Great Lakes region until the end of the eighteenth century. Initially, the Dutch cultivated a positive relationship with the Mahicans and Mohawks, and the fur business thrived. The van Rensselaer family(Killiaen, the patriarch never visited his “bouwerie”), from Nijkerk in the Dutch Republic, established its fiefdom in 1632, amassing one million acres on both sides of the Hudson River. His sons managed the farm, fur trade, and commerce with New Amsterdam, Amsterdam, and later, New York. In 1664, when New Netherland was ceded to the English, Beverwijck was renamed Albany. Albany was chartered an English city in 1686, with Pieter Schuyler as its first mayor. The Dutch influence remained strong until the American Revolution when Dutch commercial allegiance to the British led to its

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