History of Westchester County, New York, Volume 1. Frederic Shonnard

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СКАЧАТЬ understanding, which were carefully formulated at the time and had never been repudiated. It will be admitted by most impartial minds that this was a reasonable contention. But the Westchester tract was not the only territory in debate. English settlement had proceeded rapidly on Long Island, and the onward movement of citizens of Connecticut in that quarter was quite as in consistent with the terms of the articles of 1650 as was the presence of an organized English colony in the Vredeland. Thus whatever course might be suggested by fairness respecting the ultimate English attitude toward Westchester, that was only one local issue among others of very similar nature; and with so much at stake, the policy of self-interest required a studied resistance to the Dutch claims in general, even if that involved violation of the spirit of an agreement made in inchoate conditions which, though in a sense morally binding, had never been legally perfected. Finally, there was no conceivable risk for the English in any proceedings they chose to take, however arbitrary or unscrupulous; for in the event of an armed conflict over the boundary difficulty, the powerful New England colonies could easily crush the weak and meager Dutch settlements.

      It is not known to what extent, if any, the settlers at Westchester suffered from the great and widespread Indian massacre of 1655, which occurred before they had submitted themselves to the Dutch government and consequently before their affairs became matters of record at New Amsterdam. On the 15th of September of that year sixty-four canoes of savages — '" Mohicans, Pachamis, with others from Esopus, Hackingsack, Tappaan, Stamford, and Onkeway, as far east as Connecticut, estimated by some to amount to nineteen hundred in number, from five to eight hundred of whom were armed," — landed suddenly, before daybreak, at Fort Amsterdam. They came to avenge the recent killing of a squaw by the Dutch for stealing peaches. Stuyvesant, with most of the armed force of the settlement, was absent at the time upon an expedition to subdue the Swedes on the Delaware. A reign of terror followed, lasting for three days, during which, says O'Callaghan, " the Dutch lost one hundred people, one hundred and fifty were taken into captivity, and more than three hundred persons, besides, were deprived of house, home, clothes, and food." The Westchester people were probably spared on this occasion. It was a deed of vengeance against the Dutch, and, as the English pioneers had up to that time firmly resisted Dutch authority, the Indians could have had no reason for interfering with them. The reader will remember that when Stuyvesant's officer, Van Elslant, came to Westchester with his writ of dispossession in the spring of the same year, he was met by only eight or nine armed men; whereas one year later twenty-three adult males were made prisoners by De Koninck's party at that place. This demonstrates that the progress of the settlement had at least undergone no retardation in the interval.

      Thomas Pell, to whose enterprise was due the foundation of the first permanent settlement in the County of Westchester, was born, according to Bolton's researches, at Southwyck, in Sussex, England, about 1608, although he is sometimes styled Thomas Pell of Nor folk. He was of aristocratic and distinguished descent, tracing his ancestry to the ancient Pell family of Walter Willingsley and Dymblesbye, in Lincolnshire. A branch of this Lincolnshire family removed into the County of Norfolk, of which was John Pell, gentle man, lord of the Manor of Shouldham Priory and Brookhall (died April 4, 1556). One of his descendants was the Rev. John Pell, of Southwyck (born about 1553), who married Mary Holland, a lady of royal blood. Thomas Pell, the purchaser of the Westchester tract, was their eldest son. As a young man in England he was gentle man of the bedchamber to Charles I., and it is supposed that his sympathies were always on the side of the royalist cause. It is uncertain at what period he emigrated to America, but Bolton finds that as early as 1630 he was associated with Roger Ludlow, a member of the Rev. John Warham's company, who settled first at Dorchester, Mass., and later removed to Windsor, Conn. In 1635, with Ludlow and ten families, he commenced the plantation at Fairfield, Conn. (called by the Indians Unquowa). In 1647 he traded to the Delaware and Virginia. Being summoned in 1648 to take the oath of allegiance to New Haven, he refused, for the reason that he had already subscribed to it in England, " and should not take it here." For his contumacious conduct he was fined, and, refusing to pay the fine, " was again summoned before the authorities, and again amerced."

      Thus his early career in Connecticut was attended by circumstances which, on their face, were hardly favorable to his subsequent selection by the government of that colony as an agent for carrying out designs that they may have had regarding the absorption of Dutch lands. It is altogether presumable that in buying the Westchester tract from the Indians in 1654 he acted in a strictly private capacity, although the settlers who went there may have been stimulated to do so by the colonial authorities. Pell himself does not appear to have ever become a resident of Westchester. He evidently regarded his purchase solely as a real estate speculation, selling his lands in parcels at first to small private individuals, and later to aggregations of enterprising men.

      Of the more important of these sales, as of the conversion of much of his property into a manorial estate called Pelham Manor, due mention will be made farther along in this History. The erection of per ham Manor by royal patent dated from October 6, 1666, Thomas Pell becoming its first lord. He married Lucy, widow of Francis Brewster, of New Haven, and died at Fairfield without issue in or about the month of September, 1669. He left property, real and personal, valued at £1,294 Its. M., all of which was bequeathed to his nephew, John Pell, of England, who became the second lord of the manor.

      For some six years following Pell's acquisition of Westchester in 1654, there were, so far as can be ascertained, no other notable land purchases or settlements within our borders. Van der Donck's patent of the " Yonkers Land," inherited by his widow, continued in force; but the time had not yet arrived for its sub-division and systematic settlement. The New Haven Colony's purchase from Ponus and other Indians in 1640, confirmed to the people of Stamford in 1655, which covered the Town of Bedford and other portions of Westchester County, also continued as a mere nominal holding, no efforts being made to develop it. No new grants of any mentionable importance were made by the Dutch after that to Van der Donck, and while in dividual Dutch farmers were gradually penetrating beyond the Harlem, they founded no towns or comprehensive settlements of which record survives.

      But with the decade commencing in 1660 a general movement of land purchasers and settlers began, which, steadily continuing and increasing, brought nearly all the principal eastern and southern sections under occupation within a comparatively brief period.

      The earliest of these new purchasers were Peter Disbrow, John Coe, and Thomas Stedwell (or Studwell), all of Greenwich, Conn., who in 1660 and the succeeding years bought from the Indians districts now embraced in the Towns of Rye and Harrison. Associated with them in some of their later purchases was a fourth man, John Budd; but the original transactions were conducted by the three. Their leader, Peter Disbrow, says the Rev. Charles W. Baird, the historian of Rye, was " a young, intelligent, self-reliant man," who seems to have enjoyed the thorough confidence and esteem of his colleagues. On January 3, 1660, acting by authority from the Colony of Connecticut, he purchased " from the then native Indian proprietors a certain tract of land lying on the maine between a certain place then called Rahonaness to the east and to the Westchester Path to the north, and up to a river then called Moaquanes to the west, that is to say, all the land lying between the aforesaid two rivers then called Peningoe, extending from the said Path to the north and south to the sea or sound." This tract, on Peningo Neck, extended over the lower part of the present Town of Rye, on the east side of Blind Brook, reaching as far north as Port Chester and bounded by a line of marked trees.

      Six months later (June 29, 1660) the Indian owners, thirteen in number, conveyed to Disbrow, Coe, and Stedwell, for the consideration of eight coats, seven shirts, and fifteen fathom of wampum, all of Manussing Island, described as " near unto the main, which is called in the Indian name Peningo." A third purchase was effected by Disbrow May 22, 1661, comprising a tract lying between the Byram River and Blind Brook, " which may contain six or seven miles from the sea along the Byram River side northward." Other purchases west of Blind Brook followed, including Budd's Neck and' the neighboring islands; the West Neck, lying between Stony Brook and Mamaroneck River, and the tract above the Westchester Path and west of Blind Brook, or directly north of Budd's Neck. This last-mentioned tract was " the territory of the present Town of Harrison, a territory owned СКАЧАТЬ