de Halve Maen, Fall 2018

de Halve Maen Journal of The Holland Society of New York Fall 2018

The Holland Society of New York requests the pleasure of your company at the

133rd Annual Meeting and Dinner on

Saturday, April 6, 2019 at the

Lotos Club

5 East 66th Street, New York, NY 10065

2018 Annual Medalist General H.R. McMaster

will receive the Outstanding Achievement Medal Annual Meeting 4:30 PM Cocktails 6:00 PM Dinner 7:00 PM Presentation 8:30 PM $80 for Members and Fellows $190 for Friends and Guests Dress: Business attire Please respond no later than March 28, 2019; make check payable to: The Holland Society of New York. Please mail your response and payment to 1345 Avenue of the Americas, 33rd Floor, New York, NY 10105, or visit our website at www.hollandsociety.org and pay via Paypal.

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The Holland Society of New York 708 THIRD AVENUE, NEW YORK, NY 10017 President Andrew S. Terhune Vice President Col. Adrian T. Bogart III Treasurer R. Dean Vanderwarker III

Magazine of the Dutch Colonial Period in America Secretary James J. Middaugh Domine Rev. Paul D. Lent

Advisory Council of Past Presidents Roland H. Bogardus W. Wells Van Pelt Jr. Kenneth L. Demarest Jr. Walton Van Winkle III Robert Schenck William Van Winkle Peter Van Dyke Charles Zabriskie Jr. Trustees Laurie Bogart Andrew A. Hendricks Bradley D. Cole David D. Nostrand D. David Conklin Gregory M. Outwater Christopher M. Cortright Samuel K. Van Allen Eric E. DeLamarter Frederick M. Van Sickle David W. Ditmars Stuart W. Van Winkle Philips Correll Durling Kenneth G. Winans

Trustees Emeriti Adrian T. Bogart Kent L. Stratt John O. Delamater David William Voorhees Robert G. Goelet Ferdinand L. Wyckoff Jr. Robert Gardiner Goelet Stephen S. Wyckoff David M. Riker Donald Westervelt Rev. Everett Zabriskie Burgher Guard Captain Sarah Bogart Vice-Presidents Connecticut-Westchester R. Dean Vanderwarker III Dutchess and Ulster County Florida James S. Lansing International Lt. Col. Robert W. Banta Jr. (Ret) Jersey Shore Stuart W. Van Winkle Long Island Eric E. DeLamarter Mid-West David Ditmars New Amsterdam Eric E. DeLamarter New England Niagara David S. Quackenbush Old Bergen-Central New Jersey Gregory M. Outwater Old South Pacific Northwest Edwin Outwater III Pacific Southwest (North) Kenneth G. Winans Pacific Southwest (South) Paul H. Davis Patroons Robert E. Van Vranken Potomac Christopher M. Cortright Rocky Mountain Col. Adrian T. Bogart III South River Walton Van Winkle III Texas James J. Middaugh Virginia and the Carolinas James R. Van Blarcom United States Air Force

United States Army Col. Adrian T. Bogart III United States Coast Guard Capt. Louis K. Bragaw Jr. (Ret) United States Marines Lt. Col. Robert W. Banta Jr., USMC (Ret) United States Navy LCDR James N. Vandenberg, CEC, USN Editor David William Voorhees Production Manager

Sarah Bogart

Editorial Committee Peter Van Dyke, Chair Christopher Cortright John Lansing

Copy Editor Rudy VanVeghten

David M. Riker Rudy VanVeghten

VOL. XCI

Fall 2018

NUMBER 3

IN THIS ISSUE: 50

Editor’s Corner

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Dutch colonization’s disruption of the Hudson Valley’s Native landscape

59

The Dellius Patent and Rock Rogeo

69

Here and There in New Netherland Studies

70

Society Activities

71

In Memoriam

by Jason R. Sellers

by Rudy VanVeghten

The Holland Society of New York was organized in 1885 to collect and preserve information respecting the history and settlement of New Netherland by the Dutch, to perpetuate the memory, foster and promote the principles and virtues of the Dutch ancestors of its members, to maintain a library relating to the Dutch in America, and to prepare papers, essays, books, etc., in regard to the history and genealogy of the Dutch in America. The Society is principally organized of descendants in the direct male line of residents of the Dutch colonies in the present-day United States prior to or during the year 1675. Inquiries respecting the several criteria for membership are invited.

De Halve Maen (ISSN 0017-6834) is published quarterly by The Holland Society.

Subscriptions are $28.50 per year; international, $35.00. Back issues are available at $7.50 plus postage/handling or through PayPaltm.

POSTMASTER: send all address changes to The Holland Society of New York, 708 Third Ave., 6th Floor, New York, NY 10017. Telephone: (212) 758-1675. Fax: (212) 758-2232.

E-mail: info@hollandsociety.org Website: www.hollandsociety.org Copyright © 2018 The Holland Society of New York. All rights reserved.

Cover: Edward Moran, detail from“Henrik Hudson entering New York Harbor, September 11, 1609” (1909), Berkshire Museum, Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

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Editor’s Corner

M

IGRATIONS FORM THE basic story of humankind. Driven by climate change, warfare, economic factors, the search for fame and wealth, or just the desire for a change, whether by free will or by force, people are constantly on the move. New York has seen tremendous cultural changes over the past four hundred years. In historic times, American Indian communities and Dutch colonial settlements were altered and enriched by the migrations of French Protestants, Germans, New Englanders, Irish, Southern and Eastern Europeans, African Americans, and Latinos, among others, all seeking to improve their prospects. This issue of de Halve Maen focuses on the rapid seventeenth-century Dutch expansion into the Hudson River Valley and its impact on the inhabitants already living in the region.

By the end of the sixteenth century, Jason Sellers tells us in his essay, as many as 20,000 to 30,000 people lived throughout the Hudson River Valley in thirty or forty autonomous communities ranging from fifty to three hundred inhabitants. Yet, he relates, a century later a group of Mahicans told Albany officials that “Now they are weak and are but few.” Drawing on travel narratives, and diplomatic and court records, Sellers explores how European settlement transformed the Native regional landscape in the service of Dutch colonial agriculture and trade.

Sellers notes that pre-colonial populations had constructed “a complex subsistence regime that drew on a wide range of ecological niches.” Daily activities grounded in tradition “reinforced the connections between peoples and other living things” in their immediate surroundings.

Living in a diversified subsistence regime, pre-colonial peoples, he says, “constituted an ecological safety net that protected individual resources from overuse and insulated Natives against localized environmental disruptions.”

According to Sellers, Hudson Valley Indians saw the European newcomers “as members of a human community unified by cohabitation of a shared landscape.” All that being said, he notes, much of the language about “integration and solidarity” appears in Dutch documents meant to address the failed attempts to merge European needs with those of the Indians. Dutch settlers, Sellers argues, although largely concentrated in a few locations, thwarted Native efforts to integrate them. Dutch attitudes and strict laws against intercultural sexual relations created an additional barrier that weakened a bonding potential between individuals belonging to different cultural communities.

The environmental changes that accompanied colonization proved among the most disruptive developments to the Native communities. As a result, Sellers reveals how Dutch colonization physically and conceptually distanced Native peoples from the traditional landscape that sustained their communities.

Rudy VanVeghten’s essay also reveals the continuing

disruption of traditional Native landscapes. In his essay, VanVeghten focuses on the 1690s politics behind the reshaping of New York’s geopolitical landscape. In the wake of the collapse of Jacob Leisler’s 1689–1691 administration, anti-Leislerian English governor Benjamin Fletcher awarded to the leadership of the Leislerian opposition immense patents to Native lands. Albany Reformed Church minister Godfrey Dellius was among a group of such beneficiaries who obtained a substantial patent for land along the Mohawk River. When Fletcher was recalled in 1697, King William attempted to balance the political scale by appointing the pro-Leislerian Earl of Bellomont as governor. Bellomont soon learned that Dellius had not only received the Mohawk patent, but also a grant to a far larger parcel that extended seventy or more miles from the Hudson River to the shores of Lake Champlain. At over a half million acres, Dellius’s northern patent was nearly the size of Rhode Island. Moreover, there was virtually nothing in the way of taxes for the government.

In a lively and engrossing style, VanVeghten retells Bellomont’s campaign on negating Fletcher’s large land grants to Dellius. Although the Native peoples appear as minor players in his narration of political maneuvers, Bellomont’s charge that Dellius had misused his position as a religious leader among the Mohawks to trick their sachems into signing over their homeland reveals an important element in the story. Nonetheless, in the end it is in the memory of the Native definitions of the land that provide the clues to exact locations of the Dellius Patent.

The interaction between pre-colonial and European populations in the early modern era is one of the many fascinating factors at play in creating a new American identity.

To more fully understand our past we need to focus on all of the elements that shaped their world and ours, for to truly know our Dutch ancestors we must also understand their interactions with the peoples with whom they came in contact.

The electronic layout and typesetting of a magazine can sometimes result in unintentional strange displacement of information. This occurred in the Summer 2018 issue of de Halve Maen, when a line from Robert Audley Snedeker’s obituary relating to his employment with the “Photo Products Division of Dupont” inadvertently reappeared in the obituary of Robert William Banta. My apologies to the Banta family for this error. The phrase is being removed from the online edition and will not appear in any future publication of the issue.

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David William Voorhees Editor

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Dutch colonization’s disruption of the Hudson Valley’s Native landscape

by Jason R. Sellers

I

n 1675, a group of Mahicans at Albany told colonial officials that “before they were strong of people and had power,” but “Now they are weak and are but few.”

They attributed their own diminished strength to the fact that “their earth is very empty” while asking to “plant on Dutch soil,” linking environmental conditions to the political ascendance of European colonists.

The comment contrasted a colonial landscape that served European colonists with the Native landscape that had formerly sustained thriving Native communities.1 Admittedly, this particular exchange occurred after New Netherland had become New York, but the speaker’s comment that “the English and the Dutch are now one” identified continuity across eras. Though addressed to representatives of the English colonial regime, the speech responded to conditions initiated with the beginnings of Dutch settlement. This essay, then, turns to travel narratives, and diplomatic and court records, to consider how Dutch colonization changed Native landscapes and bodies, and altered relations between Jason R. Sellers received his doctorate from the University of California at Irvine. He is currently Assistant Professor of History and American Studies at the University of Mary Washington. His articles on Native American and environmental history in the seventeenth-century Hudson Valley have appeared in Early American Studies and New York History, and another is forthcoming in Native American and Indigenous Studies.

“Noort Rivier in Niew Neerlandt” (1639). Dutch cartographer Joan Vinckeboons’ map of the North, or Hudson, River, showing Indian communities along the river’s length. them. It begins with a discussion of the Native landscape to explain Native efforts to integrate Dutch newcomers into an existing Native geography and community, and then consider how Dutch settlers reconfigured portions of a larger regional landscape in the service of colonial agriculture and trade. This essay argues that although Dutch settlers were largely concentrated in a few locations, their activities thwarted Native efforts to integrate them, and disrupted existing ties between physical environments and Native bodies and communities in those locales. As a result, Dutch colonization simultaneously physically displaced and conceptually distanced Native bodies from the landscape that reflected and sustained their communities. Colonists certainly worked to impose their own notions of private property onto the Native landscape, and a range of policies adopted by colonial

officials were premised on the assumption that Native bodies could be separated from lands, but the valley’s Native peoples also expressed a growing sense of alienation as they discussed the conditions of their bodies and lands in the latter half of the seventeenth century.

The Hudson Valley’s Native Landscape.

Responding to a Dutch visitor’s question about human origins, an Indian near Hackensack explained in 1679 that after a tortoise had raised its back out of the water to create dry land, “there grew a tree in the middle of the earth, and the root of this tree sent forth a sprout beside it and there grew upon it a man, who was the first male.” Subsequently, “the tree bent over until its top touched the earth, and there shot therein another root, from which came

1 Robert Livingston, The Livingston Indian Records, 1666–1723, ed. Lawrence Leder (Gettysburg, Pa., 1956), 37–38.

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Portrait of a Munsee believed to be from the lower Hudson River Valley.

Wenceslaus Hollar, “Unus Americanus ex Virginia” (print, 1645).

forth another sprout, and there grew upon it the woman, and from these two are all men produced.” This story traced an emergence from water to land to a living entity from which humans derived. Thirty years earlier, another Dutch visitor had reported from elsewhere along the Hudson River, “this nation say that they have descended from a tortoise-father,” and other accounts recalled humans emerging from below the earth. Stories like these firmly tied Native identities and bodies to physical landscapes and the biological communities that inhabited them. Human bodies were literally the products—fruits or seedlings, or offspring—of other living things, whether plants or animals. The human communities that arose continued to share space with plant and animal forebears, which physically sustained them by providing the resources necessary for life.2 By the end of the sixteenth century, perhaps 20,000–30,000 people lived in thirty or forty autonomous communities throughout what we now call the Hudson River Valley, some loosely grouped into larger bands. Munsee Indians in the lower estuary and Mahicans above Rondout Creek, at today’s Kingston, oriented many of their activities around major waterways, prompting Europeans to later describe them generally as “River Indians.” Towns home to fifty to three hundred inhabitants occupied flat lands just above the floodplain, and consisted of various spaces

and structures spread across several acres: wigwams or longhouses interspersed with burial sites, outdoor work and manufacturing areas, storage pits or structures, woodlands, marshes, and nearby, current and former agricultural lands. The groups of people gathered in waterside towns also regularly visited specialty sites further afield, constructing a complex subsistence regime that drew on a wide range of ecological niches, and made possible their permanent inhabitations in the Hudson River corridor.3 Mundane daily activities reinforced the connections between humans and other living things remembered in storytelling and/or ritual, grounding these traditions in Native communities’ immediate surroundings. The biological diversity of riparian lands let Native groups based alongside major rivers and streams pursue a wide range of subsistence activities in or near the homes they primarily inhabited throughout most of the year. As one Dutch colonist explained, Indians “have settlements at certain places near water where they are in the habit to do much fishing every year and at the same time plant some crops.” For groups living on the lower estuary’s shores and islands, marine resources were reliable enough to enable sedentism. Further upstream, regular flooding deposited alluvium in low-lying areas Indians used to cultivate the Three Sisters agricultural package. While women

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planted and tended crops, men fished the successive spawning runs of different anadromous species that began in the spring and continued through summer and fall months. Untended areas generated edible wild plants, some of which—notably Jerusalem artichoke and ground nuts— thrive in disturbed soils such as abandoned home sites or fields. Meanwhile, the same aquatic and plant resources that attracted Natives to waterside locations drew game animals. Besides permanent animal populations, geese, swans, and other migratory birds arrived seasonally to shelter and feed in the estuarine wetlands.4 Hudson River Valley Indians, who strategically placed their homes in resource-rich areas, also managed lands to foster ecological succession and biological diversity and maintain the land’s productivity. Charcoal smudges marking tree growth-rings confirm colonists’ reports that Natives “burnt every Spring to make way for new” grasses. Fires kept cleared fields from growing over and regenerated the herbaceous plants and grasses that attracted grazing animals. By drying fish and corn to “bury it in the earth, where they let it lie and go” hunting, Native communities continued to draw subsistence from the ground after the growing season ended. Disuse constituted another resource-management strategy. Periodically relocating towns and farms circulated agricultural land out of use, allowing soils to recover, creating forage that attracted game animals, and producing wild plant foods. Seasonal visits to upland hunting camps reserved those areas for extraction only in winter, relieving deer populations from the periodic stress humans introduced, and protecting acorn-bearing white oaks on which wintering deer relied. Left alone when other resources abounded, large game animals like deer, as well as elk Jasper Danckaerts, Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679– 1680, Original Narratives of Early American History, ed.

J. Franklin Jameson (New York, 1913), 77–78; David de Vries, “David De Vries’s Notes,” in J. Franklin Jameson, Narratives of New Netherland, 1609–1664 (New York, 1909), 225; Robert Grumet, The Munsee Indians: A History (Norman, Okla., 2009), 24. See also Charles T. Gehring and Robert S. Grumet, “Observations of the Indians from Jasper Danckaerts's Journal, 1679–1680,” William and Mary Quarterly 44, no. 1 (1987): 118; Adriaen van der Donck, A Description of New Netherland, Charles T. Gehring and William A. Starna, eds., Diederik Willem Goedhuys, trans.

(Lincoln, Nebr., 2008), 112–13.

2

Tom Arne Midtrød, The Memory of All Ancient Customs: Native American Diplomacy in the Colonial Hudson Valley (Ithaca, N.Y., 2012), xiii–xiv, 2; Grumet, Munsee Indians, 16, 38–40.

3

Van der Donck, Description of New Netherland, 58–59, 83–84, 98.

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and bears, concentrated less biologically rich areas’ energy into resources Natives could extract in winter.5 Indians actively managing this wide range of resources linked distinct ecological niches—mountains, bottomlands, wetlands, streams, islands, and estuary— throughout the Hudson River Valley into a larger Native landscape. They also received constant reminders of the degree to which the physical health of individuals and communities rested on relationships with the lands, plants, and animals to which their traditions ascribed human origins. Distributing local populations across multiple acres diffused their immediate environmental impacts, extending the period of time a given location was inhabitable.

Placing towns near major waterways positioned Natives at the nexus of overlapping resource zones, as well as transportation corridors. From their homes, Natives could exploit regularly replenished soils and the rich energy reserves inherent in marine habitats and wetland areas’ biomass, access large game that concentrated the caloric value of less energy-rich upland areas, and rely upon migration patterns that imported energy from distant locales in the form of anadromous fish and migratory birds. Native towns became nodes in a web of energy flows that covered the regional landscape. This diversified subsistence regime constituted an ecological safety net that protected individual resources from overuse and insulated Natives against localized environmental disruptions.6 If creation stories located human

origins in other living things, and daily subsistence activities maintained direct ties between Native bodies and the environments they inhabited, mortuary activities perpetuated physical, social, and spiritual ties to that same Native landscape. One visitor captured the essence of these when he reported that Natives “fence and stockado their graves about, visiting them once a year, dressing the weeds from them, many times they plant a certain Tree by their Graves which keeps green all the year.” Ensuring that they buried the deceased “along the banks of rivers or streams where they live or have lived,” Indians returned bodies to the grounds from which they derived, shaped throughout their lifetimes, and marked in death. Annual visits to clear burial sites of weeds unified members of the community through their participation in constructing and maintaining the gravesite. Over time, this associated multiple generations with a particular location, imbuing the ground with a community’s history in that place.

Finally, planting an evergreen tree may have been an act of creation that recalled origin stories in which humans grew on trees; rather than the original first humans, this tree grew a community rooted in that location by the graves of its ancestors and specialized subsistence practices.

Landscapes, in other words, manifested the relations of the peoples who shared them.7

date Dutch settlement as Natives integrated the newcomers into a regional landscape and the human community that inhabited it. As early as 1632, agriculturally minded colonists near Fort Orange recognized that they enjoyed “cleared land (or which has been seeded before by the savages) at the water’s edge along the river.” This pattern was more than simply Dutch opportunism.

In 1656, one author recalled that a Native acquaintance told him while they observed the clearing of forest, “I see that you are having that land made ready for use; you will do well, it is very good land and bears grain in great quantity; I know that, because only twenty-five or twenty-six years ago we planted grain there, and now it has reverted to forest.” His precise sense of the land’s history and utility suggested a sense of ownership, and positioned these new developments as part of a shared historical arc; Dutch colonists now inherited not just the space, but the history invested there, joining a community defined by its shared relationship with the land.8 Natives accustomed to disusing lands to keep them productive often encouraged this settlement pattern, hoping to enhance the productivity of their own territories.

Upon granting land near their Esopus villages to Dutch officials in 1658, a group of sachems explained they “would like to see that it be built upon immediately so that they can be accommodated with everything,” hinting they saw Dutch settlement Daniel Denton, A Brief Description of New York, Formerly Called New Netherlands, With the Places Thereto Adjoining, Likewise a Brief Relation of the Customs of the Indians There (New York, 1845), 20; Isaack De Rasieres, “Letter,” in Jameson, Narratives of New Netherland, 108; April M. Beisaw, “Environmental History of the Susquehanna Valley Around the Time of European Contact,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 79, no. 4 (Autumn 2012): 869.

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Integration. These subsistence strategies and ritual activities could easily accommo-

Jason R. Sellers, “‘Lands fit for use’: Native subsistence patterns and Euroamerican agricultural landscaping in colonial New York,” New York History 97, no. 3/4 (Summer/ Fall 2016): 296–99. For ecological safety nets, see William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983), 34–53; Andrew Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison (New York, 2000), 39.

6

Charles Wolley, A Two Years’ Journal in New York and Parts of its Territories in America, ed. Edward Gaylor Bourne (Cleveland, 1902), 50; Gehring and Grumet, “Observations of the Indians,” 110; Albert Cook Myers, ed., Narratives of Pennsylvania, West New Jersey, and Delaware, 1630–1707 (New York, 1912), 340. For more on mortuary practices and rituals, see Jason R. Sellers, “History, Memory, and the Indian Struggle for Autonomy in the Seventeenth-Century Hudson Valley,” Early American Studies 13, no. 3 (2015): 722–25.

7

Indian subsistence: fishing, hunting, and processing corn. Cartouche detail from John Ogilby’s map, “Novi Belgii Quod nunc Novi Jorck, vocatur Nova qe Angliae & Partis Virginiae” (1670).

A. J. F. Van Laer, trans. and ed., Van Rensselaer Bowier Manuscripts (Albany, 1908), 197; Adriaen van der Donck, A Description of New Netherland, Charles Gehring and William Starna, eds., Diederik Willem Goedhuys, trans.

(Lincoln, Nebr., 2010), 20–21.

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New Amsterdam with Indian canoes in the foreground. t’Fort Nieuw Amsterdam op de Manhatans [The Hartgers View], 1626–1628. Stokes Iconography, vol. 1 (1915), Plate 1. as a way to develop valuable resources nearby. An official fort and trading post would support the sanctioned fur trade that peaked from June to August, while Dutch neighbors would participate in daily exchanges of food and durable goods.

Both levels of trade channeled Europeansourced goods into Native subsistence regimes. Natives could even intensify their use of the stored energy that accumulated in Dutch settlements by periodically raiding those posts and towns. In effect, Natives exchanged redundant edible wild plants and game animals extracted from disused maize lands for resources drawn from the Atlantic Ocean and Europe. This further diversified their resource base, and drew an energy stream with distant origins—and potentially insulated from local environmental instabilities—into their orbit.9 Hudson Valley Indians described the resulting relationships between themselves and the Dutch in ways that suggested they saw the newcomers as members of a hu-

man community unified by cohabitation of a shared landscape. The Esopus sachems who encouraged Dutch settlement in 1658 specified that “they would like to see plowing proceed,” and the following year, another group assured Dutch officials, “one fire is burning between us and we may go to sleep on either side.”

Agriculture would invest Dutch settlers in the land in ways familiar to Native farmers, as well as contribute to the collective survival of the area’s human inhabitants by feeding the Dutch and thus ensuring the presence of trade partners for Indians.

Participation in a subsistence regime and a shared landscape would integrate the newcomers into the existing Native Hudson Valley. The Esopus region thus became a shared domestic space in which multiple inhabitants centered around a metaphorical fire performed complementary labor and exchanged their resources with one another, much as generational and gendered divisions of labor structured Native subsistence patterns.10

Farming, hunting, and trading sustained the individual bodies that comprised the region’s human community, and Native speakers turned to images of human bodies to remind colonial officials of their mutual interest in maintaining a productive landscape. One party of Esopus Indians promised Petrus Stuyvesant they “would go hand in hand and arm in arm with” the Dutch, while another speaker insisted that the 1664 peace “should be henceforth so firm and binding as the arms, which he folded.” Natives and newcomers joined arms as each used the landscape in complementary and mutually beneficial ways. The resulting strength of each individual body in turn strengthened the bond between them—their grip grew stronger. Integration into the physical Native landscape thus promised integration into Native social relations, as well.11 Linked bodies could grow even closer as language evoking mortuary practices fused the physical terrains of landscapes and bodies. Native diplomats spoke frequently of burying their grievances and their dead. Although these expressions are more apparent in English records, their frequency in 1664 and 1665 New York suggests they were familiar tropes that simply went unrecorded or unremarked in Dutch records of intercultural diplomacy.

Such comments recalled the mortuary practices that perpetuated Native peoples’ links to each other, and to the landscape from which they derived. A common grave—even a symbolic one—joined Native and European bodies to each other and to their shared landscape, while regular Charles T. Gehring, trans. and ed., Correspondence, 1654–1658 (Syracuse, NY, 2003), 211; Sellers, “’Lands fit for use,’” 299, 302–305.

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10 Gehring, Correspondence, 1654–1658, 211; Berthold Fernow, Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York (Albany, 1881), 13: 106.

Gehring, Correspondence, 1654–1658, 194; Fernow, Documents Relative 13: 375.

11

“Nieuw Amsterdam,” circa 1649. Cartouche from Claes Jansz Visscher’s map of New Netherland, New England, and parts pf Virginia, Novi Belgii Novæque Angliæ nec non partis Virginiæ tabula, first published in 1650.

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West India Company DirectorGeneral Petrus Stuyvesant, circa 1660. Portrait attributed to Hendrick Couturier, original in New York Historical Society.

commemorations reinforced their history together in a particular locale.12 Euroforming and Environmental Change. All that being said, much of this language about integration and solidarity appeared in treaties and meetings meant to address failed attempts to smoothly merge the needs and desires of Indians and Europeans inhabiting the Hudson River Valley. The environmental changes that accompanied colonization proved some of the most disruptive developments of the seventeenth century. Early Dutch colonists seeking trade partners and fertile soils for farming had occupied lands adjacent to thriving Native communities, settled there by Indians enhancing the productivity of their diverse environments.

By the 1630s growing Dutch populations increasingly committed to agriculture had begun changing the landscape by clearing forests, draining wetlands, and damming or redirecting natural watercourses. These efforts did not reshape the entire regional landscape, but they did reconfigure the local environments in which most European colonists were concentrated—the same areas most attractive to, and most shaped by, preexisting Native communities.

For a time, Dutch posts and settlements enhanced Native subsistence regimes by providing them new resources. However, as the colonial population grew, with 3,500 settlers at two major settlements at New Amsterdam and Beverwijck and others populating smaller towns along the river,

including in the Esopus, it engrossed more and more land at the nexus of the Hudson River Valley’s energy flows and directed that energy toward producing for colonial and European markets. Expansive fields protected from wild animals did little to support wild game populations, while colonists’ free-range livestock competed for the same forage and invaded Native

fields. Edible wild plant foods gave way to cultivated crops or succumbed to wandering domestic animals. Migratory birds found fewer refuges as wetlands became fields and hay meadows, and anadromous fish encountered mill dams and eroding stream banks that disrupted spawning patterns. Farmers, mill owners, and towns cleared forests to use as lumber and fuel, and to open areas for farming and defense, further reducing biological diversity.

The environmental changes initiated by the growing European population were localized in the most productive areas of the Hudson River corridor, disrupting Native subsistence patterns centered on the biologically rich bottomlands to which Natives and newcomers alike were attracted.13 Compounding the challenge of maintaining a subsistence regime on a rapidly changing landscape were colonists’ understandings of property as exclusive space. Whereas deeds earlier in the century reflected Native understandings of land

12 On burials and mourning as diplomatic metaphors, see Sellers, “History, Memory, and the Indian Struggle for Autonomy,” 725–28.

On population figures, see Jaap Jacobs, The Colony of New Netherland: A Dutch Settlement in SeventeenthCentury America (Ithaca, N.Y., 2009), 32 and 118; Michael G. Kammen, Colonial New York: A History (New York, 1975), 38; Grumet, Munsee Indians, 210. On environmental changes, see Sellers, “’Lands fit for use,’” 306–16.

13

An Indian land deed retaining rights.

Deed from the chief of Marossepinck, Sintsinck, otherwise called Schout’s Bay, of a tract of land on Long Island. NYSA_A188078_VGG_0028, Digital Collections, New York State Archives, Albany.

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Page of the petition of the burgomasters requesting Indian trade be conducted only at a designated spot in New Amsterdam and Indians be otherwise barred, referenced in footnote 14.

Petition of the burgomasters NYSA_A1809-78_V06_0315, Digital Collection, New York State Archives, Albany.

tenure by reserving hunting, fishing, and even planting rights on lands they partially conveyed to Dutch settlers, by the 1660s those deeds explicitly barred Natives from claiming reserved rights to fish and hunt, “set deer snares,” or harvest “ye herbage or Trees or any other thinge growing or being thereup[on].” Colonial officials

reinforced this sense that European and Native uses of lands were incompatible with a series of ordinances that obstructed familiar daily exchange patterns such as the trade in food. One insisted that “no savage shall be allowed to come either armed or unarmed . . . upon land, where the Dutch are ploughing, sowing, mowing, planting

or pasturing cattle,” while colonists later requested a law “prohibiting Indians from coming into this city . . . except to a place designated by your honors, in order to trade their goods.” Even if the lands on which colonists now dwelt remained potentially useful to Native inhabitants, colonial officials determined to maintain peace by establishing spaces that were exclusively Dutch made it difficult, if not impossible, for Indians to continue drawing resources from the lands they had disused. Though ordinances did make allowances for trade visits, those exceptions still assumed the presence of Natives in colonial spaces was anomalous, advancing colonial attitudes that Native bodies belonged elsewhere than on newly European lands.14 Dutch attitudes and colonial laws against intercultural sex posed an additional barrier to intimate relationships that might have strengthened ties between individuals belonging to the region’s different cultural communities. Kiliaen van Rensselaer warned his colonists “not to mix with the heathen or savage women, for such things are a great abomination to 14 Victor Hugo Paltsits, ed., Minutes of the Executive Council of the Province of New York: Administration of Francis Lovelace, 1668­–1683 (Albany, 1910), 1: 339–40; Charles T. Gehring, trans. and ed., Fort Orange Records, 1656–1678 (Syracuse, NY, 2000), 120; Fernow, Documents Relative, 13: 376; Charles Gehring, trans. and ed., Council Minutes, 1655–1656 (Syracuse, NY, 1995), 256.

Len F. Tantillo’s painting “Homeport” depicts how seventeenth-century European settlements rapidly transformed the environment along the banks of the Hudson River Valley.

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the Lord God,” an attitude accompanied by legal prohibitions on sexual intercourse between colonists and “heathens, blacks, or other persons.” Despite images of Native and European bodies entwining arms in alliance, very real proscriptions militated against the union of individual bodies, maintaining boundaries between Native and Dutch communities. Natives thus not only confronted the dramatically transforming spaces of colonized landscapes, but increasingly found themselves excluded from the human communities those spaces sustained.15 Native Expressions of Alienation. The changes effected by European colonists, then, had more than merely physical consequences. In the late 1650s, following their encouragement of Dutch settlement in the mid-valley, Esopus Indians asked why settlers had not yet begun farming, noting that “they are not very well pleased, because they can not use the path, which formerly run through the guardhouse-grounds.” By neglecting to cultivate the ground and yet settling in a pattern that impeded foot traffic, Dutch settlers disrupted the relations that should have connected peoples inhabiting the area. Although the comment most clearly referred to a literal path used for hunting and trade, the image also resonated on a metaphorical level. Hudson Valley Indians committed to sustaining the ties that knit the various peoples of a landscape into a wider community used the process of clearing roads, paths, and waterways for easy and safe travel as a metaphor for building diplomatic relationships. Those same routes were doubly important because they also facilitated subsistence activities. Grounding these metaphors in the physical landscape therefore collapsed the distinction between subsistence activities and human relations, emphasizing that the interconnections between components of a regional environment promoted the bodily health and safety of all its members. Dutch landowners cultivating the land would thus serve Native neighbors by integrating themselves into a coherent landscape.

However, constructing a landscape to serve only one segment of the population, as Dutch towns limiting exchange and intimacy with Natives seemed to be doing, displaced people once anchored by their relationships with each other and the local environment.16 By the mid-to-late-seventeenth century, Hudson River Valley Indians, no longer

served by Dutch settlement nor by the lands whose character the Dutch had changed, began moving further away from colonial towns. Many followed existing connections to familiar areas, which often meant relocating to areas less biologically rich than the home bases they had cultivated near major waterways. In 1663, for instance, sachems from Hackensack and Staten Island relayed to Dutch officials that Esopus Indians were “obliged to make their living by the chase, as they have no corn and every one . . . is scattered here and there.” Colonization not only dislodged Indians from their traditional homes, but fragmented communities formerly unified around agricultural activities in those homes.17 Others adapted to the new economic regime by trading for food or working for wages, strategies that nonetheless posed new challenges for Indians and their subsistence regimes. Increased reliance on hunting for subsistence, and to procure furs to trade for food, intensified the use of game resources that had once been reliable in part because they were exploited only periodically. Moreover, intensifying the use of a more limited range of resources undermined the ecological safety net that characterized pre-contact Native subsistence patterns. Meanwhile, wage labor meant Natives no longer procured resources directly from the application of their labor, and a 1648 ordinance noted

that “great complaints are daily made by Indians” that colonists “employ the natives and use them in their service, and often dismiss them unrewarded after their service is completed.” Both approaches altered Native relations with the landscape, narrowing the breadth of environmental resources on which they drew and installing unreliable mediators between Natives and the resources they sought to procure from the land.18 Changes in environmental relations bore consequences for Native bodies, and Hudson River Valley Indians began expressing a sense of weakness and alienation as they commented on the condition of their own individual bodies in the late seventeenth century. One Native man in the lower valley declined to be hired as a guide, explaining, 15 A. J. F. Van Laer, trans. and ed., Van Rensselaer Bowier Manuscripts (Albany, 1908), 442; Susanah Shaw Romney, New Netherland Connections: Intimate Networks and Atlantic Ties in Seventeenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: N.C., 2014), 142.

16 Fernow, Documents Relative, 13: 106. For an example of rivers/paths as diplomatic metaphors, see Livingston, Livingston Indian Records, 40. For more on paths/roads, see Jane T. Merritt, At the Crossroads: Indians and Empires on a Mid-Atlantic Frontier, 1700–1763 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2003), 1–3; Francis Jennings, The History and Culture of Iroquois Diplomacy: An Interdisciplinary Guide to the Treaties of the Six Nations and their League (Syracuse, 1985), 121.

17

Fernow, Documents Relative, 13: 321.

Charles Gehring, trans. and ed., Laws and Writs, 1647–1663 (Syracuse, NY, 1991), 19.

18

Fall 2018

Cartouche from Carolus Allard, Orbis Habitabilis, Amsterdam, ca. 1700.

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“I am very cold . . . and have nothing but a little worn-out blanket for my naked body.”

Negotiating the terms of employment, he cited the condition of his body as evidence that wage work impoverished him. But he also indirectly critiqued the new economic realities that left that body, and others, vulnerable and suffering. Similarly, when Natives complained that “They had patiently borne the blows, which each of us had often given them” and enumerated the instances in which “our people had at different places wrongfully beaten and injured their tribe,” they certainly protested individual incidents of personal abuse. But they also alluded to the colonial processes that subjected them to such abuse, including a series of seventeenth-century wars and epidemic disease. Perhaps even more significant were the environmental changes that necessitated adjustments to subsistence regimes that had once sustained the autonomy and strength of Native individuals and communities, and the creation of exclusively Dutch spaces in which anomalous Indian bodies were

vulnerable to mistreatment.19 Conclusion. If the party of Mahicans with whom this essay began asked colonial officials for permission to “plant on Dutch soil” because “their earth is very empty,” they still sought to find a home in the changed world of the Hudson River Valley. They interpreted their declining numbers and strength as consequences of changes to the Native landscape, changes legible on individual bodies and the communities they comprised. Like other Hudson River Valley Indians, they had experienced a process of physical and social exclusion from the emerging colonial landscape, even as they still hoped to reconstitute that strength on a landscape that so clearly strengthened the bodies of European colonists.

But three decades later, a party identified as Mahican and River Indians continued to draw on their ideas about the relationship between landscapes and bodies, explaining to English officials in Schenectady that they migrated west because “Wee are Become

a Small Nation the flesh taken from our Bodyes.” The image of a deteriorating human body described their diminished stature in colonial New York. Their departure from the Hudson River Valley was the culmination of a century of colonialism that not only physically displaced, but also conceptually dissociated, Native bodies from the landscapes they once inhabited. Begun with Dutch settlement, but accelerating under English rule, environmental changes that facilitated the expansion of colonial society disrupted Hudson River Valley Indians’ connections with the Native landscapes they had formerly maintained, and the other biological communities whose interdependence strengthened them all.

Years of environmental and social change had left their bodies diminished as they sought a new home in which to remake a Native landscape on which they could “Bee Strenthend again.”20

19 Danckaerts, Journal, 173; Fernow, Documents Relative, 13: 103.

20

Livingston, Livingston Indian Records, 189.

Thomas Pownall’s “A view in Hudson’s River of Pakepsey & the Catts-Kill Mountains. From Sopos Island in Hudson’s River,” circa 1760, shows the transformation of the Hudson River Valley by the mid-eighteenth century.

From The New York Public Library.

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The Dellius Patent and Rock Rogeo

By Rudy VanVeghten

Pro-Leislerian Governor — Richard Coote, the first Earl of Bellomont, governed New York province from 1698-1701. Concerned over rampant corruption during the administration of his anti-Leislerian predecessor, Gov. Benjamin Fletcher, he successfully revoked a handful of large land grants, including one along Lake Champlain that came to be known as the Dellius Patent.

L

ORD BELLOMONT WANTED revenge—not physical vengeance, but more the political or, he would say, moral sort.

As an English nobleman, Richard Coote, 1st Earl of Bellomont, had used his seat in the House of Lords to condemn the deaths of Jacob Leisler and Jacob Milborne, who had been executed for temporarily taking over the government of New York following King William III’s 1688 Glorious Revolution. When he became New York’s governor in 1698, Bellomont used his office to punish some of the anti-Leislerians who had rushed Leisler to the gallows in 1691 and later reaped rewards from Bellomont’s forerunner, Governor Benjamin Fletcher.

Among the targets of Governor Bellomont’s retaliation was Albany Reformed Church minister Godfrey Dellius. He was among a group of leading Albanians who received a large patent from his predeRudy VanVeghten recently joined the editorial committee of de Halve Maen. A former newspaper editor, he has combined his love of history and journalism to research the world of his ancestors and is a frequent contributor to de Halve Maen.

cessor, Gov. Benjamin Fletcher, in 1697 encompassing valuable Indian land along the Mohawk River. Dellius, Bellomont alleged, had misused his position as a religious leader among the Mohawk villages to trick their sachems into signing over their homeland.

Bellomont soon learned Dellius had also received a grant for a far bigger parcel extending from the Hudson River seventy or more miles to the north along the shores of Lake Champlain. Early in his brief tenure as governor, Bellomont focused his quest for revenge on revoking the Mohawk River patent, the Dellius patent and other large grants bestowed by Gov. Fletcher and his predecessors.

togie.3 In its original form, Saratoga was situated on both sides of the Hudson River beginning at the northern bounds of Half Moon, extending to a depth of six miles on each side of the Hudson and about twentytwo miles north to the mouth of a river the Indians called Dionoendogeha (later known as the Batten Kill).4 All that existed north of the Saratoga patent was virgin, mountainous land claimed by the Mohawk nation, bordered by the fur-trading highway comprised of Lake Champlain, and the Richelieu and St. Lawrence Rivers.

Mohawks also exercised control, by virtue of previous victories over Algonquinspeaking Abenaki Indians, over land east of Lake Champlain. Taking advantage of his close ties with the Mohawks as their religious leader, Dellius purchased some of this land currently unused by the Indians.

Fletcher had been instructed in his commission as governor to buy up Indian lands. “When any opportunity shall offer for purchasing great Tracts of Land for us from the Indians for small sums you are to use your discretion therein as you shall judge for the convenience or advantage which may arise unto us by the same.”5 So, with his Indian deed in hand, Domine E. B. O’Callaghan and Berthold Fernow, trans. Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, 15 vols. (Albany, 1856–1887), 13:387 (hereafter DRCHNY).

1

Calendar of N. Y. Colonial Manuscripts: Indorsed Land Papers: In the Office of the Secretary of State, 1643–1803 (Albany, 1864), 50; Joel Munsell, ed., The Annals of Albany, 10 vols. (Albany, 1850–1859), 2:61, 3:34–36.

2

Issuing the Patent. In 1696, land grants along the Hudson River north of Albany were few in number. Just above the confluence of the Mohawk into the Hudson was the Half Moon patent dating from 1667.1 Roughly across the river from Half Moon was a newer grant situated along the south bank of the Hoosic River, sharing the name Schaghticoke with a nearby Indian village.2 And just north of Half Moon and Schaghticoke was the 1684 grant known as Sarach-

Nathaniel Bartlett Sylvester, History of Saratoga County, New York (Philadelphia, 1878), 73.

3

4 William M. Beauchamp, Aboriginal Place Names of New York in New York State Museum Bulletin 108 (Albany: New York State Education Department, 1907), 239–40; text of the Saratoga patent appears in Stefan Bielinski, “Saratoga Patent” The People of Colonial Albany website, https://exhibitions.nysm.nysed.gov/albany/na/sarapat.html#patent, retrieved 11-24-2018; 5

DRCHNY 3:823.

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Manor-Sized Grants — New York Surveyor General Cadwallader Colden’s 1726 map of manorial grants shows the Saratoga patent ending north along the Hudson River to the (unnamed) Batten Kill. Text at the northeastern corner of the map describes a separate patent just north of Saratoga: “Part of a very large Tract 70 miles long granted to Godfrey Dellius in 1696 Paying a Raccoon Skin but vacated by act of the Assembly & some of it granted since.”

Godfrey Dellius had little trouble obtaining an official patent from Fletcher. Dellius’s original grant, dated September 3, 1696, reads as follows: A certaine Tract of Land lying upon the East side of Hudson’s River, between the Northermost bounds of Saraggtoga and the Rock Retsio, Containing about Seventy Miles in Length, and Goes backwards into the woods from the said Hudson’s River twelve Miles until it comes unto the wood Creeke, and so far as it goes be it twelve miles more or lesse from Hudson’s River on the East side, and from said creek by a Line twelve Miles distant from River, to our Loving Subject the Reverend Godfredius Dellius, Minister of the Gospell att our city of Albany, He yielding Rendering and Paying therefore Yearly and every Year unto us our Heirs and Successours on the feast Day of the Annunciation of our blessed Virgin Mary, at our city of New Yorke the Annuall Rent of one Raccoon Skinn in Lieu and Steade of all other Rents Services Dues Dutyes and Demands whatsoever for the said Tract of Land and Islands and Premises.6 Background. Domine Godfrey (or as

he liked to Latinize it, Godfredius) Dellius Jr. came to the New World from the Netherlands in the summer of 1683. He was assigned as an assistant to the aging Domine Gideon Schaats. Dellius made an immediate impact on his new congregation by compiling a list of church members and instituting a practice of recording baptisms and marriages.

Only recently ordained and married, the young cleric’s arrival in New York came at a politically challenging time. He replaced the late Domine Nicholas van Rensselaer, who had held the assistant pastor position from late 1674 until his death in November 1678. Van Rensselaer had stirred up a religious controversy between conservative (Voetian) worshipers of the Calvinist Reformed Church and liberal (Cocceian) beliefs being taught at Leiden University, Dellius’s alma mater. It had taken the intervention of Anglican Governor Edmund Andros to resolve the issue raised when merchant Jacob Leisler had objected to a Van Rensselaer sermon while visiting Albany in 1676.7 Five years after Dellius began preaching at Albany, these festering religious differences infiltrated the political sphere after William and Mary deposed Catholic King James II in England. Hoping for a return

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to conservative Calvinism, Jacob Leisler assumed control over New York during the rebellion named for him. He quickly began removing and often imprisoning anyone opposed to his regime. To Leisler, any belief not conforming to his own was political treason inspired by papist, Jacobite influences.

In an October 1690 letter to King William’s Secretary of State Charles Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, Leisler vented his feelings about one such opponent, Domine Godfrey Dellius: “Wee cannot omit to give an account of a more than ordinary Actor herein one Domine Dellius a Cockaran [i.e.

Cocceian] Minister at Albany aforesaid who ever inveighed against the Prince of Orange and despighted his Dignities, upon notice of this happy Revolucion preached to his Party (the [Albany] Convencion) the legality of the Authority set up by King James.”8 The grant’s wording appears nearly identical in separate sources: Nathaniel Bartlett Sylvester, Historical Sketches of Northern New York and the Adirondack Wilderness (Troy, N.Y., 1877), 264; and Hiland Hall, “The New York Dellius Patent,” in, Vol. III, Second Series (Morrisania, N.Y., 1868), 74.

6

David William Voorhees, “‘In behalf of the true Protestant religion’: The Glorious Revolution in New York,” PhD dissertation (New York University, 1988), 223–25.

7

8

DRCHNY 3:753.

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Dellius and other ministers saw things differently. Leisler, they concluded, wanted to cleanse provincial pulpits from any traces of modern, liberal influence. “Our ministers have been cast under suspicion through slanders against them,” reads a letter written by some of the affected ministers following Leisler’s 1691 arrest and execution. “Church officers and other members have been imprisoned and maltreated, put in irons, and confined in darkness. And not satisfied with doing such things, even the Sanctuary has been attacked with violence and open force. Domine Dellius, not being foolish enough to allow himself to be imprisoned, chose to fly and escaped to Boston.” In the minds of the affected pastors, Leisler’s actions had been criminal in nature, “done under pretext of pleasing King William, and as if for the sake of religion; but in fact everything done was contrary to law, to King William, and to the Protestant faith.”9 During the next half dozen years, Governors Henry Sloughter and Benjamin Fletcher showed favoritism to those who had opposed Leisler’s Rebellion. “He was a generous man,” wrote Enlightenment physician, scientist and surveyor Cadwallader Colden, “and gave the Kings Lands by parcels of upwards of One hundred thousand Acres to a man, and to some particular favourites four or five times that quantity.”10 But this anti-Leislerian sentiment was hardly ubiquitous. Members of Leisler’s family and supporters of his cause sought

to restore first his estate and then his muddied reputation.11 When anti-Leislerian Governor Benjamin Fletcher was recalled in 1697, King William attempted to balance the political scales by appointing a proLeislerian champion as the next governor— Richard Coote, the Earl of Bellomont.12 Ship Masts. While Bellomont focused his early gubernatorial efforts on dampening factional disputes in New York, he was unable for several months to pay attention to pressing issues up in Albany. This furtrading center on the provincial frontier was vulnerable to aggression from Canadian Governor Louis de Frontenac and his allied northern Indian tribes. Angered upon learning Fletcher had never officially written to Frontenac regarding the treaty ending King William’s War, Bellomont enlisted Peter Schuyler and Godfrey Dellius, who spoke French, to undertake a diplomatic mission in May and June 1698 north to Quebec to discuss the treaty and negotiate an exchange of prisoners.13 While Dellius canoed down Corlaer’s Lake north toward Quebec, he was able to scan the forests along the patent granted to him two years earlier. Many of the taller pine trees, he noticed, rose well above the tree line. These trees were highly desired by shipbuilders for making masts, especially for the king’s navy. So, the following spring, when lakes and rivers swelled with their annual floods, Dellius managed to float several dozen of these trees south to

Unseemly Company — Howard Pyle’s 1894 illustration in Harper’s Magazine titled “Sea Robbers of NY” depicts New York Governor Benjamin Fletcher consorting with Thomas Tew, one of several Atlantic pirates he invited into New York harbor. Fletcher’s association with pirates resulted in his recall to England. His replacement, the Earl of Bellomont, set about cleaning up Fletcher’s malfeasance, including revoking land patents Fletcher had doled out to his supporters.

the shipping harbor at New York. Meanwhile, Bellomont had learned of Dellius’s opposition to Leisler’s regime and had soured against him. “He used any story told by the Leislerian faction to vilify the cleric,” notes historian Koert Burnham.14 Curious when he saw the mast trees harvested by Dellius bobbing down the Hudson, Bellomont apparently first learned of Fletcher’s patent to Dellius. “I understand there are as good pines for masts of ships on the land granted to Mr Dellius by Colonel Fletcher as any are in New Hampshire, and a great number of them,” wrote Bellomont to the Lords of Trade on April 17, 1699, “and they may be floated on the river all the way for Yorke with little or no charge; so that for any thing I know the King may be much cheaper furnished with masts for his ships of war from thence than from Pescataqua in New Hampshire. I do not mean the land of Mr Dellius complained of by the Mohack Indians, but the other grant which is six times as big as that (it containing 86 miles in length and 20 miles broad.) as some say, and as others 16 miles.”15 His statement of an eighty-six-mile-long patent, as opposed to the “about” seventy-mile-long grant spelled out in the patent, turns out to be significant, as will be shown later.16 At over a half million acres (and 25 percent larger by Bellomont’s reckoning), the size of the Dellius Patent was staggering.

It was nearly the size of Rhode Island. If that wasn’t bad enough, there was virtually nothing in the way of taxes for the government. “Neither is there any reservation of quit Rent to the Crown,” complained Bellomont, “except one Raccoon’s skin pr annum, nor the liberty of cutting a tree or building a fort.”17 9 E. T. Corwin, ed. Ecclesiastical Records of the State of New York, 7 vols. (Albany, 1901–1916), 2:1042.

10 Cadwallader Colden, The Lands of New York 1732, Colden Manuscripts XIV (New York Historical Society, 1849), 380.

11 E. B. O’Callaghan, Documentary History of the State of New York. 4 vols. (Albany, 1865), 2:435–37(hereafter DHNY).

12

DRCHNY 4:261

13

Ibid., 340–41.

Koert Burnham “Godfrey Dellius: An Historical Obituary by a Protagonist,” in de Halve Maen 54:2 (Summer 1979), 14. Burnham’s essay is a good resource for additional biographical information on Dellius.

14

15 DRCHNY 4:503–504. The low-lying route along Wood Creek between Lake Champlain and the Hudson is now the path of the Champlain Canal from Fort Edward to Whitehall, New York.

16 Ecclesiastical Records 3:2193 also describes the patent as 86 miles in length.

17

DRCHNY 4:504.

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Making His Argument — Likely drawn to help Gov. Bellomont build his case against large land grants, this 1698 map has a number of interesting features. Water bodies shown as Cadaraque Lake and Corlars L. correspond with what we know today as Lakes Ontario and Champlain. Although there were several petitioners who received the patent along the Mohawk River (left side of map), the description singles out only one: “The land Contained between the marks being two miles in breadth on each side of the Maquas River and fifty in length was granted to Godfrey Dellius Anno 1697.” (Map courtesy of the State Library of New York).

Political Agenda. As part of his campaign against anti-Leislerians, Bellomont suggested the Dellius Patent and others should be revoked and the many thousands of acres instead be doled out as rewards for the king’s soldiers. “If this course had been taken twenty years ago,” he conjectured, “the Frontier towards Canada had by this time been so well peopled, that they would be able to make a stand against the French and their Indians.”18 Bellomont hoped to use the provincial Assembly to negate the Dellius, Mohawk and other large grants. “I much question whether I shall be able to get an Act pass’d in this Assembly to break all the fore mentioned extravagant grants of lands,” he wrote. “The parties concerned are jealous of my designe and are now indeavouring to preposesse the members of the Assembly with a thousand apprehensions about it; but as the Grantees are men that are generally much hated by the country I hope I may prevail to get a bill pass’d for the breaking part of the grants this Session, and will try to break the rest the next.”19 It is notable that Bellomont based his case for revoking the Mohawk River grant on objections from the nation’s sachems. There were no similar complaints from the Mohawks against the separate Dellius grant, as it was land they had claimed (but not populated) following many decades of Iroquois-Algonquin wars.20 Bellomont followed through with his plan to vacate the grants on May 12, 1699.

“I did with the advice and consent of the Council direct the Attorney General to

with the Seal of the Province, made by Colonel Fletcher, late Governor of this Province under His Majesty, unto Mr. Godfrey Dellius, bearing the Date the Third Day of September, One thousand six hundred ninety six, and Registred in the Secretary’s Office, containing a certain Tract of Land lying upon the East side of Hudsons-River, between the Northmost Bounds of Saraghtego and the Rock Rossian, containing about Seventy Miles in Length, and goes back into the Woods from the said HudsonsRiver Twelve Miles, until it comes unto the Wood Creek,23 and so far as it goes, be it Twelve Miles more or less from Hudsons-River, on the East-side, and from the said Creek by a Line Twelve Miles distant from the said River: To have and to hold the said Land and Appurtenances unto him the said Godfrey Dellius, his Heirs and Assigns for ever, under the Rent reserved of one RaccoonSkin per Annum.

prepare and bring in a bill for vacating the Extravagant grants of lands by Colonel Fletcher to Mr Dellius the Minister at Albany, to Colonel Bayard, to Captain Evans, to Collonell Caleb Heathcon, and to the Church,” he reported in an April 1699 letter.21 Claiming he had “advice and consent of the Council” was, however, an exaggeration. The Council had voted three to three on the measure, with dissenters like Stephanus van Cortlandt also having large grants that could be in jeopardy.22 As a result of the tie, Bellomont said, “I was obliged to give a casting vote for the Bill.”

In reality, the council proper did not give its consent. Like a swing vote on today’s Supreme Court, it had become Bellomont’s personal decision.

Sending the bill on to the Assembly, the Leislerian majority ratified the act, which reads as follows: An Act for Vacating, Breaking, and Annulling Several Extravagant Grants of Land made by Colonel Fletcher, late Governor of this Province under His Majesty.

Whereas their Excellencies the Lords Justices of England have, by their Instructions unto his Excellency the Governor, bearing the Date the Tenth Day of November, One thousand six hundred ninety eight, directed to his said Excellency, to use all legal Means for the Breaking of extravagant Grants of Land in this Province. And whereas there is an extravagant Grant of Land, sealed

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Also included in the Assembly’s bill was 18

Ibid.

19

Ibid., 506.

William Haviland and Marjory Power, The Original Vermonters: Native Inhabitants, Past and Present, revised edition (Hanover, 1994), 224–28.

20

21

DRCHNY 4:510.

Other grants in jeopardy included those to Frederick Phillipse, Stephanus van Cortlandt, Peter Schuyler, Robert Livingston, and even the early Dutch grant of Rensselaerswijck. Ibid., 514, 528.

22

23 By some accounts, Wood Creek ended not at today’s Whitehall, but at the narrows near Crown Point much farther north. See note 41.

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“The Red Line” — E. B. O’Callaghan’s map of land grants along the eastern shore of Lake Champlain marks off his understanding of the revoked Dellius Patent with a red line. This demarcation was later used by other historians arguing for either an east- or west-shore location of the patent. O’Callaghan’s determination of the patent’s upper end proved to be several miles short of the actual boundary.

revocation of the Mohawk River grant to Dellius and others. Alleging that “Godfrey Dellius has been the principal Instrument in Deluding the Mohaque Indians,” the legislature singled out the minister for special punishment: “that he ought to be, and is hereby suspended from the Exercise of his Ministerial Function in the City and County of Albany.”24 Pinpointing the Patent’s Location. Various interpretations regarding the location of the Dellius Patent make for an interesting historiography. E. B. O’Callaghan in 1849 published a map of colonial French and English grants along Lake Champlain, outlining the upper portion of the Dellius Patent with a red line showing the land lying on the east side of the big lake.25 According to the compilers of the New York Colonial Documents series, the Dellius patent “extended from Batten kill, in Washington county, New York, being the north bounds of the Saratoga patent, to Vergennes in the State of Vermont.”26 In essence, the patent began at the confluence of the Hudson and Batten Kill, followed the Hudson north to Fort Edwards, then proceeding northeast along the “Carry” and Wood Creek to the southern tip of Lake Champlain at today’s Whitehall, New York, and then following the east bank of Champlain to a point tra-

ditionally described as opposite from Split Rock, but on O’Callaghan’s map south of the point where Otter Creek empties into the lake.

Two decades later, former Vermont Governor Hiland Hall had a different interpretation, basing his thinking on a 1773 study by James Duane. Reading the grant’s vague description literally, he determined that the Dellius Patent was located not east, but west of Lake Champlain. Previous accounts, wrote Hall, claimed the grant included “a tract of land in Vermont twelve miles in width, lying on the east side of Lake Champlain, and extending some fifty miles in length from Fair and West Haven on the south to Charlotte on the north.” He said this theory “has hitherto been regarded as historical truth,” and noted that “its supposed northern boundary in Vermont has been designated and dignified by a special red line,” that being the red line outlining the patent on O’Callaghan’s map.

Hall came to a different conclusion.

“Upon no rational construction of the language of the grant, can it possibly be made to include a single acre of Vermont territory.” Because the original patent cited the Hudson as its western edge, and since the Hudson bent to the west and north from Fort Edwards, Hall claimed the “natural meaning” of the grant would indicate “the

land it describes is bounded all the way on the west by Hudson’s river.”

Hall claimed that “Rock Retsio” or “Rock Rossian,” commonly identified as Split Rock on the western bank of Lake Champlain, merely determined the latitude of the patent’s northern edge. “In the description of the tract, the Hudson river is beyond question a controlling boundary and can not be dispensed with, without making the language altogether unintelligible.” He adds, “No step can be taken towards sliding the west boundary of this grant over to the eastern shore of Lake Champlain without wrestling the language of the grant from its clear and obvious meaning.”28 Hall supports his theory by noting that Lake Champlain is not mentioned in the patent’s wording as a boundary. His research, however, does not appear to be complete, as there are actually several primary source references that do associate Champlain with the patent.

Although the French called it Lake Champlain after their own explorer, the English called it by other names, the most common of which was after fur trader Arent van Curler, who drowned in the lake while on a diplomatic mission to Quebec in 1667.

When Gov. Bellomont in 1699 was looking to revoke the Dellius Patent, he described it as lying “on the side of the Long Lake called Corlaer’s Lake or Iroquois, because that land is the most advanced towards Canada.”29 Bellomont’s statement proves the grant bordered on one side or the other of Lake Champlain, but it doesn’t in itself indicate which side. Proof that it was on the east side comes from a 1698 map Bellomont sent along to England with his proposal to revoke the grant. A copy of that map at the New York State Library shows the Dellius grant extending from the Hudson northward about half way up the east bank of Lake Champlain.

That map can by no means be considered geographically accurate, but it does show a few interesting generalities regarding relative positions. First, as noted above, it 24 Acts of Assembly Passed in Province of New-York from 1691, to 1718 (London 1719), 35–36.

25

DHNY 1:572.

26

DRCHNY 4:391n.

Fair Haven, Vermont, is located just over the New York border from Whitehall at the head of Lake Champlain.

27

Hiland Hall, The History of Vermont from its Discovery to Its Admission into the Union in 1791 (Albany, 1868), 488–95.

28

29

DRCHNY 4:503–504.

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Mistaken Identity — Hiland Hall, governor of the State of Vermont from 1858-1860, mistakenly argued that the 1896 Dellius Patent was not located on the eastern shore of Lake Champlain, but along the western shore of the Hudson River, as shown in this map from his 1868 History of Vermont.

cally meant to depict what today comprise Grand Isle County in Vermont. Dellius’s land is shown as ending opposite South Hero, Vermont, on the lower island.

shows conclusively that the grant was on the east side of the lake, land which the Mohawks considered theirs when they sold it to Dellius. Second, the map includes the river labeled Otter Kill. While it is grossly inaccurate as to its source and path, it shows the river’s entrance significantly well below the top edge of the Dellius Patent. Third, the only notable physical features shown within Corlaer’s Lake are two large islands, logi-

Rock Rogeo. Another point of puzzlement over the location of the grant stems from the description of its northern bounds, variously given as “Rock Retsio” in the original 1696 grant or “Rock Rossian” in the 1699 repeal. Primary sources are stingy with any other references to Rock Rossian, and it is unclear where this name comes from. There are, however, numerous references to Rock Retsio, often shown as Regeo or Rogeo.

Although this landmark doesn’t appear on the 1698 map or other early maps, it is commonly associated with the landmark now known as Split Rock, located at the end of a point at the northern tip of Split

Rock Mountain.

A present-day New York state historical marker claims Split Rock was determined to be the boundary between New France and colonial New York during the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht: “Split Rock, called Roche Regio by Indians,” proclaims the marker, calling it the “boundary between Mohawks and Algonquins, by Treaty of Utrecht conceded as limit of English dominions.” This message seems to be historically inaccurate, however. There is nothing in the treaty that mentions borders between English and French colonies in America.30 James Duane, in the 1773 study used

by Hall, also stated that Rock Retsio is the same as Split Rock, which he declared was a “station indisputable.”31 Hall claimed it was located 20 miles north of Crown Point.

Referring again back to the original grant, there is also no mention of Crown Point. It vaguely states only that the northern bound at Rock Retsio was “about 70 miles” north of its beginning at the Saratoga patent.

This measure, if accurate, does bring the top edge of the patent to the approximate latitude of Split Rock.

30 The closest it comes is article IX, which says “all and singular the subjects of each kingdom shall, in all countries and places, on both sides, have and enjoy at least the same privileges, liberties, and immunities, as to all duties, impositions, or customs whatsoever.”

“Peace and Friendship Treaty of Utrecht between Spain and Great Britain,” Wikisource, https://en.wikisource. org/wiki/Peace_and_Friendship_Treaty_of_Utrecht_between_Spain_and_Great_Britain#ARTICLE_IX, retrieved 11-24-2018.

31 Hall, 489. James Duane was one of New York’s representatives to the Continental Congress in 1775 who signed the Declaration of Independence.

Definitive Proof — This detail of the 1698 map reproduced earlier proves the Dellius Patent was on the east side of (from south to north) the Hudson River, “the Carrying Place,” Wood Creek and Lake Champlain. As noted by the description on the map, “This Tract of Land was granted to Godfrey Dellius Minister of Albany by Gov. Fletcher— Anno 1696.” But where was the northern edge of the patent, described in the patent as ending at Rock Retsio? (Map courtesy of the State Library of New York)

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“Historic” Marker — New York’s Education Department claims that Split Rock was the same as Rock Regio (or Retsio) that Mohawk’s claimed as the northern boundary of their territory in the colonial era.

It is problematic, however, that this landmark is on the western shore of Lake Champlain, and the Dellius Patent, which ended at Rock Retsio, was located along the opposite shore.

Washington County historian Chrisfield Johnson and early Lake Champlain scholar B. C. Butler also equated Rock Retsio with Split Rock.32 More recently, Shirley Dunn cites her agreement with Hall’s Split Rock model. “The north edge of the Dellius Patent was opposite the Rock Rossian or Regio (various spellings) on the west shore of the lake. This existing rock formation is at a narrow part of the lake. Also called Split Rock, the formation is a knob of land at the end of a rocky peninsula extending into Lake Champlain.” Dunn, giving no citation for the statement, adds “the north boundary of the Dellius Patent is also described as the mouth of Otter Creek.”33 None of the scholars mentioned above found it problematic that Split Rock is situated well east of Hall’s theorized location of the grant, and across the lake from O’Callaghan’s and Dunn’s understood location east of Lake Champlain. If the patent was on the east side, as the 1698 map proves, why would the bounds be identified by a rock on the opposite shore and not use the known location of the mouth of Otter Kill?

“Indisputable” or not, an analysis of primary sources dating back to the Leisler Rebellion shows Split Rock was most definitely not the northern border of the Dellius Patent.

Digging Through the Sources. During the opening days of King William’s War, Albany formed a “convention” of officials

and military officers looking to bulk up its defensive posture against Canadian-French aggression. They dispatched Ensign Abraham Schuyler and Capt. Gerrit Teunisse to a spot on Lake Champlain today known as Chimney Point in Vermont, located across from Crown Point. Their assignment was to watch for “any Enemy French or Indians that might come to this governmt to doe any mischief.”34

By January of 1690, the mouth of Otter Creek had become the lookout point of choice for the concerned residents of northern New York province. Albany on January 20 enlisted a band of Mohawk Indians “to goe out as Skouts towards ye lake and otter creek to wat[c]h ye Designe of yt Deceiver ye Govr of Canada.” 35 Again on March 31, several weeks after the devastating Schenectady massacre, fearful Albany officials sent Abraham Schuyler, now promoted to captain, with a collection of Mohawk and Schaghticoke scouts to advance “seven miles beyond the Crownpoint unto the Otter-creek, or some other better place or Rendesvous which you may consider more suitable safer and more advantageous.” Convention officials also sanctioned the Indians to “proceed from the aforesaid Otterkill to Canada as Spies, to reconnoitre or to take prisoners… provided the post at the aforesaid Otterkill or your sojourn, shall always remain fully established.”36 These references show an evolution of understanding about the geography of

Lake Champlain, or what they referred to as Corlaer’s Lake, moving from Crown Point to Otter Kill and points further north.

Another reference shows the next stage in this evolution. Major Peter Schuyler, during his 1691 expedition against Canada, recorded in his journal for July 23: “We sent out nine spyes vizt 3 Christians, three Mohawks and three River Indians, who advanced from Crowne point toward Regio, 30 miles distant.”37 This marks the earliest known reference to the rock in New York records. Although this reference is murky as to which side of the lake “Regio” is on, it appears that, at “30 miles distant,” it is much further north from Crown Point than Split Rock as later analysts deduced.

It was five years later when Fletcher granted Godfrey Dellius the huge land patent along the Hudson River and Lake Champlain, using “Rock Retsio” as the top edge. About a year after the Dellius Patent’s revocation, Albany Alderman David 32 Chrisfield Johnson, History of Washington County, New York (Philadelphia, 1878), 15; Benjamin Clapp Butler, Lake George and Lake Champlain from Their First Discovery to 1759, second edition (New York and Albany, 1869), 17.

33 Shirley Dunn, The River Indians:Mohicans Making History (Fleishmanns, N.Y., 2009), 59.

34 Minutes of the Albany Convention 1689–1690, Jacob Leisler Institute for the Study of Early New York History.

Although the collection is reproduced in DHNY 2:80–178, it is missing the opening pages from June 24–July 31, 1689, which are included in the Leisler Institute collection.

35

DHNY 2:86.

36

Ibid., 113.

37

DRCHNY 3:802-803.

Western Shore Landmark — A steam-powered paddle wheeler cruises past Split Rock Point and Lighthouse along the shore of Lake Champlain, opposite Thompson Point in Vermont, in this 1872 Americana sketch. (Wikimedia Commons).

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Schuyler took advantage of a short lull in the wars to travel to Canada. In an August 1700 memorial to Bellomont, Schuyler wrote “that he went to Canada this spring and that in the going thither the French Guards (sent out from Canada to prevent the transportatcôn of Beavers from thence) mett him with a canoe within the bounds of this Government at the Otter Creek eighteen miles on this side of the Rodgio the great Rock that is in Corlaers Lake, but they having no beavers and being stronger than the French had no contest or dispute wth them.”38 This source again indicates that the rock and the accepted upper bounds of New York province were both well north of Split Rock.

Later Sources. Several decades later, during another in the relentless series of French and Indian Wars, Canadian forces had pushed south and built a fort on Crown Point called Fort St. Frederick. This caused considerable concern among the northern English colonies, not only due to the increased possibility of devastating attacks, but also due to the potential loss of territory. Former Massachusetts Gov. William Shirley, who had earlier launched a failed attack against Crown Point, sailed to England in 1750, stopping in France to lodge complaints about the fort. While there, he wrote for assistance from New York’s aging Surveyor General Cadwallader Colden.

“I have directions from Govr Shirley to send him all the proofs I can of the Rights & claim of the Lands at or near Crown point or towards Canada,” he wrote to his son John in November 1749.39 Colden was able to collect at least three depositions, including one dated April 1, 1750, from fur trader John Henry Lydius, who testified: that he hath frequently heard both from the Mohawk & Caknawage40 Indians & that for about these twenty five years past that the Land Northward of Saraghtoga as far as the Rock Regeo did & does belong to the Mohawks which Rock is scituated on the Lake Champlain about ten leagues North from Crown Point, neither hath he ever heard of any other Rock called by the Indians Rogeo, Rogeo being a Mohawk word & the name of a Mohawk Indian who was drown’d as the Indians say in the Lake Champlain near that Rock long before the Christians came amongst them from whence the Mohawks call both the Rock and the Lake Rogeo . . . And he this Deponent hath always heard that the

purchase made by Godfrey Dellius in the year 1696 was commonly esteemed to extend to the Rock Rogeo.41 Ten leagues, as mentioned in Lydius’s deposition, equals about 34 miles. He doesn’t disclose on which side of the lake Rock Rogeo is situated. Also, the Mohawk story of a drowning Indian proves to be a distortion of a borrowed Algonquin myth, as explained later.

Two other depositions were recorded in March of the same year. Trader John Grosbeck told Colden: The Entrance into Corlaers Lake is near the French Fort at Crown Point from whence it is by Computation about forty five Miles Northerly to the Rock Rogeo which lies near the Eastern Shore of said Lake and nearly opposite to Corlaers Island on the West side of the said Lake That the deponent hath been to Canada and always heard that the said Rock is the Rock called Rogeo And the deponent further saith that he hath heard the same so called both by Frenchmen & Indians.42 Here is a wealth of clues, not the least of which is that Groesbeck places Rock Rogeo a full 45 miles north of Crown Point and along the east shore of the lake. Groesbeck also provides another landmark—Corlaer’s Island on the west shore. There is no island today called Corlaer’s Island, but there is one named Schuyler Island, and it lies near a natural cove today called Corlaer’s Bay, near the Ausable Chasm tourist attraction.

Schuyler Island is also nearly directly opposite the city of Burlington, Vermont.

Another affidavit was drafted by Capt.

Peter Winne, trader and former Assembly representative, on the back of the Groesbeck deposition: Captain Winne says the same with Messrs Livingston & Groesbeck that he has been from Albany to Canada six or seven times that he is well acqd With the Rock Rogeo in the Lake Champlain & to the best of his Remembrance he was once upon the Rock that he has heard both French & Indians as they pass’d near the Rock make offerings by throwing Pipes Tobacca or other things into the Lake near the Rock and calling upon the Name Rogeo That the dept hath always heard & understood that the Purchase made by Godfried Dellius extended to this Rock.43

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Winne’s deposition gives us another important clue about the actual identity of Rock Rogeo by introducing the theme of French Indians (probably Catholic Mohawks from Caughnawaga) throwing pipes and tobacco toward the rock.

One other primary source reference comes by way of a journal kept by Col. Louis Franquet, inspector of fortifications for the French government in Canada, who in August 1752 made a trip from Fort St. Jean on the Richeleau River to Fort St. Frederick at Crown Point. On August 11, Franquet and his group encamped along the lake’s west shore “at about the same altitude (i.e. latitude) as the Four Winds Islands.” Now called the Four Brothers Islands, they are located across the lake and somewhat south from Burlington. As Fran38

DRCHNY 4:748.

Cadwallader Colden, The Letters and Papers of Cadwallader Colden 1711–[1775], volume 9, in Collections of the New York Historical Society for the Year 1935 (New York, 1937), 68:45-46.

39

40 Caughnawaga Indians were Mohawks from a similarly named village on the Mohawk river who had been converted

by French priests and relocated to a new village on the St. Lawrence river southwest of Montreal.

41 DRCHNY 6:569. John Henry Lydius was the son of Domine John Lydius, who replaced Godfrey Dellius as pastor of the Albany Reformed Church in 1699. Dellius, for his part of the pulpit exchange, took over Lydius’s position as pastor of the Reformed Church in Antwerp, Belgium.

John Henry was familiar with the land encompassed by the former Dellius Patent as he had purchased two parcels from Mohawk Indians, one along Wood Creek and the other along the northern end of Otter Creek, which is the one he references in his deposition. [Hiram Augustus Huse, The New Hampshire Grants: Being Transcripts of the Charters of Townships (Concord, N.H., 1895), 618.]

42 Colden, 66. This deposition provides an example of the claim that Wood Creek extended all the way to the narrows between Crown and Chimney Points.

43

Ibid., 67.

Opposite page: Northern Bounds — Created near the end of the last French and Indian War, the 1762 Brasier Map shows how the British reclaimed Lake Champlain from the French. Relevant points, labeled in red, show how today’s Rock Dunder, which the Abenakis called Odzihozo and the Mohawks corrupted to Rodsio, was a good deal north of Split Rock.

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Resting Place of a God — This attractive picture graces a page on the Lake Champlain International website that tells the story of Odzihozo, an Abenaki demigod who created the beautiful lake and then turned himself into a rock so he could forever admire his handiwork. Today the small island near Burlington Bay is known as Rock Dunder.

quet embarked at first light on August 12, he noted a couple of landmarks across the lake, identifying the islands of Woinoustic and Rodziou.”44 On his return journey, he added a key detail when passing these islands again, calling the latter “celle au calumet, l’isle Rodziou,” which translates as “that of the pipe, Rodzio Island.” 45 Notice that pipe motif again, coming now from a totally independent source.

Although not a primary source of information, there is one other reference that helps explain the name of the rock island.

In the late nineteenth century, William M. Beauchamp did an extensive study of Iroquois place names for the state of New York. “Re-gi-ogh’-ne is one form of a name on Lake Champlain,” explains Beauchamp. “In 1763, after ceding a large tract of their Canadian relations, [William] Johnson said the Iroquois claimed ‘from Regioghne a Rock at the East side of said

lake to Oswegatche.’” He further explains that the Iroquois also referred to Lake Champlain as Lake Rodsio. “Ro’-ge-o,” he adds, “is the same word, and was the name of a rock which marked the boundary of the home territory of the Mohawks on Lake Champlain.” Beauchamp cites a reference from the mid-eighteenth century, attributed to the Rev. Henry Barclay, saying “the Mohawks have a word in their language called rotsio, corruptly pronounced rogeo; it is the name of a rock in Corlaer’s lake, or Lake Champlain.”46 As it turns out, the Mohawk word Rotsio or Rogeo is a distortion of a name borrowed from their archenemies, the Algonquins.

Name Grounded in Mythology. Evidence from our various primary sources proves convincingly that Rock Retsio or Rogeo cannot be the same as Split Rock. It has to be a rock well north of that location and located along the east side of the lake. There is, in fact, another distinctive rock formation located about 2,000 feet off Shelburne Point, just south of Burlington, Vermont. It is now known as Rock Dunder.

In a presentation for Vermont Public Radio a few years ago, State Archeologist Jess Robinson explained that Dunder is a later name for the small island given by the British navy in the era of the Revolutionary and 1812 Wars. That was not, however, the name by which the indigenous population knew it, he noted. To the local Abenaki Indians, the island was known as Oodzee-hozo, named for an Algonquin mythological figure.47 Oodzee-hozo, also frequently spelled Odzihozo, was thought to be a demigod with limited creative powers. He created himself, first growing a head and then arms. Before his legs were fully grown,

Odzihozo began dragging himself around the landscape of New England, forming mountains, rivers and lakes in his path.

“Odzihozo’s last work was Lake Champlain,” explain authors William Haviland and Marjory Power. “So pleased was he with this masterpiece that he climbed onto a rock and changed himself into stone so that he could sit there and enjoy it through the ages.” A significant piece of history has been all but forgotten, the authors feel. “It is too bad that the rock as it appears today is labeled ‘Rock Dunder’; it really ought to be called by its proper name.”48 The late Rutgers anthropologist Gordon M. Day studied the linguistic closeness of the names Odzihozo and Rogeo. “At one time or another a rock, an island, a point, and a lake or part of a lake have borne similar names, variously spelled . . . under the rubric ‘Rogeo.’ ” He points to the “possibility that the Iroquois original of the variants of Rogeo might be borrowed from the Abenaki’s Odzihozo.”

Day remarked on a peculiar morphologic feature regarding “the initial r, which is necessary in Mohawk but not in Abenaki.”

By adding that r to Odzihozo and dropping the final (Day calls it “locative”) syllable, the result becomes R’odziho, which to colonial English/Dutch ears became vari44 Louis Franquet, Voyages et memoires sur la Canada (Quebec, 1889), 65. Translation from Vermont Historic Sites website, https://historicsites.vermont.gov/sites/historicsites/files/Documents/directory/chimney_point/Chimney%20Point%20New%20France%20Map%20%26%20 Document%20Activity.pdf, retrieved 11-18-2018.

45 Ibid., 79. Calumet was the French word for an Indian ceremonial smoking pipe used in ritual observances.

Beauchamp, 73–74. The Oswegatchie River empties into the St. Lawrence at today’s Ogdensburg, N.Y.

46

47 Erin Lucey, “A Small Rock in Lake Champlain Has Deep Roots in Abenaki Mythology,” 2014, http://digital.vpr.net/ post/small-rock-lake-champlain-has-deep-roots-abenakimythology#stream/0, retrieved 11-11-2018.

48

Haviland and Power, 193.

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ously Retsio and Rogeo.49 VPR, in their feature on the rock island, added another key piece of information.

“For hundreds of years, the Abenaki would go and offer pipes and tobacco to Oodzeehozo to smoke.” Robinson explains, “It was thought that if you allowed Oodzee-hozo to smoke, he would be calm and the winds would be calm for safe voyages across and up and down the lake.”50 This then ties in with Capt. Peter Winne’s 1750 deposition about his French and Indian companions whom he heard “as they pass’d near the Rock make offerings by throwing Pipes Tobacca or other things into the Lake near the Rock and calling upon the Name Rogeo.” It also meshes with Col. Franquet’s statement about a rock called the place “of the ceremonial pipe.”

Combined with the consistent testimony that Rogeo was located well north (35 to 45 miles) of Crown Point on the east side of the lake, there can be little doubt that Rock Rogeo is the same landmark known today as Rock Dunder. It does, however, greatly expand the original seventy-mile scope of the Dellius Patent some fifteen miles further north of Split Rock. Recall, though, that Bellomont had reported the Dellius Patent to be eighty-six miles in length, bringing it very close to the unique rock near Burlington that the Native Americans worshipped as a lesser god.

When Dellius petitioned Gov. Fletcher for his patent in 1696, there was no point of reference for the rock island at the top of the grant other than the memory of what they’d heard. Dellius had purchased the land from Mohawks rather than Algonquins, and following Day’s theory about the Mohawks’ use of an initial r, it appears that the Algonquin’s Odzihozo morphed to R’odsio and from there to Retsio in the Mohawk language. Over time, this standardized to Rogeo, as it was consistently written in Colden’s communications from 1750.

One unique perspective on the story of the rock and its inner spirit comes from the creative pen of Margaret M. Bruchac, an anthropology professor at the University of Pennsylvania with Abenaki ancesters.

Her poem “Corlaer’s Backside” claims Arent van Curler’s death resulted from his failure to pay homage to the deity of the rock. Instead, goes the story, he flashed his naked backside, which caused the insulted Odzihozo to blow up the sudden storm that caused the Dutchman’s drowning.

He goes by many names, this rock

“Rock Dunder” say the locals, with no explanation “Rock Rogeo” say some, who misspeak Algonkian “Odzihozo” say the Abenaki standing on the other side gesturing carefully, respectfully, from a distance towards the one who shaped himself from nothing and to the powerful underwater grand fathers who surround him this being who sits at the center of the lake.

His needs are few his hungers easily satisfied a little tobacco, a pipe, even some silver to calm the waters a small prayer can guarantee safe passage 51 Return to the Old Country. In the legislative act to repeal the Dellius grant, the Leislerian party appended an amendment to dismiss Dellius from his position as minister. This didn’t sit well with his congregation at Albany. In a letter dated May 22, 1699, parishioners of the Dutch Reformed Church of Albany wrote to the Classis of Amsterdam opposing his removal.

We, the undersigned, members of the Church of Jesus Christ in the City and County of Albany, learning that our very worthy and much beloved pastor, Domine Godfridus Dellius, has for certain reasons fully resolved, to return to the Fatherland, or at least to make a voyage to England; by which we run the risk of being deprived for some time, at least, of his faithful administration of the Gospel and his greatly edifying teachings, which we have enjoyed with so great satisfaction during sixteen years past, and desire always to enjoy: Therefore we, with the addition of the desires and tears of many pious souls, make request, that, as speedily as possible, he will return, for the building up of God’s Church and the salvation of our souls; we will then receive him with the greatest joy and with most loving embraces; not doubting but the Rev. Consistory will also do their utmost in this regard.52

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In addition, Elders Dirck Wessels ten Broeck and Peter Schuyler were among church lay leaders who signed an accompanying testimonial to Dellius.53 Other statements supporting Dellius came from his congregations at Schenectady and Kingston. Not surprisingly, former Gov. Benjamin Fletcher also voiced support for Dellius. “I stand astounded that I now hear you accused of any immorality,” he wrote the domine, “or that you are a Jesuit or Jacobite. But what will not some men do to gratify spite?”54 Bellomont noted that Dellius was not taking the loss of his large land grants passively but “is gon to England to complain and try to hinder the King’s approving that Act, which breaks his and some few other grants.”55 Although the revocation of the grants was eventually upheld in English courts, Dellius fared better in religious circles. Support of their departed minister by his American congregation had a positive impact on the high church officials in the Netherlands. “We first tried to persuade the Rev. Dellius to return,” they said in a March 29, 1700, letter to various New York churches.56 Dellius declined. Having defended his reputation successfully, he stayed in Europe to minister at churches including Antwerp, Belgium, (Domine Lydius’s former church) and at Halsteren in North Brabant, Netherlands.

Domine Godfrey Dellius died in 1738.

The tale of his patent, however, lived on.

As noted above, Cadwallader Colden used details of the patent to defend New York’s territorial claims against French incursion during the 1750s. Following the end of the French and Indian War of 1754–1763, Colden used this knowledge once again in defending New York’s borders against Governor Benning Wentworth, who carved out town charters in present-day Vermont, commonly known as the New Hampshire Grants.

49 Gordon M. Day, “Abenaki Place-Names in the Champlain Valley” in In Search of New England’s Native Past: Selected Essays (Amherst, Mass., 1998), 254.

50

Lucey, Small Rock.

Margaret M. Bruchac, “Corlaer’s Backside” in Dreaming Again: Algonkian Poetry (Greenville Center, N.Y., 2012), 16. Bruchac’s likely source for the story of Van Curler’s drowning is Cadwallader Colden, The History of the Five Indian Nations (New York, 1727), 23–24.

51

52

Ecclesiastical Records 2: 1305–1306.

53

Ibid., 1306–1308.

54

Ibid., 1351–1353.

55

Col. Docs., 4:533.

56

Ecclesiastical Records 2: 1348.

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Here and There in New Netherland Studies Annual Dinner of the New Netherland Institute

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URING THE ANNUAL DINNER of the New Netherland Institute, which followed the New Netherland Institute’s 41st Annual Conference on September 22, 2018, exciting new research by New Netherland scholars was recognized. The dinner was held at LaSerre Restaurant in downtown Albany, with Stephen McErleane serving as master of ceremonies.

The presentation of the prestigious 2018 Clague and Carol Van Slyke Article Prize was awarded to Rogier van Kooten and Reinoud Vermoesen for their article “Peasants’ Paradise: A Comparison of Kings County, New York, and Inland Flanders Economies in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” The article was originally published in the Spring 2017 issue of de Halve Maen.

The 2018 Annual Hendricks Award was presented to Dr. Wim Klooster for his book The Dutch Moment: War, Trade, and Settlement in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World, published by Cornell University Press in 2016. The Annual Hendricks Award is given to the best book or book-length manuscript relating to any aspect of the Dutch colonial experience in North America until the American Revolution. In his masterful work, Klooster reveals how the Dutch created and eventually lost an Atlantic empire that stretched from the homeland in the Low Countries to the Hudson River Valley and from Brazil and the Caribbean to the African Gold Coast.

The evening’s featured speaker was Ian Stewart. Stewart is owner of New Netherland Timber Framing and Preservation, a small group of craftspeople located in Ghent, New York, and dedicated to the preservation of the American-built heritage located. Stewart’s talk, “‘As pleasant a land as one can tread upon’: Netherlandish Architecture in the Hudson Valley,” appeared as an article in the Summer 2018 issue of de Halve Maen. In his PowerPoint presentation, Stewart focused on Dutch building practices in the Hudson River Valley and surrounding regions from the West Indian

Ian Stewart’s presentation on Hudson River Valley architecture before the New Netherland Institute Annual Dinner on September 22, 2018.

Company period through the first decades of the nineteenth century. Drawing on industrial, agricultural, and residential Old and New World examples, Stewart focused on Dutch timber framing and introduced the language associated with it to help redefine the development of a vernacular architecture in the region.

Handel-Krom Lecture in Hudson River Valley History

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N THURSDAY October 18, Susannah Shaw Romney presented a lecture at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York, titled “Who Built Dutch New York?

Personal Ties and Imperial Connections in the Seventeenth-Century Hudson River Valley.” In this talk, Dr. Romney focused on how the relationships and networks formed

by Dutch settlers, Native American, and enslaved Africans “created a unique culture in New Netherland that defined the region for centuries.”

Dr. Romney is an assistant professor of history at New York University specializing in the seventeenth-century Dutch empire.

Published in such academic journals as

The William and Mary Quarterly her book New Netherland Connections: Intimate Networks and Atlantic Ties in SeventeenthCentury America (2014) has garnered awards from the New Netherland Institute, the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture.

The Handel-Krom Lecture in Hudson River Valley History series was established through the generosity of Shirley and Bernard Handel and Lt. Col. Gilbert A. Krom, U.S. Army Retired, “to promote knowledge and appreciation for the rich history of this unique and important region of America.”

The Hudson River Valley Institute is the academic arm of the Hudson River Valley National Heritage Area. Its mission is to study and promote the Hudson River Valley and to provide educational resources for heritage tourists, scholars, elementary school educators, environmental organizations, the business community, and the general public. Its projects include the publication of the Hudson River Valley Review and the management of a digital library and regional portal site. The Hudson River Valley Insitute is supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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Society Activities

Sarah Bogart Cooney Named Society Executive Director

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OLLAND SOCIETY MEMBER Mrs. Sarah Bogart Cooney has been named Executive Director of the Holland Society of New York. Mrs. Cooney replaces Odette Fodor-Gernaert, who retired from the Holland Society on September 13. Ms. Fodor-Gernaert had joined The Holland Society as the Society’s Executive Director in 2016. Mrs. Cooney had been assisting Ms. Godor-Gernaert since 2017 as well as being copy editor of de Halve Maen.

Mrs. Cooney is the daughter of Colonel Adrian T. Bogart III, and granddaughter of former Trustee Adrian T. Bogart Jr. She has actively participated in Society events since becoming a Member in 2016. Among her capacities outside of the office, she has served as the Society’s Captain of the Burger Guard, been involved in organizing the banquet and other functions, and helped prepare for the end of the Society’s lease at 20 West 44th Street in Manhattan and move to new quarters on East 44th Street.

Mrs. Cooney has revived the monthly Holland Society newsletter and created an active social media presence for the Society.

She has, with Dr. David Voorhees, started publishing de Halve Maen digitally while maintaining its print presence. In addition, she maintains and updates the website and manages membership communications.

Ms. Cooney was born in New York City

and moved to Maryland at the age of four.

She attended St. Timothy’s School outside of Baltimore, Maryland, and the University of Colorado at Boulder, from which she graduated cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology. She has previously worked for Dumbarton Oaks, a Harvard institution, as the research associate in the publications department. She also worked for SAGE Publications as an assistant editor in the video editorial department.

In addition to the Holland Society of New York, she is an associate member of the Holland Dames, a member of the New York Junior League, the University Club, and the Seawanhaka Corinthian Yacht Club. She is married to Stephen Cooney, and they have a son, Frederick.

Niagara Frontier Branch Meeting

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HE HOLLAND SOCIETY of New York’s Niagara Branch held their annual dinner meeting Saturday, October 27, 2018, at the Saturn Club in Buffalo, New York. The guest speaker was Russell Shorto, author of the best-selling The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the

Forgotten Colony That Shaped America.

Mr. Shorto gave a fascinating presentation about his most recent book, Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom. It provided attendees an opportunity to gain the insiders perspective about this book and why the American Revolution may still be evolving today in our understanding of individual freedoms.

A convivial group of forty attendees thoroughly enjoyed the annual meeting and an extended opportunity to reconnect with Mr. Shorto. He had attended the Niagara Branch Meeting in 2004, when his Island at the Center of the World book was just being released.

Members, Friends, and guests in attendance were: Barb Lazier, Amy Lazier Schaefer, David and Molly Quackenbush, Adrian Quackenbush, Russell Shorto, Glen and Susan Van Buskirk, Scott and Margaret Jean Van Buskirk, Ted Van Deusen, Larry Van Deusen, Robert Van Deusen, Connie and Walter Constantine, Ted Constantine, Tom Schofield, Tom and Rose Bailey, Robert Butcher, Robert and Janie Constantine, Jad and Shelly Cordes, Mike and Marilee Keller, Phillip Kiefer, David and Karen Rumsey, Hank and Tricia Semmelhack, Sara Buxton Smith and Stephen Smith, Robert and Jean Spampata, and Richard and Jane Griffin.

Left: Niagara Frontier Branch Members gather for a group portrait.

Right: Niagara Branch gathering for dinner at the elegant Saturn Club in Buffalo, New York.

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In Memoriam Michael David Dingman Holland Society of New York Life Member Michael David Dingman died of cancer on October 3, 2017, at his home in Lyford Cay, The Bahamas, at the age of eighty-six. Mr. Dingman was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on September 29, 1931, son of James E. Dingman and Ameilia Williamson. He claimed descent from Adam Dingman, who migrated from Haarlem, Holland, to New Netherland in 1663.

Mr. Dingman attended the Hun School in Princeton, New Jersey, graduating in 1951. He then enrolled at the University of Maryland, where he joined Theta Chi fraternity, but at age twenty he left the university before graduating to work as a salesman for a New Jersey flagpole company. In 1962, he joined Burnham and Company, rising to become in 1970 a partner in the firm and was assigned to the initial public stock offering of the predecessor of Temple-Inland Inc. While at Burnham, he also became president and chief executive officer of Equity Corp. Mr. Dingman became president or chief executive officer of Wheelabrator-Frye, Inc., The Signal Companies, and Allied-Signal. But he is best known in the investment community as what one major magazine called a “deal maker extra-ordinaire.”

In 1985, Mr. Dingman left the presidency of Allied-Signal to head the Henley Group, an amalgam of thirty-five companies that Allied-Signal did not want. Many of the holdings of the Henley Group were losing money when Mr. Dingman took the helm.

The next spring, he took the Henley Group public for a record $1.2 billion, which at the time was the largest initial public stock offering in United States history. Analysts said it was Dingman’s reputation and force of personality that made the investment appealing on Wall Street. Restless, a quick decision-maker, with what one reporter called “the mien of an affable Marine Corps general,” Dingman helped establish an investment philosophy that many other financial leaders have since followed. He bought companies at a discount when they were struggling and their prices were low.

He then reworked them, often cutting costs and increasing efficiency, and sold them or

spun them off at a substantial profit when prices recovered.

With the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in the 1980s, Mr. Dingman began to invest internationally, particularly in Russia and other former Soviet Union states. He put money into oil and water companies, telecommunications, and venture capital. He later moved onto the Czech Republic and China, with investments in biotech, clean energy, transportation, healthcare, manufacturing, natural resources and real estate. He created a program under which his top executives could buy five percent of the company’s stock, the intent being to give them incentive to become more entrepreneurial. He moved Henley’s headquarters to a location overlooking the Pacific in La Jolla, California; he had another home in Aspen.

He established the Shipston Group in 1991.

Mr. Dingman also served as a director of the Ford Motor Company, Time Inc., and Time Warner Inc., Mellon Bank Corporation, Temple Industries, Temple-Inland, Continental Telephone, and Teekay Shipping. He became a non-executive director of GeoPark Limited in 2017.

Mr. Dingman married Jean Hazelwood on May 16, 1953, in Elkton, Maryland. The couple had three children, Michael David Dingman Jr., born on February 13, 1954, in Plainfield, New Jersey, Linda Channing Dingman, born on June 2, 1955, in Plainfield, New Jersey, and James Clifford Dingman, born on August 26, 1957, in Glen Cove, New York. Mr. Dingman married for his second wife Elizabeth Tharp in Manhattan on April 13, 1984, and had three sons, James (“Jamie”) Tharp Dingman, born on October 30, 1973, David Ross Dingman, born on January 3, 1986, and Patrick Michael Dingman, born on June 2, 1990, all in San Diego, California.

Mr. Dingman became increasingly active as a philanthropist, giving money to support education, hospitals, the environment and social agencies that supported people through tough economic times. “To see the average working man suffer is more than we care to witness without trying to do something about it,” he said in 1992.

In 1995, Mr. Dingman became a citizen of the Bahamas. In the Bahamas he and his wife, Elizabeth, rebuilt the Lyford Cay International School, helping double its

enrollment and achieve international accreditation. They also led the building of St. Paul the Apostle Catholic Church outside Lyford; for this work he was awarded the knighthood Order of Saint Sylvester Pope and Martyr. He founded the Michael D. Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland, a center that encourages entrepreneurship and provides mentoring to emerging growth companies around the world. He later led the founding of the Centre for Entrepreneurship at the College of the Bahamas.

He was a donor to and trustee of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the John A. Hartford Foundation. In 1989, the University of Maryland awarded him an honorary doctorate of science in business and management. In that same year The Holland Society of New York awarded him its Distinguished Achievement Medal to Members for Corporate Leadership. In his spare time, Mr. Dingman liked to restore classic cars Mr. Dingman is survived by his wife, Elizabeth, daughter Linda Dingman Cady, sons Michael David Dingman Jr. of Erie, Colorado, James Tharp Dingman of Exeter, New Hampshire, Patrick Michael Dingman of Exeter, New Hampshire, David Ross Dingman of Exeter, New Hampshire, and James Clifford Dingman of Santa Ynez, California. All his sons are Life Members of The Holland Society. A funeral took place on October 7, 2017, at Little Pipe Cay, Exumas, Bahamas. Mr. Dingman was cremated.

Adolphe Riviere Edward Roome IV Holland Society of New York Member Adolphe (“Dolphe”) Riviere Edward Roome IV died on July 26, 2018, in Riverside, California, at the age of seventy-two.

Mr. Roome was born on March 19, 1946, in Los Angeles, California, son of Adolphe Riviere Edward Roome III and Edith May Davis. Mr. Roome claimed descent from Willem Janszen Roome, who immigrated to New Netherland from Werekendam, North Brabant, in 1659. Mr. Roome joined the Holland Society in 2009.

Mr. Roome attended Hollywood Pro-

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fessional School, a private school in Hollywood, California, for children working in show business, graduating in 1963. Mr. Roome was particularly interested in genealogy and history.

Mr. Roome married Lucy Borden Mason on December 16, 1963, in Boise, Idaho. The couple had four children: Katharine Elizabeth Roome, born on February 22, 1971, Alicia Marie Roome, born on October 14, 1975, Adolphe Riviere Edward Roome V, born on October 23, 1977, and Aaron Edward Roome, born on September 23, 1979. Mr. Roome’s wife Lucy died on April 6, 2000, in Cathedral City, Riverside, California. Mr. Roome married for his second wife Patricia Anne Robbins on October 20, 2008.

Mr. Roome is survived by his wife, Patricia, daughter Katharine Roome Smith and Alicia Roome Inskeep, sons Adolphe R. Roome V and Aaron Edward Roome, and thirteen grandchildren. Acheson and Graham Garden of Prayer of Mortuary Riverside, California, handled the funeral arrangements. Funeral and graveside services were held on Friday, August 3, 2018.

John Richard Voorhis III Holland Society of New York Life Member John Richard Voorhis III died on August 13, 2018, in Richmond, Virginia, at the age of eighty-eight. Dr. Voorhis was a former Holland Society Trustee, Vice President, and Branch President. He was born in Nyack, New York, on June 21, 1930, son of George Voorhis and Louise Maggiolo. He claimed descent from Steven Coerte van Voor Hees from Hees, Drenthe, who emigrated to New Netherland in 1660, settling in New Amersfort, Long Island. Dr. Voorhis had been a member of The Holland Society since 1960. His great-greatgrandfather John Richard Voorhis was a Charter Member of the Holland Society of New York in 1885.

Dr. Voorhis was raised in Piermont, New York. He graduated from Tappan Zee High School. He received a Bachelor

of Arts degree from Columbia College in 1952, Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees from Columbia University School of Optometry in 1954, and a Doctor of Optometry degree from Massachusetts College of Optometry, Boston, in 1956. In 1961, Dr. Voorhis also received a certificate in children’s vision from the Gesell Institute of Child Development. During the Korean War, Dr. Voorhis served in the US Army SP-4, from 1954 to 1956.

Dr. Voorhis married Janet Louise Kraissl at the First Presbyterian Church in Port Jefferson, New York, on March 28, 1953.

The couple had two children, Charles John Voorhis, born on June 17, 1955, in Lawton, Oklahoma, and Amy Louise Voorhis, born on September 28, 1959, in Hackensack, New Jersey. Janet Louise Voorhis was a Friend in the Holland Society of New York.

She preceded her husband in death on April 10, 2018.

Dr. Voorhis practiced optometry in Ridgewood, New Jersey, for thirty-five years before retiring to Florida. He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Optometry, President of the Bergen-Passaic Society in 1969, awarded Optometrist of the Year in 1969, and was Founder of the Vision Crusade Foundation, a joint venture of optometrists and the NJ District 16A of the Lions Club, which built, staffed, and operated one of the nation’s first eye mobile clinics.

Dr. Voorhis also served as a member of the Board of Directors of Gesell Institute of Child Development Visual Research Fund in New Haven, Connecticut, from 1972–1982, as well as on the Professional Advisory Board of the University Optometric Center, State College of Optometry, SUNY, New York City, from 1972 to 1978.

The SUNY Optometric Center operated in Manhattan one of the largest outpatient eye clinics in the United States. Following his retirement, Dr. Voorhis and his wife summered in Belle Terre, Long Island, New York, and wintered in Tequest, Florida.

Dr. Voorhis was an active Member of The Holland Society. He served as Branch President of the Old Bergen, New Jersey, Branch

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in 1981–1984, and as a Society Trustee from 1983 to 2001, as Vice President of the Florida Branch, and on the Society’s Aims and Purposes Committee. He was most proud of his service to the branches.

He aided in establishing the South River Branch, Texas Branch, Old South Branch, and Florida West Coast Branch, and reactivated several others. In addition he redesigned the Holland Society Roster in a setup that allowed every member to be assigned to a local branch. He wrote in a note to the editor of de Halve Maen, “Sometime, hopefully in the distant future, when ‘In Memoriam’ is prepared for me please mention the above branch activity.”

In 1998 the Holland Society awarded him the Distinguished Achievement Medal to Members for his service.

In addition to his membership in the Holland Society of New York, Dr. Voorhis was a longtime member of the Van Voorhees Family Association, and of the Lion’s Club of Ridgewood, New Jersey, of which organization he served as president in 1970–1971. He was also an active member and deacon in the Old Paramus Reformed Church of Ridgewood. An avid golfer, Dr. Voorhis was a member of Mariner Sands Country Club, Tequesta Country Club, Port Jefferson Country Club at Harbor Hills, Jupiter Inlet Beach Club, and the Williams Club. He loved boating, fishing, beach activities, and he traveled extensively with his wife, including three Holland Society trips to the Netherlands. He was Republican in his politics.

Dr. Voorhis is survived by his son Charles John Voorhis of Port Jefferson, New York, a Holland Society Life Member, daughter Amy Voorhis Lenow of Richmond, Virginia, and grandsons Christopher C. Voorhis and Eric Voorhis, both Holland Society Life Members, Joseph E. Lenow, and John J. Lenow, and two great-grandchildren. A funeral service was held on August 20, 2018, at Old Paramus Reformed Church, Ridgewood, New Jersey, with interment at Valleau Cemetery, in Ridgewood, New Jersey.

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