Thomas Farrington: Flushing's “Founding Uncle”

Thomas Farrington’s untimely death ended his history in Flushing shortly after he signed the Charter. We do not know his date or cause of death, only that in August 1646 his widow remarried. His only child, Thomas Farrington, Jr., moved upstate. The Farrington family thus owes its legacy in Flushing to Thomas’s brother Edward, who followed him to the town. It was Edward who induced the Bownes to settle there following his marriage to Dorothy Bowne, who signed the 1657 Flushing Remonstrance, and who founded one of the area’s leading Quaker families. Thomas himself might be considered more a “Founding Uncle” of the town than a Founding Father. However, in his brief life he co-founded not just one but two Colonial towns, including the first English settlement on Long Island.

Beginnings in Buckinghamshire

 
Old Olney Bridge, Buckinghamshire, by William Samuel Wright, 1815–1915. (The Cowper and Newton Museum)

Old Olney Bridge, Buckinghamshire, by William Samuel Wright, 1815–1915. (The Cowper and Newton Museum)

Thomas Farrington’s origins at least are documented, unlike those of a number of his fellow Charter signers we have examined. He was born to Edmund Farrington and Elizabeth Newhall around 1614 in the English county of Buckinghamshire, probably in the village of Sherington where his parents wed. The family soon moved to nearby Olney, a market town remembered today as the site of a battle in the English Civil War. In later life Edmund Farrington took on an apprentice “fulmonger,” or dealer in hides; he also operated a grist mill. However, it’s unclear whether he brought up his sons to either occupation. In April 1635 Thomas’s parents and four youngest siblings- Sarah, Mathew, John, and Elizabeth- joined the Puritan Great Migration and emigrated to the Bay Colony aboard the Hopewell. The passenger list records that Edmund Farrington took the “Oath of Allegiance and Supremacy,” in which would-be emigrés affirmed the King as head of the Church of England, and thus their religious orthodoxy. By 1638 Edmund owned 200 acres in Lynn, Massachussetts. Thomas and his brother Edward, the eldest children, must have emigrated separately.

 

Striking Out on Long Island: The Settlement of Southampton

In March 1639/40 Thomas Farrington, his father Edmund, and his brother John appear on a list of twenty “undertakers” of the first English plantation on Long Island. Edmund was one of eight investors who financed a vessel and hired a captain to transport the settlers and their cargo. He signed the “Disposall of the Vessel” with his mark; however, both his sons were literate and signed their names. Apparently, this was an upwardly mobile family. Unlike the founders of Rhode Island, the Long Island pioneers were not driven out of Massachusetts by religious persecution; Governor Winthrop wrote that the Lynn residents simply “found themselves straitened for land.” The “undertakers” even promised that once they were sent a minister from Massachusetts, they would voluntarily surrender all administrative authority in the new plantation to the Church. They left armed with a patent for eight square miles anywhere on Long Island signed by James Farrett, agent for the Scottish Earl of Stirling, who had just been granted Long Island by King Charles I of England. The Crown was eager to block Dutch expansion, and Charles’ gift to his favored courtier simply disregarded the existing Dutch settlement on the Island.

In May 1940 an advance party of 10, including John Farrington, disembarked in Schout’s Bay near present-day Manhasset, where they found the coat of arms of the Dutch States-General (the governing body of the Netherlands) nailed to a tree. Undeterred, they began clearing the wilderness. Their arrival nearly caused an international incident, as appears in the New Netherland Council minutes of May 13, 1640. The Dutch had just purchased the land in question from Sachem Penhawitz of the Canarsie Indians, who promptly reported the “interlopers and vagabonds” to the Council of New Netherland. A Dutch scout sent to reconnoiter observed the English already building houses, also noting that the Dutch Arms had been torn down. Worse yet, “a Fool’s face” had been carved in their place, “this being a crime of Lèse-Majesté [insult to the State] and tending to the disparagement of the sovereignty of their High Mightinesses.” On May 14, Secretary Tienhoven arrived before dawn with an entourage of 25 soldiers and arrested six Englishmen. They left behind a woman and small child with two unnamed men, possibly including Thomas Farrington- indeed, the small party contained one other pair of brothers. The interrogation of “Jan Farington” is preserved in the New York State Archives. He and the others wisely blamed James Farrett, safely at his home in New Haven, and Lieutenant Howe, the skipper of the departed boat, for vandalizing the Arms, while professing total ignorance of the “Fool’s face.” On May 19 the prisoners were released, on condition that they leave Dutch territory immediately “on pain of being punished as perverse usurpers.”

 
 
Conscience Point National Wildlife Refuge. (Photo: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) “Near this spot in 1640 landed the colonists from Lynn, Mass. who founded Southampton - the first English settlement on Long Island.”

Conscience Point National Wildlife Refuge. (Photo: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) “Near this spot in 1640 landed the colonists from Lynn, Mass. who founded Southampton - the first English settlement on Long Island.”

On June 10th, 1640, Farrett issued the undertakers another patent, for "all those lands…between Peaconeck [Peconic] and the easternmost point of Long Island with the whole breadth of the said Island from sea to sea..." -as far from the Dutch as they could get. The settlers were obligated to buy the land from the local Indians, and to pay the Earl of Stirling four bushels of prime Indian corn each year. Later that month they disembarked at “Conscience Point” off Peconic Bay, today a wildlife refuge where a stone marker stands in their honor. Striking an informal agreement with the Shinnecock near the Indian village of Agawam on the south shore, they founded Southampton in the area today known as Old Town, east of present-day Main Street. On December 13, 1640, the Native owners Pomatuck, Mandush, Macomanto, Pathemanto, Wybbenett, Wainmenowog, Heden, Watemexoted, and Cheekepuehat formalized the transfer of their land to thirteen of the undertakers, including Edmund Farrington. In exchange they received sixteen coats, three-score (60) bushels of Indian corn, and a promise of protection against more warlike mainland tribes. One of the witnesses who signed the deed was Robert Terry, who moved to Flushing in 1642 and married Thomas’ sister Sarah Farrington. Before the winter of 1640/1, around 40 households had arrived, most living in makeshift “cellars” with sod roofs. Thomas’s brother Edward Farrington must have also joined the family there, for he is named in the town records of 1644.

 

However, the Farringtons did not linger there. Edmund returned to Lynn before May 1643, when a Southampton resident named John Cooper was granted “the lott of Goodman Farrington,” having fenced the plot on his behalf, and being still owed 15 shillings for his labor. (Fencing carried a near-existential importance to early Colonial farmers in the wilderness, and early court records abound with neglected fences.) John also rejoined their father in Lynn. No Farringtons appear on the 1644 roster for a whale-watching patrol compulsory for males over age 16. By 1645 Thomas and Edward owed five pounds to the town, which in an echo of The Scarlet Letter’s famous opening lines, the fledgling town earmarked for a jail. However, Southampton land records indicate that the family kept a footprint there in absentia for at least two decades, with references such as “the land between the ffaringtons and the Pond” (1653); they were further memorialized in old place names like “Farrington’s Pond” (Old Town Pond), “Farrington’s Point” (Noyack), and the contemporary “Farrington Close,” site of a condominium development.

“The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Scarlet Letter

 
 
The Old Towne Pond: “…ye pond commonly called Farrington’s Pond, ranging on the old side of towne.”George Bradford Brainerd. East Side of Pond, South Hampton, Long Island, ca. 1872–1887. (Image: Brooklyn Museum)

The Old Towne Pond: “…ye pond commonly called Farrington’s Pond, ranging on the old side of towne.”

George Bradford Brainerd. East Side of Pond, South Hampton, Long Island, ca. 1872–1887. (Image: Brooklyn Museum)

 

It’s unclear exactly when or why Thomas made his way to the Dutch instead of rejoining his family in Lynn, especially given New Netherland Director Kieft’s ongoing wars with the Indians, and John Farrington’s recent brush with the authorities there. Certainly hardships and constraints were written into the founding documents of Southampton: no resident was allowed more than four acres for a home lot and twelve for planting, and Farrett’s patent permitted just one designated resident to barter with the Indians, and then only for foodstuffs, as Lord Stirling maintained a monopoly on trade. In 1643 tensions flared with the previously friendly Indians, when Lieut. Howe (one-time vandalizer of the Dutch Arms) fatally knifed a Native man suspected of murdering an Englishman. On another note, if Thomas had received news from his hometown in late 1643, he might have heard about the Battle of Olney Bridge, where outnumbered Parliamentarians loyal to Oliver Cromwell turned back the Royalist forces, some at the cost of their lives. Perhaps the religious tolerance of the Dutch seemed appealing against this backdrop of sectarian strife. Whatever the story, both Edward and Sarah Farrington eventually followed Thomas to Flushing, while their parents and their three youngest siblings- John, Mathew, and Elizabeth- remained at Lynn under the governance of Governor Winthrop.

Thomas married Helena Applegate, the daughter of fellow Flushing patentee Thomas Applegate, on an unrecorded date. Their only son, Thomas Farrington, Jr., was baptized on April 30, 1645 in the Dutch Reformed Church of New Amsterdam (which spelled their name “Pharendon.”) Although the Church did offer the sacraments of marriage and baptisms to members and non-members alike, this choice suggests that the couple did not hold any strong objections to the Reformed faith. They may have belonged to one of the English denominations, such as Congregationalist or Presbyterian, whose strict Calvinist beliefs were considered “Reformed” by the Dutch. The Church records next reveal that on August 15th, 1646, Helena “widow of Thomas Farrington” married Lovis Hulot (Lewis Hewlett.) Although we do not know his date of death, Thomas would have been no more than thirty-two years old.

Helena is one of the few “Founding Mothers” on whom we have even bare biographical data. We know that within 18 months her second husband also died, leaving her with a second fatherless child. Helena then married Charles Morgan, a former soldier of the Dutch West India Company, and had four more children with him. She died in 1652 at the age of 31, orphaning Thomas Farrington, Jr.. In 1654 Thomas Applegate, “as grandfather of the surviving child of Thomas Farrington,” sued his grandson’s conservator William Harck, demanding he account for “the goods and cattle, which he as curator of said child has in his possession." (Harck appeared in our profile of Thomas Saul, as the provisional Sheriff of Flushing who was “thrown upon the ground” while attempting an arrest, and later dismissed for performing an illegal marriage and allowing it to be consummated in his bed.) The outcome of the suit was not recorded, but in 1669 Thomas Jr. sold land he owned in Gravesend, where his grandfather Applegate had lived. He signed the deed with a mark; the family had gone from illiteracy to literacy and back within three generations. Thomas married but was widowed young, and moved to Westchester with his only daughter. There is no record of him ever remarrying or having more children. The male line of Thomas Farrington had died out.

Meanwhile, his brother Edward Farrington thrived in Flushing, where he raised four sons, one of whom carried on the name of Thomas. Edward and his descendants were important enough to the town, and to the Bowne family, that we will devote a follow-up post to him and selected other members of the family. 

Our research is a work in progress. If you have additional information on the Flushing Charter signers, or believe that you may be a descendant, we would like to hear from you! You can write to us at office@bownehouse.org

Lawrence Dutch: Black Sheep of the Flushing Charter

Due to his name, Lawrence Dutch has traditionally been regarded as the only Dutch founder of the English town of Flushing. However, in his “Profiles of Selected Kieft Patentees of Flushing, 1645,” B. Purcell Robinson states that “Dutch” is a transcription error of the kind later associated with Ellis Island, and identifies him with a Dane named Laurens Duyts, familiarly known as “Laurens Grootshoe” (essentially “Bigfoot.”) No surviving records connect Duyts directly to Flushing; however, the registry of New Netherland yields no better matches, and Duyts did engage in farming in Newtown, where other Flushing patentees soon moved.

Laurens Duyts was born around 1612 on the North Sea island of Nordstrand in Holstein, now the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein. In 1634, most of the island was destroyed in a storm surge. Denmark was not a colonial power, so its economic refugees had to join the settlement efforts of other powers. By 1638 Duyts had migrated to Amsterdam, where he married a Dutch woman of 18, Itye Jansen of Oldenburgh. The church register describes him as a laborer residing at the Brouwersgracht, a canal lined with breweries. In 1639 the Duytses sailed for New Netherland aboard De Brant van Trogen, or The Fire of Troy, under fellow Dane Capt. Peter Kuyter, who would settle East Harlem, and his partner Jonas Bronck, for whom the Bronx is named. Duyts and his friend Pieter Andriesen came as indentured servants to Bronck. Following their arrival in New Ansterdam, a contract dated July 21, 1639 commited them to cultivate a tract of wilderness “on the mainland opposite to the flats of Manhates,” with permission to grow their own maize and tobacco, on condition that every two years they break new land and surrender the previous plot for Bronck’s use. From the proceeds the two would repay their passage money, “in tobacco or otherwise.” The illiterate Duyts signed with a mark.

 

“The invisible hand of the Almighty Father surely guided me to this beautiful country, a land covered with virgin forest and unlimited opportunities. It is a veritable paradise and needs but the industrious hand of man to make it the finest and most beautiful region in all the world.” - Jonas Bronck 

 
 
Detail from 1639 map “Manhattan Lying on the North River.” North River = Hudson River; Bronck’s homestead is number 43 in the key. (Library of Congress.)

Detail from 1639 map “Manhattan Lying on the North River.” North River = Hudson River; Bronck’s homestead is number 43 in the key. (Library of Congress.)

 

Duyts and Andriesen accompanied Bronck across the Harlem River to a tract of over 500 acres purchased from the Wecquaesgeek Indians. The 1639 map above shows Bronck’s homestead at the southern tip of the mainland in present-day Mott Haven, across from Randall’s Island. Bronck named his land “Emmaus,” after the Biblical town where Christ appeared after the Resurrection. (Thanks to the “industrious hand of man,” the site is currently occupied by Harlem River Yards and its solid waste processing plant.)

“Signing the Peace Treaty with the Indians.”

“Signing the Peace Treaty with the Indians.”

Bronck’s imported labor force soon erected a stone house with tile roof “in the style of a Dutch fort,” a barn, tobacco houses, and barracks. The Duyts family grew with the farm; daughter Margariet was baptised on December 23, 1639 in the Dutch Reformed Church at Manhattan, and son Jan followed on March 23, 1641, with Captain Kuyter as godfather. In April 1642 Duyts may have witnessed history on this far-flung “outplantation,” when the Dutch signed a peace treaty with Wecquaesgeek sachems Ranaqua and Tackamuck at Bronck’s farmhouse following an abortive raid on the Indian village at Yonkers. Sadly, Bronx’s peacemaking unraveled after Kieft’s War broke out in 1643, and Bronck himself died before May 6th of that year. With Indian-settler relations tense and the farm changing hands, Duyts needed a fresh start.

Why would this Dane head to English Flushing, and not his countryman Captain Kuyter’s settlement just across the river in Harlem? The answer may lie in the New York State Archives. On June 25, 1643, Englishman Thomas Spicer, formerly of Rhode Island, signed a lease for the former Bronck farm. Several of Spicer’s old neighbors, including Charter signer Thomas Beddard and Remonstrance signer George Clere, would shortly become Flushing residents, and perhaps he suggested to the displaced sharecropper that he follow their lead. Following the baptism of their son Hans in 1644, the family disappears from the Dutch records for several years. If Duyts did start a new life as “Lawrence Dutch,” he left no lasting trace in Flushing, and starting in 1653 he resurfaces regularly in the court records of New Amsterdam, alongside parties bearing almost exclusively Dutch or Scandinavian names.

Duyts appeared some dozen times before the Court of Burghomasters and Schepens and the New Netherland Council. Not all of this activity was litigious; in 1640 he witnessed a promissory note for his brother-in-law, Garret Jansen, and in 1643 a cobbler’s deposition records that another man robbed Duyts of some leather. In 1653 he was sued by his former partner Pieter Andriesen, who had become a man of means even as Duyts remained a farmer- acquiring a tavern license, a chimneysweeping business, and even African slaves. The court minutes give no details of the dispute, as Duyts sent a representative without a proper power of attorney, and was deemed in default.

In 1654 Captain Francis Fyn accused Duyts of attempting to sell land “over against Hog Island” that Fyn held title to. “Hog Island” is now Roosevelt Island, placing the contested property near the Long Island City waterfront. Fyn’s patent was sealed but not signed, so the court referred the case to Director Stuyvesant. In 1657 Fyn again sued Duyts and a co-defendant for selling crops before paying their rent, in violation of their lease. A final determination on these cases was never entered, but they establish Duyts’ continued activity in Newtown, Flushing’s neighbor to the west.

There were further suits, the details of which are often sketchy or confused, but which nonetheless paint a vivid portrait of the hardscrabble life of the colony, with its barter economy and oral contracts between illiterate people. There are suits over non-payment for 20 wagonloads of hay delivered to Claes van Ruyter “in the Valley”; over who owed the carter for lost wages; over crops purportedly embezzled by “Jan the Soldier” Hendricks, who was demanding 200 florins for tobacco he’d allegedly seized; over Duyts’ landlord’s outstanding debt for some meat, for which Duyts was served with a arrest warrant. In May 1658 grande dame Annetke Bogardus, widow of the Dutch Reform Minister, demanded two hogs from “Lauwerence Grootshoe” in lieu of unpaid rent for the Bouwerie (farm) that Duyts sublet from the delinquent meat buyer in the previous case. Overall, Duyts appears three times as a victim or plaintiff, three times as a witness, and seven times as a defendant or co-defendant. The cases deal with minor debts, property disputes, and business deals gone sour; at worst the profile of a petty grifter. Events then take a dramatic turn.

Our authority B. Purcell Robinson notes that after 1658 Duyts mysteriously disappears from the record for ten years. However, Mr. Robinson toiled in the days before the Internet, when the Minutes of the Council of New Netherland were not yet digitized. The following documents finally explain the lost decade.

On November 18, 1658, an order was issued to interrogate Geesje Jansen, a woman accused of having illicit intercourse with Duyts. Geesje may have been the sister of Duyts’ wife Isje Jansen.

On November 25, 1658 the following eye-popping decree was recorded: “Sentence. Laurens Duyts, of Holstein, for selling his wife, Ytie Jansen, and forcing her to live in adultery with another man, and for living himself also in adultery, to have a rope tied around his neck, and then to be severely flogged, to have his right ear cut off, and to be banished for 50 years.”

Geesje Jansen was displayed half-naked on the pillory with two iron bars in her hands, and banished for 30 years. The other man -identified as John Purcell, alias Botcher, of Huntingdonshire, England- was also pilloried, fined 100 guilders plus court costs, and banished for 20 years. Itye Jansen, seemingly the victim, was punished as an adulteress herself, with whipping and banishment for an unknown period. It seems that the two unmarried adulterers were spared corporal punishment.

This foray into sexual trafficking, spousal abuse, and adultery would indeed seem to auger the end of Duyts’s career in New Netherland, and within a week, at least two people requested liens on Duyt’s property. Duyts moved to Bergen, New Jersey, where eight years later he married Geesje Jansen. Their daughter Catherine was baptized in 1667.

On 12 January 1667-8 Duyts makes his final appearance in the Court records of New Amsterdam, now ruled by the English. A baker and a laborer were disputing the rights to a canoeload of grain sold by Laurens Duyts, now deceased. Duyts had ordered it delivered to the baker, but he died owing back wages to the employee who had helped row the grain across the East River. Noting the geography, it seems that after the English takeover in 1664, Duyts may have felt at liberty to resume farming on Long Island, even with John Parcell alias “Botcher” and his ex-wife Itye still resident in Newtown.

The aftermath suggests that the whole sordid affair may have been less sordid, and more consensual, than Duyts’ sentence suggests. In December 1658 Ytie Jansen and John Parcell petitioned the court as “two sorrowful sinners” for a pardon and leave to marry. They were ordered to separate and given three months to leave the province. However, it seems that instead they quietly remained in Newtown and had two children together. The Duytses’ adult sons did business with Parcell, evidently not shunning him as their mother’s kidnapper. A court record from 1684 describes Ytie as Purcell’s widow, so they must have eventually married. Was Duyts truly the “black sheep” of the Flushing Charter signers, a monster who sold his wife into sexual slavery, which she then reconciled herself to? Or were all four people simply taking advantage of the relative freedom of frontier life to seek happiness in an unconventional living arrangement? From the distance of 2020, it is hard to judge.

 

Our research is a work in progress. Bowne House welcomes new information on the Charter Signers and early Flushing history. If you believe you are descended from Lawrence Dutch/Laurens Duyts, or have information about him, please contact us at office@bownehouse.org

 

Thomas Saul: From Itinerant Tradesman to Town Magistrate

New Haven in Thomas Saul’s time.

New Haven in Thomas Saul’s time.

Thomas Saul first appears in 1639 in the town of New Haven; we know little of his origins, except that they soon caught up with him. The would-be colony was founded in 1638 by devout Puritan investors who dreamed of a Bible-based theocracy. However, not all New Havenites were religious fundamentalists. A carpenter by trade, Saul himself was part of an influx of itinerant artisans. In 1637, the advance party scouting the site had squatted in hillside dugouts; a year later, over 100 families needed housing. Amid this construction boom, Saul and another carpenter named William Gibbons were hired as sub-sub-contractors to work on the meeting house, an ambitious structure measuring 50 feet on all sides, with a tower, turret, and casement windows. Part of their job was to “make the roof of the tower tight, to keep out wet.”

The earliest mention of Saul occurs in the Court session of December 4, 1639, in which he and a Goodman Spinage were ordered to resolve their (unspecified) differences before the next session. Two months later, the Court ordered Saul to pay 5 shillings a week to a Mr. Evans, as security for Spinage’s claim against him. Finally, in the record of September 2, 1640, Saul acknowledged a debt of £20 to Humphrey Spinage, “to be leavied of his goods and chattells for publique use of this towne” should he fail to pay upon demand. Here Goodman Spinage is described as the agent for someone in London, offering a clue to Saul’s previous residence and possible motive for emigration.

A Plan of the Town of New Haven, 1748. A new meeting house stands in the village green.

A Plan of the Town of New Haven, 1748. A new meeting house stands in the village green.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, a 1641 list of the residents of New Haven does not include Thomas Saul, although it’s unclear if itinerant tradesmen were counted. However, in 1644 he reemerges in the Court records, this time in absentia. Whether from negligence or lack of skill, the roof of the meeting house—which he and Gibbons were supposed to make watertight—was already badly leaking. Andrew Williams, the master carpenter, was squabbling with the two sub-contractors who had hired Gibbons and Saul over who bore the blame for their poor supervision. Given the urgency of the problem, the town ordered all parties to jointly repair the tower. However, within a few years the rest of the Meeting House began to decay, including roof, ground sills, timbers, windows and doors, and the entire building was condemned in 1670, erasing the only known monument to Thomas Saul.

New Netherland offered Saul a fresh start, away from creditors and angry clients. Unlike some Charter signers, he settled down in Flushing and become a freeholder there. An 18th century probate record refers to “a patent share of meadow in Fresh Meadows, Flushing...formerly owned by Thomas Saule.” However, his early years in Flushing also saw him back in court.

On February 1, 1648 William Harck, the “Schout-Fiscal” or Sheriff of Flushing, appeared with his associates before Director-General Stuyvesant and the Council of New Netherland. They requested that the authorities “favor them with a pious, learned, and Reformed minister, and then order that each inhabitant should contribute to such godly work...and that an end be put to the present differences in a manner that shall promote peace, quietness, and unanimity in said town.” The record continues: “Thomas Saul, John Lawrence, and William Turner, the opposite party, thereto delegated by the remainder of their side, request the same as the Schout and his associates abovementioned have asked.” It does not elaborate upon the “present differences” between these two factions who claimed to want the same thing, but we can infer clashing ideas of what qualified as a “pious, learned, and Reformed minister.” This incident probably stems from a summons issued two weeks earlier for five of Saul’s fellow Flushing Charter signers:

 

“Whereas one John Townshend, Edward [Hart?], Thomas Stiles, John Lawrence and John Hicks of Flushing in New Netherland are with others the principal opponents to the general vote and decision of their neighbors in contributing toward the support of a Christian and godly Reformed minister and to the nomination of a Schout...it is resolved for the best interest, advantage and peace of this province to have the said persons summoned to appear on the 23rd of January before the honorable Director and Council, and in case of refusal or declining to appear said persons may be arrested by the Fiscal...” - January 17, 1648

 

These wanted men, all original incorporators of the town like Saul, refused to support the minister, Elias Doughty, whom Stuyvesant had assigned to Flushing after he had alienated his previous parishioners in nearby Newtown (now Astoria, Queens.) It’s unclear if their objections to Doughty were doctrinal or personal, or if deep down they objected to funding any “official” minister. They further protested the Dutch system of choosing the Schout, the town’s law-enforcement officer and its only elected official. The townsfolk had to submit a list of nominees from which the Dutch would choose; however the faction represented here wanted the residents themselves to decide upon one candidate before seeking Dutch approval, giving the town more autonomy.

Council Record, April 8, 1648: Sentences of Thomas Stiles and Thomas Saul for assaulting the acting Sheriff of Flushing and obstructing the arrest of Stiles. (New York State Archives)

Council Record, April 8, 1648: Sentences of Thomas Stiles and Thomas Saul for assaulting the acting Sheriff of Flushing and obstructing the arrest of Stiles. (New York State Archives)

The parties did not respond to the summons, though the following week they evidently designated Lawrence, Saul, and Turner to face off against provisional Schout William Harck on their behalf and to lodge their competing request for a new minister. Stuyvesant and the Council agreed to search for a suitable reverend, so as “to promote peace, union, and tranquility both in ecclesiastical and civil affairs.” This noble aim failed, for on April 8, 1648, Thomas Saul and his fellow patentee Thomas Stiles were sentenced for assaulting Harck, who had been sent to arrest Stiles for some unspecified offense. Stiles confessed that he “threw the sheriff on the ground,” but promised “henceforth to behave as an honest inhabitant should,” and was “graciously pardoned”- provided he “beg forgiveness of God, the Council, the Honorable Director, and the Schout of Flushing,” and pay a fine of 50 guilders. Thomas Saul confessed to barring the door so that no one could come to Harck’s aid, thus preventing Stiles’ arrest. He likewise prayed mercy and promised to never do so again, and submitted to a fine of 25 guilders.

In a bizarre coda, around this time William Harck was dismissed for solemnizing a illegal marriage that he was not ordained to perform and to which the underage bride’s parents had not consented, then providing a bed in his own house for its immediate consummation. The Indian fighter Captain John Underhill replaced Harck as Schout, and promptly locked the detested Rev. Francis Doughty out of his church. The latter, despairing of ever being paid, absconded to Virginia and was not replaced. When the Long Island towns got their own magistrates, our erstwhile defendant Thomas Saul was twice elected to that office, in 1651 and 1655. We know nothing about the cases that came before him, as the town records of Flushing were destroyed by fire in 1788.  After 1655 Saul vanishes from the municipal archives of New Netherland and all neighboring colonies, which the indefatigable researcher B. Purcell Robertson personally scoured in the pre-Internet age for his Profiles of Selected Kieft Patentees of Flushing. As with Thomas Beddard, our other “International Man of Mystery,” we lack evidence of any surviving wife or children.

 If Thomas Beddard represents one New World archetype -the pilgrim in search of religious freedom- Thomas Saul represents an equal and opposite type: the economic migrant. (Of course, these contrasting narratives are not mutually exclusive: Saul became caught up in the religious disputes of the town, whether he participated fully in a spiritual movement, or just provided some “muscle” to back up his zealous friends.) Regardless, his is a classic frontier story: leaving behind a trail of debt and dubious workmanship, in New Netherland Saul found a community that allowed him to go from troublemaker to magistrate, and ultimately reinvent himself as a respected citizen.

Here at Bowne House, our research is a work in progress. If you believe you are a descendant of Thomas Saul, or have additional information about him or his family, please contact us at office@bownehouse.org.

The Indian Deed of 1639: Prelude to the Flushing Charter

Before the Flushing Charter, there was the Indian Deed.

Flushing, or “Vlissingen,” was built on land previously purchased from Native Americans. The 1629 Charter for the colony of New Netherland dictated that settlers “must satisfy the Indians of that place for the land,” rather than simply squatting there or occupying it by force. The Dutch Colonial Records in the New York State Archives contain several of these so-called “Indian Deeds.” This original document, labeled “Indian Deed to the Directors of the West India Company for Land on Long Island,” is dated January 15, 1639. It conveys most of present-day Queens and Nassau County to the government of New Netherland. (The paper was damaged in the Capitol Fire of 1911 in Albany.)

 
 

ANCIENT PLACES: THE BOUNDARIES OF THE LAND

The document records that Mechoswodt, the chief sachem of Marossepinck, Sintsinck, and its dependencies, appeared in person at Fort Amsterdam to transfer his patrimonial lands on the western end of Long Island (“called in the Indian tongue Suan Hacky”) to the Dutch, with the consent of its co-owners, named as Piscamoc, his cousin, Wattewochkouw, Kachpohor, and Ketachkwawars. It describes a tract “reaching in length along the southside of said island from Reckouw Hacky to Sicketeuw Hacky, and from said Sicketeuw Hacky in width to Martin Gerritsen's Bay, and thence in length westwardly along the East River to the Vlaecks Kil.” (Suan Hacky, meaning “place of scattered shells,” refers to sewan or wampum, the prized natural resource of Long Island.)

The modern equivalents of these ancient place names remain uncertain. Marossepinck, known as Massapeague to the English, probably refers to Massapequa, off South Oyster Bay. Sintsinck, literally “stone upon stone,” was the Indian name for Manhasset Bay on the northern shore, settled by the Matinecock and dubbed “Schout’s Bay” by the Dutch. Reckouw Hacky (Rockaway) formed the south-west corner of the purchase, and presumably lay somewhere around the present-day Rockaways. Sicketeuw Hacky to the east has been translated “Secatogue,” the name of an Indian band who lived around West Islip; a 1656 map by Adriaen van der Donck shows its (very) approximate location.  As for Martin Gerritsen’s Bay, the Dutch applied this name inconsistently to various bodies of water along the Sound, but here it likely means Oyster Bay, which became the recognized border between Dutch and English territory in Long Island. Finally, according to Long Island historian Frederick Van Wyck, Vlaeck’s Kil, or “Kill of the Flats,” may refer to Newtown Creek.

 

“Lange Eylandt alias Matouwacs”: detail from Van Der Donck’s Map of New Netherland, 1656. - Note “Sickete Wachty” on the south shore.

 

Mechoswodt and his people retained the right to live on their former land, to farm, fish, hunt, and generally make a livelihood there. They were promised the protection of the Dutch, presumably against New England settlers and hostile Indian tribes that might covet the sewan shells prized all the way to the Great Lakes. Both parties must have hoped this deal would bring peace and security.

[Read a translation of the Deed from the New York State Archives]

The treaty ending Kieft’s War, 1645.

SIX LOST YEARS: KIEFT’S WARS

However, instead of wooing new inhabitants Kieft almost immediately provoked a series of costly conflicts. There were attempts to exact tribute from the tribes, skirmishes over drunken tavern murders and allegations of stolen swine (the “Pig War” of 1640.) In 1642, despite the pleas of his own councilors, the Director ordered the Pavonia Massacre, an attack on several hundred Wappinger refugees who were fleeing their Mohawk attackers upriver. The massacre, which saw the murder of whole families in their sleep and the torture and mutilation of infants, sparked “Kieft’s War.” Twenty Algonquian tribes ravaged Dutch settlements in retaliation; religious dissident Anne Hutchinson and her family at their Bronx homestead were among the victims. The Long Island Indians stayed neutral- until Kieft plundered their maize stores to provision New Amsterdam for the coming siege. Then the Canarsee, Manhattan, Massapequa, Matinecock, Merrick, Rockaway, and Secatogue bands all took up arms. The newly purchased territory became depopulated, as colonists fled their farms to shelter in Fort Amsterdam. Chief Sachem Mechoswodt himself may have perished in a Dutch raid on Marrosopinc/Massapequa in 1644, for a different Sachem sued for peace on behalf of Marrosopinc the following month, while Mechoswodt himself never reappears in the record. It took the Pound Ridge Massacre outside Greenwich- in which English mercenaries under Captain Underhill fired an encampment with hundreds trapped inside- to finally bring the tribes to parley. A treaty was signed in 1645. Thus six long years elapsed between the signing of the Indian Deed and the grant of the Flushing Charter.

A BOWNE HOUSE “INDIAN DEED”?

The existence of this Indian Deed calls into question an old tradition that the Bownes purchased their land from the Matinecock for “6 silver guilders and 4 fathoms of wampum.” No such bill of sale exists in Bowne’s papers, and no mention of the purchase appears in either his Journal or his Account Book. If the Dutch already owned the land, why would Bowne need to purchase it from the Indians? However, the history of neighboring Hempstead leaves a margin for doubt. There, English settlers arriving in 1643 paid the Indians for the land, despite the existing Dutch title. (Upon discovering this, Kieft swiftly granted them a patent to bring them under Dutch administrative control.) Possibly the boundary lines of Kieft’s purchase were as unclear then as today; alternatively, the Indians may have felt that Kieft’s War had voided the deal. Some Indians may have disputed Mechoswodt’s right to dispose of their lands in the first place, or misunderstood the terms of a sale negotiated by a third party. To confuse matters further, the Indians had an altogether different cultural understanding of land ownership than the Europeans, and at least in the early days of contact they often believed that they were simply licensing the use of their land, not permanently alienating it. Indeed, after the English took over the colony they ultimately felt the need to buy out all the Dutch patents and re-purchase the town of Flushing from the Matinecock.

THE NEXT GENERATION: SACHEM TACKAPOUSHA

In 1685 Governor Thomas Dongan of New York granted the town a new Patent, with expanded boundaries. The Dongan Patent of Flushing to John Bowne and his fellow residents lists “Tackapousha Sachem, Qussaw, Wascoe, Suscanenian Ats Rumsack and Werah, Cetharum, Nimham, Shumsheweham, Nimham’s Sonne, and Oposon” as the sellers of the land, “in consideraçõn of a valuable sume...to the full satisfaçõn of the Indians.” Sachem Tackapousha was the son of Mechoswodt and the most influential leader among those Indian bands who remained in western Long Island. The Patent refers to “a further strengthening of the title” granted in the 1645 Patent, and promises “to Distroy all Cause, matters, and Pretences for controversy, or Variences that might at any time arrive from Tackapousha, [etc....] or any Person or Persons, whether Christian or Indian.” Whatever ambiguity existed regarding the claim to Flushing was settled. However, in the accompanying bill of sale, the Indians did reserve from their patrimony “the privilege of cutting bulrushes forever.”

[Explore the Dutch Colonial records in the New York State Archives digital collections]

Learn more about the Matinecock people

Next in Profiles of the Charter Signers: Thomas Beddard