izK IGtbris 
 
 SEYMOUR DURST 
 
 When you leave, please leave this hook 
 
 Because it has heen said 
 "Sver'thing comes t' him who waits 
 
 Except a loaned hook." 
 
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 ^4 I3 yiAy^^'-"^. 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2013 
 
 http://archive.org/details/chroniclesoftarrOObaco_0 
 
CHRONICLES or 
 TARRYTOWN AND 
 SLEEPY HOLLOW 
 
 By EDGAR HAYHCW BACON 
 ILLUSTR7\TED 
 
 THIRD IMPRESSION 
 
 0. p. PUTNAM'S SONS 
 
 NEW YORK mo LONDON 
 THE KNICKERBOCKER PRESS 
 1900 
 
F 
 
 Copyright, 1897 
 
 BY 
 
 G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
 
 Ube 'Stnicfterbocficr press, t\c\9 l^orl? 
 
 • 
 
ERRATA. 
 
 Page 2)^— for Cornelius read Jacobus. 
 
 Pp. 43 and 48— /br Ritzenier read Ritzeina. 
 
 P. /^j—for Bartholf read Bertholf. 
 
 P. 53, beginning with yth line to end of paragraph, 
 
 account misplaced ; refers to Rev. Thos G. Smith, 
 
 who follows. 
 P. ']?>—for Robert read Peter. 
 Pp. 84 and S$—for 24tb read 23d. 
 P. d>s—for east side 7'ead east side of present road. 
 P. %\—for 1778 read 1780, 
 P. \yd—for William read Edward. 
 
AUTHOR'S PREFACE. 
 
 MOST books of places are prefaced with 
 the statement of a hope that they 
 may ' ' foster local pride. ' ' This little work 
 is not offered with any such futile anticipa- 
 tion. The slow ox, Time, that Sydney lyanier 
 pictures as browsing through his clover-field 
 of poets and great men and names the 
 ' ' course-o' -things, "sweeps away old landmarks 
 like worthless rubbish. It is no less destruc- 
 tive in '97 than it was in '37 or at any other 
 date, though not a few have been the heroic 
 efforts to check its progress. Houses wherein 
 generations have lived and died, haunted with 
 memories, disappear each year to make place 
 for bright new bricks and mortar — that is to 
 say, for the planting of the seeds which, in 
 time, will yield a crop of new chronicles. 
 
 But the policy of destro3ang old sites may 
 be justly questioned either from an aesthetic or 
 iii 
 
iv 
 
 preface 
 
 from a business standpoint ; from the first, be- 
 cause the sentiment which grows upon the con- 
 templation of that which is venerable and 
 suggestive to the imagination is a pure and 
 worthy one, and from the second because it 
 often happens that the chief attraction to 
 strangers (who from visitors not infrequently 
 become residents), lies not in the new brick 
 and mortar, but in the old shingle sides and 
 gambrel roofs of colonial houses. 
 
 It is certain that the genius of Washington 
 Irving has done a great deal to attract people 
 to Tarrytown. It seems safe to say that all 
 other agencies together have not brought as 
 many people into this region as the Legend of 
 Sleepy Hollow has. Yet only last year the old 
 house which was, according to Mr. Irving, the 
 scene of the courtship, the home of Katrina 
 van Tassel, w^as torn down to make way for a 
 new vSchoolhouse. In 1866 Mr. James Miller 
 wrote the following : It is folly to quarrel 
 with these changes. Cut down the trees that 
 shade your loveliest brook, if you will ; let an 
 adventurer dam it with his pin factory ; let 
 your old Dutch church go to ruin; let boys 
 
preface 
 
 V 
 
 iiack the woodwork and break the window- 
 glass ; show your fine taste by sticking your 
 smart modern cemetery, with its spic-span 
 tombstones on the hill-top to overcrow the 
 simple relics of the venerable dead who sleep 
 in the old graveyard below — but remember 
 that all this is money out of your pockets. 
 . . . Strangers will come to see these places 
 that Irving has written about and they will 
 not find them. They might have been cared 
 for and preserved, and they would have paid 
 the interest on all it would cost to keep them 
 from destruction." 
 
 That was a good, honest plea, and as useless 
 as it was earnest. The course-o' -things " 
 still browses in our historic field, and is no 
 monster after all, but just the world's ox, 
 doing the world's work. He has been always 
 browsing, and the clover has always been 
 springing again at his heels. 
 
 This book is a basket full of field fare that 
 has been snatched from under his muzzle. If 
 you do not want it he will come to it presently, 
 and then, after deliberate scrutiny, the basket 
 and its contents will go together. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Author's Preface v 
 
 I. — Life and Customs of Eari,y vSettt.ers i 
 II.— Vredryk Fi^ypse— His Castile . . 5 
 
 III. — The Story of the Oi,d Dutch Church 39 
 
 IV. — SUNNYSIDE 66 
 
 V. — The Neutrai, Ground . . . .71 
 VI.— Myths and Legends .... 95 
 -VII.— O1.D Sites and Highways . . .126 
 VIII.— Tarrytown in War Times . . .144 
 IX.— To-Day 149 
 
 vii 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 PACK 
 
 Old Manor House (" Flypse's Castle") and 
 
 Mill, Tarrytown . . . Frontispiece 
 
 Drawn by the Author. 
 
 Old Mill — Built by Vredryk Flypse . . 8 
 Old Sleepy Hollow Mill .... 20 
 Old Dutch Church in Sleepy Hollow . . 40 
 
 From a photograph by F. Ahrens. 
 
 Interior of Old Dutch Church, Sleepy 
 Hollow, Prior to its Restoration in 
 1897 58 
 
 From a photograph by F. Ahrens. 
 
 ' * SuNNYSiDE. ' ' Home of Washington Irving 66 
 Monument to the Captors of Andr]^ . . 84 
 
 From a photograph by F. Ahrens. 
 
 The Jacob Mott House. Home of Katrina 
 Van Tassel 88 
 
 Drawn by the Author. 
 
 The Capture of Andr^ 94 
 
 From a print in the possession of Dr. Coutant, 
 
 The Pocantico River 102 
 
 Old Church Graveyard 112 
 
 " Hulda's grave is close by the north wall." 
 
 ix 
 
X 
 
 llluatrations. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 "He Beheld Something Huge, Misshapen, 
 
 Black, AND Towering " . . . .114 
 
 From Irving's Legend of Sleepy Hollow 
 
 "Just then he Heard the Black Steed 
 
 Panting and Blowing Close behind 
 HIM " 118 
 
 From Irving's Legend of Sleepy Hollow. 
 
 Bird's-eye View of Tarrytown . . .126 
 
 From a photograph by F. Ahrens. 
 
 "Lyndhurst." Home of Miss Helen 
 Gould 130 
 
 Old Lane 140 
 
 The Castle 144 
 
 From a photograph by F. Ahrens. 
 
 Home of William Rockefeller . . .150 
 
 From a photograph by F. Ahrens. 
 
 Map OF Tarrytown 152 
 
CHRONICLES Or TARPYTOWN 
 AND SLEEPY HOLLOW 
 
I 
 
CHRONICLES OF TARRYTOWN 
 AND SLEEPY HOLLOW 
 
 I 
 
 I.IFK AND CUSTOMS OF EARLY SETTLERS 
 P^HE houses of the early settlers were 
 
 I not homes of luxury by any means, and 
 the thrifty pioneer did not know the taste of 
 the bread of idleness. From the first his 
 toil included the manufacture of many of 
 the implements of labor, and what he or his 
 women-folk could not produce they went 
 without. For many years not a shop or 
 store offered an alternative to home-spun and 
 home-made goods. 
 
 The peddler, going his familiar round 
 through the wilderness, with a pack that 
 
2 
 
 Cbronicles ot (Tarrgtovvn 
 
 rivalled the bazaars of Constantinople to the 
 eyes of unsophisticated Annetjes and Gret- 
 chens, was a merchant of consequence ; a guest 
 to whom more than ordinar}^ consideration was 
 to be shown. The lace that trimmed a holiday 
 stomacher, or the pinchbeck that adorned a 
 plump hand or dangled against ruddy cheeks; 
 the buttons that glittered on the Goedman's 
 waistcoat, or the buckles that graced the dance 
 in the manor-house kitchen, came from his 
 mysterious treasure-box. 
 
 Once in a while a trading-boat put into the 
 bay and tied up to a tree on the shore, while 
 the word of its arrival, passing from mouth to 
 mouth, brought the entire population flocking 
 around it. 
 
 The people raised their own stock, their own 
 cabbages and corn ; the wives spun and wove, 
 brewed and baked, and the most celebrated 
 were those who made the best sausages, or the 
 most toothsome olykoeks. 
 
 If you could have gone into one of the little 
 houses that were scattered here and there 
 through the woods, you would have found 
 meagre, rude furniture set upon sanded floors, 
 
aiiD SleepB Ibollow 
 
 3 
 
 on which a pattern had been marked with a 
 broom. A shelf of pewter and delft ware was 
 the only adornment of the pictureless walls, 
 and the only object of grace or beauty in the 
 room was apt to be the spinning-wheel, or the 
 girl who ran it. 
 
 We must picture houses almost bare of what 
 we would consider indispensable to life ; cabins 
 as rude as any camp in the woods, devoid of 
 books, barren as the hut of a savage. Within 
 these dwellings a sturdy hard-working race 
 grew up to look upon the Lord of the Manor 
 as little less than sovereign in his power and 
 wisdom. The lore that their fathers and 
 mothers brought from the old countr}^ must 
 have seemed to them almost like fables ; the 
 Master, who divided his time between New 
 York and his manor, took the proportions of 
 a mysterious prince, while the dominie, who 
 made long journeys to them from Hackensack 
 three or four times a 3^ear, was armed with the 
 authority of one who lived in another and 
 larger world. 
 
 There is no local record preserved of games 
 or amusements, but being Hollanders, and 
 
4 Cbroniclce of ^Tarr^town 
 
 therefore tenacious of old customs, it is safe 
 to suppose that the tenants of Lord Flj^pse 
 did not forget in their cabins the customs of 
 the Fatherland. St. Nicholas, goed heilig 
 maan, no doubt had come over with their other 
 household gods, and if there was any secret 
 charm that Annetje or Gretchen did not know, 
 it was because their mothers were ignorant 
 of it. 
 
 v-- Of course, it must be understood that there 
 were some among the tenants who were better 
 educated than the rest, as, for instance, Abra- 
 ham de Revere, who wrote the first minutes in 
 the old record-book of the church in 1 7 1 5 ; and 
 we know that some soon exchanged their cabins 
 for more comfortable houses, for a very few of 
 those houses have stood until quite recently. 
 But for the most part the tenantry of the estate 
 were not enlightened, and their lives were very 
 meagre. 
 
II 
 
 VRKDRYK — HIS CASTI^K 
 
 BOUT the year 1680, a royal grant gave 
 
 to Frederick Philips, or Vredryk 
 Flypse, the right to purchase and rule a large 
 tract of land, of which the Indian village 
 of Alipconc was almost the centre. There 
 are several accounts of the origin of Flypse. 
 According to John Ja}^ the elder, he was oi 
 Bohemian birth, though his childhood was 
 passed in Holland, to which country his 
 mother had fled to escape religious persecu- 
 tion, she being a Protestant. Very little was 
 saved in that pitiful exodus, and the young 
 Flypse learned his trade at the carpenter's 
 bench like any plebeian little Hollandish lad. 
 A second migration, when he was still a youth, 
 landed him upon the wharf at New Amster- 
 dam, with no capital but his handicraft and 
 
 5 
 
6 
 
 Cbroniclce of ^Tarretown 
 
 his brains. Another account makes him a 
 native of Friesland, born in 1626, son of Fred- 
 eric FeHpse. It agrees with the fonner as to 
 immigration and the carpenter's bench. 
 
 After a few years he abandoned carpentering 
 and engaged in the fur trade, showing both 
 shrewdness and capacity for business, in proof 
 of which his marriage may be considered. A 
 rival fur-trader, named de Vries, had the mis- 
 fortune to die and leave a young widow whose 
 attractions were no doubt enhanced by her 
 wealth. The picture that Vredrj'k wanted 
 was set in a golden frame. 
 
 Margareta Van Hardenbroek de Vries has 
 been greatlj^ praised for the wifely quaUties 
 she evinced. She, having a daughter by her 
 first husband, became the mother of Flypse's 
 three children, and his helpmate till he became 
 firmly established as a man of influence in the 
 colony. We infer, from such meagre data as 
 can be obtained, that the wedding took place 
 about 1660, and Margareta' s death more than 
 twenty years later, for her eldest children were 
 nearly grown when her husband moved to his 
 estate of Phihpsburg, and a resolution of 
 
anO Sleeps 1)ollow 
 
 7 
 
 thanks offered to her by the tenantry of the 
 manor proved her to have been living at that 
 time. 
 
 A narrator of the year 17 15 (Abraham de 
 Revere, in his preface to the old church 
 records) states that it had ' ' Pleased his Royal 
 Majesty of England, Scotland, France, and 
 Ireland, defender of the faith, etc., about the 
 year of our I^ord 1680, to grant by prerogative, 
 consent, and license, to the Honorable Fred- 
 ryk Flypse, to freely buy in a certain sale of 
 estate, a certain tract of land and valley situ- 
 ated in the county of Westchester, in America, 
 beginning at the place of Spuyten Duyvel's 
 kill and running north along the river to and 
 on the kill of Kitch Awong (Croton), etc., as 
 in the license and patent contained," and that 
 
 Lord Flypse had contracted with [record 
 
 torn] ' ' to let any one settle on said land free, 
 for certain stipulated years in order that it 
 should as soon as possible be cultivated and 
 settled." 
 
 The manor of Philipsburg came into Sir 
 Vredryk's hands by several conveyances. 
 Some of it was granted by the Crown, and a 
 
8 
 
 (IbronicIc0 ot ^Tarrgtovon 
 
 portion purchased ; nor were all of his posses- 
 sions acquired at the same time. Abraham de 
 Revere was only partly right when he wrote 
 his preface to the records of the old church. 
 The site of Tarry town cost only a few pounds 
 of tobacco, hardware, and cloth, and a little 
 rum. The entire catalogue of titles and 
 grants, some confirmatory of others, extended 
 from 1672 to 1693, when the signatures of Wil- 
 liam and Mary completed the series. The 
 grant given by Governor Andros, confirming 
 the Tarrytown or Pocantico purchase, is dated 
 1680. 
 
 No very positive statement can be made re- 
 garding the exact date of Flypse's settlement 
 upon the manor. He built a manor-house, 
 mill, and church on the Pocantico. 1683-84 
 and '85 are variously given as the years in 
 which the two former buildings were finished ; 
 but the same tradition which informs us that 
 the house was completed in 1683 or 1684, pre- 
 sents to us a puzzle in the avowal that the bell 
 and furniture for the church came over in the 
 same vessel which brought the brick used in 
 the chimney and other parts of the dwelling. 
 
■» 
 
 ft 
 
ant) SleepB "Ibollow 
 
 9 
 
 What makes this singular is the fact that the 
 date cast in the metal of the bell is 1685. So 
 that it appears that a bell was cast in Holland 
 in 1685, and brought to this country two or 
 three years earlier along with some brick that 
 was used in a building, or buildings, erected in 
 1683. As will be readily seen, the solution to 
 the difficulty will be found in the fact that the 
 transport made several V03^ages. Vredryk 
 Flypse was a large ship owner for that day, 
 and his vessels did a considerable carrying 
 trade between Holland, England, and the 
 colonies. 
 
 One matter which the wiseacres have settled 
 in a very off-hand way is that of the seniority 
 of the Yonkers' manor-house over that of 
 Tarry town. I believe this to be an error. All 
 the evidence seems to point to the fact that the 
 Tarrytown mansion was erected too soon after 
 the property was acquired to admit of another 
 having been built on any part of the domain in 
 the meantime; and there is not a shadow of 
 trustworthy evidence that the house of Yon- 
 kers can lay claim to a date prior to the mar- 
 riage of Eva Philips with Van Cortlandt, at 
 
lo Cbroniclee of tTarrgtovvn 
 
 which time her father bestowed with her hand 
 that part of the estate in dowry. It is not 
 probable that Flypse lived at Yonkers, though 
 there were undoubtedly shanties and a mill 
 there at a very early time. The proprietor's 
 journeys to Tarry town were made from New 
 York on horseback or by yacht. 
 
 Flypse was fortunately a man of taste as 
 w^ell as of business capacity. He chose for the 
 site of his ' ' Castle ' ' the sloping bank at the 
 head of the bay we have already referred to. 
 It was a sunny spot, reclaimed by the wood- 
 man's axe from the forest. We can picture 
 the new cornfields, backing against the sterile 
 line of pine shadow and guarded by grotesque 
 scarecrows that bravely flaunted cast-off great 
 coats of linsey-woolsey and three-cornered 
 beavers, worn with a rakish slant. 
 
 By the water's edge a new wharf of huge 
 green logs confined the channel of the stream. 
 Here was moored a curious vessel, with broad 
 bows and stern set high in air, her bulwarks 
 generously carven, and her cordage in what 
 would seem, to the modern mariner, to be inex- 
 tricable confusion. Groups of sturdy workmen, 
 
anD Sleepy IboUow 
 
 II 
 
 unloading the yacht of her brick, hardware, or 
 other cargo ; Dutch carpenters, plying the saw 
 and broad-axe as they fitted the huge timbers 
 for the new building ; a gang of negroes making 
 the place ring with their laughter and songs as 
 they carried burdens to and fro — all these might 
 be seen busily engaged in rearing the manor- 
 house. Back and forth among them, direct- 
 ing, encouraging, reproving, always alert, 
 went the master. A man to be feared was 
 Flypse. His erect figure and keen face marked 
 a leader. In the affairs of the State, the count- 
 ing-room, or the plantation it required a bold 
 will to oppose him. 
 
 As the building progressed, the lady of the 
 manor, perhaps, visited the place which was to 
 be her home for a short time and where her 
 children's young stepmother was afterwards to 
 eclipse her so utterly that the country-side 
 should forget that she had ever lived. No 
 doubt the four bright children explored, as 
 children of this later day do, the wonders of 
 the witching stream that swirled and rushed 
 over sunken bowlder and fallen tree-trunk to 
 the place where their much respected father 
 
12 Cbronicle5 of Carrgtown 
 
 was superintending the building of the dam. 
 There the future grave chief-justices caught 
 trout, and the embryo great dames, their sweet 
 sisters, were mightily terrified at the distant 
 sight of a chance bear. 
 
 At last the house was finished. It was 
 solidly built of stone. Its walls were — and are 
 still — of unusual thickness, and such care has 
 been taken lately to cover them over, that time 
 and the weather can find no point of attack. 
 The roof was built, after the fashion of those 
 daj^s, with a double slant, and in its hewn 
 timbers is a prophecy of strength for years 
 to come. 
 
 In the southwest walls of the cellar two port 
 holes or embrasures were cut, from w^hich pro- 
 truded the muzzles of small howitzers ; they 
 regulated trade as well as war. The old doors 
 at front and rear of the hall were divided into 
 upper and lower halves, and secured by heavy 
 transverse bars of iron-bound oak, while the 
 inner doors connecting the rooms show in their 
 peculiar joiner work the hand of the Holland- 
 ish carpenter of the seventeenth century. 
 
 A squarely built, honest, and substantial 
 
13 
 
 house was this, where tenants could flock for 
 protection, and an army of savages be safely 
 defied — as long as provisions held out. That 
 there was very little danger of a scarcity in the 
 larder we may judge from the generous pan- 
 tries and cellars that fill their proportion of the 
 old house. A tradition tells how Flypse, being 
 annoyed by the thieving propensities of his 
 slaves and some domesticated Indians, built a 
 smoke-house, or room, in the ample chimney, 
 and kept in his own pocket the key of a store- 
 room large enough to victual a garrison. 
 
 From the rear end of the wide hall, which at 
 present occupies the centre of the mansion, runs 
 a flight of stairs winding by three easy stages 
 to the floor above. South of the upper landing 
 is a succession of chambers opening into one 
 another, all of considerable size, and the inner 
 one, where probably stood the martial four- 
 poster, as big as a hospital ward. 
 
 Flypse-his- Castle was a very large affair in 
 its day. Its proprietor was one who had the 
 reputation of being the best housed man in the 
 colony. So strong had this impression become 
 that, in 1689, a popular demand was made that 
 
14 Cbroniclee of a:arigto\vn 
 
 the public money of New York (amounting 
 to ;^773. I2S.) be removed from the fort to 
 Flypse's house. 
 
 History and tradition do not seem fully to 
 agree concerning the manner of man that 
 Flypse was. The traditionary^ Philips was a 
 rather holy man, whose pride was in the 
 church he built, w^hose tastes were rural, who 
 was a pleasant, patriarchal old fossil, and to 
 whom the winds of existence were somewhat 
 miraculously tempered — but history makes no 
 mention of his having even been a member of 
 the church he built (at a day when church- 
 membership meant little) ; documents and 
 deeds show him to have been not only a suc- 
 cessful merchant but a keen and powerful 
 politician, who headed with Bayard and Van 
 Cortlandt the patrician party in the colony. 
 Before him and his immediate associates the 
 strong lycislerian faction gave way ultimately, 
 and by their appointed judges Leisler was con- 
 demned to death. So far from being noted for 
 his peaceable adherence to the Dutch Reformed 
 Church, he was at one time hotly charged with 
 being a Papist. 
 
mt> Sleeps iboUow 
 
 15 
 
 There is something pathetic in this attempt 
 of tradition to make a pleasant milk-and-water 
 esquire out of the strong, resolute, hard-headed 
 Bohemian carpenter boy, who fought his w^ay 
 with hard knocks from the obscurity of noth- 
 ingdom to power as a patrician leader. He 
 must have had, in common with many another 
 self-made man, a large talent for forgetting ; 
 but, though he had lived among the people, he 
 was not one of them in the sense of having 
 learned their shibboleths. He worked always 
 to compel fate to yield him a compensation for 
 the privations of his 3^outh. 
 
 On the 17th of October, 1683, the first popu- 
 lar assembly held in the colonies convened at 
 New York and framed a ' ' charter of liberties, ' ' 
 wherein it was ordained that " every free- 
 holder and free-man might vote for representa- 
 tives without restraint." In this charter, as 
 ratified, we find Flypse's name first upon the 
 list of Aldermen. It mattered little to him 
 through what channel power flowed to him ; 
 he trusted himself to hold by his wisdom and 
 strength that which he gained by his tact. 
 
 He bitterly opposed I^eisler, the popular 
 
i6 Cbronlcles of tTarr^town 
 
 leader, and was one of those two officers who 
 claimed in behalf of the colony, and as the 
 representatives of the government, the letters 
 of instruction brought over by Riggs from 
 England. These letters were addressed to 
 whoever might be in power. In a paper by 
 Colonel Bayard, styled a " Modest and impar- 
 tial account of several grievances and great op- 
 pressions, etc., etc," the writer makes a long 
 showing of error and crime on the part of Mr, 
 Jacob lycisler, and in the course of his narrative 
 refers to Mr. Fred'k Philips and Stephanus 
 Van Cortlandt as * ' Left in trust by the Lieut. 
 Gov. for the keeping of the peace and legally 
 governing their majesties' province, which they 
 carefully and honestly would have discharged 
 the trust reposed in them if they had not been 
 prevented by this violator of our laws and lib- 
 erties (Leisler), and that with more renown to 
 their majesties as well as to the satisfaction of 
 their liege people inhabiting the domain, etc., 
 etc." 
 
 An account of the transaction of which Bay- 
 ard especially complained has been preserv^ed 
 in the more legal form of a certificate signed 
 
anD SleepB Ibollow 
 
 17 
 
 by Flypse and Van Cortlandt later. It reads : 
 * ' Leisler sent over one of his pretended Lieu- 
 tenants and two Sergeants for said Riggs (the 
 bearer of the dispatches) who se?it for us whose 
 names are hereunto subscribed." They then 
 went with him to the house of I^eisler within 
 the fort, where the latter not only disputed 
 with them the possession of the papers, but, to 
 use their own language, ' ' The said lycisler told 
 the said Riggs that we had nothing to do with 
 the said government. That we were Papists, 
 and the packets were directed to and belonged 
 to him, and thereupon commanded and took 
 the said packets out of the said Riggs his 
 hands, bidding us to depart the said fort hav- 
 ing nothing to do therewith — and used many 
 opprobrious words to both of us. ' ' The ' ' op- 
 probrious words " were what rankled the 
 longest, and perhaps had their share in tight- 
 ening the rope around the neck of their author. 
 
 When Sir Henry Sloughter arrived in New 
 York with gubernatorial power, Flypse and his 
 colleague stole a march on I^eisler, and while 
 he anxiously awaited the new comer they 
 
 boarded his vessel, and loading him with com- 
 2 
 
i8 Cbronicles ot (Tarri^town 
 
 pliments and civility brought him on shore. 
 To cap this coup d'etat^ their foe, grimly en- 
 sconced in the fort, suspiciously refused admit- 
 tance to the new Governor. If the carpenter 
 was skilful in driving home his nail, he was at 
 least fortunate in having an enemy complacent 
 enough to clinch it for him on the other side. 
 So Sloughter was won; but so the two con- 
 spirators did not gain the seat they afterwards 
 occupied in his council, for in the instructions 
 which the new Governor brought over with 
 him, the names of both appeared with all the 
 attesting formulae of the court at Whitehall. 
 Under the great seal Frederick Philips was first 
 named upon the list of councilmen to be called. 
 
 How Flj'pse found time, amid all the duties 
 and troubles of his political career, to direct 
 an extensive business and still give thought to 
 his manor at Philipsburg, it is hard to see. 
 Attend to it he did, however, and very 
 thoroughly. 
 
 A few years after the grant was secured, he 
 had not only finished his house but a mill as 
 well, where his tenants came to have their 
 corn ground, and where the Indians and 
 
19 
 
 Whites used to carry on those trading opera- 
 tions that gave the aborigines some of their 
 first impressions of Caucasian superiority. The 
 old mill still stands, its empty granary a refuge 
 for bats and squirrels and other untamed folk ; 
 its walls creak with the swaying of the willows 
 that lean against it, and idl}^ dabble their finger- 
 tips in the stream ; yet the ancient structure 
 wears its centuries very lightl3^ It speaks elo- 
 quently for the methods of Flypse, who as car- 
 penter, trader, or legislator has left no record 
 of half-done work. Whether he undertook to 
 erect a mill or elevate a governor, he did not 
 fail to accomplish thoroughly what he took in 
 hand. 
 
 The mill is a little more than a rod south of 
 the house. Its timbers are of unusually heavy 
 hewn oak, and its roof is shaped like that of 
 the house. The sides are shingled, not with 
 such puny shingles as we have to-day, but 
 mighty ones, made of cedar that has forgotten 
 how to grow since then. A treasured speci- 
 men hangs over my table ; it is carven with rain 
 and warped by sun and wind, while the years 
 have painted it to a gray that no other colorist 
 
20 Cbroniclc0 of ^Tart^tovvn 
 
 can match. Throughout its two feet of length 
 are seams and fissures and cross cuts where the 
 elements have fairly charred it. It tapers from 
 a thickness of half an inch, at what was once 
 the thin end, to a ragged paper-edge that will 
 vibrate under a breath. Until ver}^ recently 
 the old mill was covered with its fellows, all 
 fastened to their places upon the oaken back 
 strips by two and a half inch wrought nails. 
 
 At rear and front of the building are the old- 
 fashioned, horizontall}^ divided, Dutch doors. 
 These, and the little windows with which both 
 sides of the buildings are lavishly besprinkled, 
 still swing upon hinges that would make the 
 heart of an antiquary leap for jo3^ 
 
 In its day the old mill is said to have been a 
 port of entry, and the vessels whose manifests 
 were inspected there belonged for the most 
 part to the dignified gentleman who sat in the 
 seat of customs — at least, so tradition asserts. 
 I have failed to find record of an}^ other port 
 of entry situated so far from the sea as this one 
 was. 
 
 The millpond dam was a picturesque affair 
 of great logs, propped by a small forest of 
 
an& Sleepy Ibollow 
 
 21 
 
 lesser logs. A foot-bridge and hand-rail 
 crossed the top. The height of the structure 
 was probably about twenty feet, and below it 
 was a deep pool, towards the lower end of 
 which a wooden wharf received the cargoes of 
 the vessels that entered there. These craft, 
 some at least, proceeded past New York with- 
 out dropping anchor, to and from the West 
 Indies and even from Holland. They were 
 queer tubs, smaller than we trust for ocean 
 travel nowadays, but commanded by men very 
 singular in build and costume, yet intrepid 
 navigators ; tars as adventurous as any the 
 world has ever known. Probably the imports 
 were of such a character as would shock good 
 temperance people of to-day. In a report to 
 the Crown, written August 6, 1691, and signed 
 by Flypse and his associates, appears this para- 
 graph : ' ' New Yorke is the metropolis, is situ- 
 ate upon a barren island bounded by Hudson's 
 River and the East River that runs into the 
 sound and hath nothing to support it but trade 
 which flows chiefly from flour and bread they 
 make of the corn the west end of Long Island 
 and Sopus produces, which is sent to the West 
 
22 CbroiUcles of ^Tavr^town 
 
 Indies and there is brought in return from 
 thence a Hquor called Rumm, the duty whereof 
 considerably increaseth your 7)iajesty's revcmie^ 
 In the light of such a document we can easily 
 understand how the old mill came to be a port 
 of entry. That the officer who made such a 
 report to the Crown should be comptroller of a 
 port where his own ships unloaded, no doubt 
 " mightil}' increased " his own revenue. 
 
 During the troublous times of which some 
 mention has been already made, Lady Mar- 
 gareta died, and Flypse, with his usual decision 
 and energy, looked about him straightway for 
 another wife. 
 
 He found before long a worthy successor to 
 Margarita, in Catharina, the daughter of old 
 Oloffe Van Cortlandt and, therefore, the sister 
 of his colleague, Stephanus Van Cortlandt. 
 
 The marriage took place soon, and Catharina 
 Van Cortlandt, widow of John Dervall (who 
 had had the kindness to leave her a large 
 fortune) became Lady Catharina Philips of the 
 Manor of Philipsburg. Singularly enough, 
 this is the only Lady Philips that tradition 
 recognizes. 
 
atiD Sleeps Ibollow 
 
 23 
 
 This alliance made Flypse the richest man in 
 the colony. While strengthening himself by 
 this means, he was neither lax in business nor 
 lazy in politics as his years and his influence 
 grew together. 
 
 I have attempted to give in the foregoing 
 pages a faint idea of the character of Flypse, 
 or rather, to indicate the lines upon which a 
 study of that strong personality may be pur- 
 sued. It is a well-worn thought, yet I venture 
 it again — that no man's greatness must be 
 measured by the size of the world he lives in. 
 
 That Vredryk was a statesman, though liv- 
 ing and laboring in a petty State, the inadequate 
 record of his acts show. With strength of 
 will, clear judgment, and ambition, he was, at 
 the beginning of the eighteenth century the 
 foremost man in what is now the Empire State. 
 Although by nature and all his sympathies and 
 circumstances the leader of the ' ' patrician ' ' 
 party in the infant colony, he appears to have 
 been the first American chosen by popular vote 
 as a popular representative in the little cit}^ of 
 his adoption. . With his hands deep in every 
 broth which his colleagues Bayard and Van 
 
24 Cbronicles of ^arrgtown 
 
 Cortlandt brewed ; with his head teeming with 
 wonderful and carefully devised schemes for 
 exercising the power held nominally by the 
 Governor of the colony, he yet managed to make 
 so good a showing to the Crow^n that the seal 
 ol Whitehall was secured to endorse his acts. 
 
 Beginning life with the saw and hammer in 
 his hands, he laid them down to commence the 
 building of a fortune, w^hich seemed to his as- 
 sociates colossal. Coveting an estate, he se- 
 cured one of the fairest in the colony, where 
 w^e may well believe his word w^as law. 
 
 One episode in the life of Flypse we must 
 not omit to mention. As a merchant his ves- 
 sels were, in common with all that sailed the 
 seas at that day, subject to the dangers inci- 
 dent to an infant commerce. The greatest of 
 these was that arising from piracy. Marauders 
 of every grade preyed upon the vessels which 
 crossed from the old world to the new. At 
 last, upon the suggestion of Colonel Living- 
 stone, of New York, William Kidd was com- 
 missioned to act as a sort of marine patrol, 
 or constable whose duty it w^as to protect the 
 merchantman. 
 
mb Sleeps tbollow 
 
 25 
 
 The history of Captain Kidd's own career, 
 his perversion to the lawless class he was sent 
 to make war upon, and his subsequent capture 
 and execution, are familiar to all. 
 
 But in the heat of political strife there were 
 not found wanting those who noticed that the 
 vessels of Flj^pse and his friends were not called 
 upon to pay toll to the privateer. A whisper, 
 which was not stilled for many years, coupled 
 the names of Flypse and Bayard with that of 
 the notorious pirate. 
 
 Was it from this source that that other 
 legend arose in w^hich a certain rock — still 
 standing like a sentinel upon the river wall 
 within rifle range of Flypse' s Castle — gained 
 the name (by which it is known to-da}-) of 
 
 Kidd's Rock?" 
 
 Flypse died in 1702. The son who ruled 
 in his stead was Adolphus, his second born. 
 Philip, the elder, married a lady from the Bar- 
 badoes and died young, leaving one son, who 
 took his father's christened name. This Philip 
 Philips was afterwards Judge of the Supreme 
 Court. He had four children, to whom the 
 estate of Philipsburg reverted, and out of whose 
 
26 Cbronlclcs of c:arrsto\vn 
 
 hands it passed at the time of the Revolution ; 
 for Frederick Philips, great grandson of the 
 founder of the house, was as weak and vacil- 
 lating a fellow as ever let a wealthy estate 
 slip through his fingers. He first thought 
 he favored the Continental cause, and then 
 changed his mind and was sure he belonged to 
 the Tory party. While he was making up his 
 mind he was exiled to Connecticut on parole. 
 First he thought he would keep his parole, 
 and afterwards was induced to break it, and 
 the result was that he was surprised into an 
 activity that resulted in the confiscation of 
 Philipsburg by New York. 
 
 But this did not occur for a long time. 
 When Frederick the first died, his son Adol- 
 phus took charge of the baronial affairs. ' That 
 he did so to the entire satisfaction of all parties 
 concerned is evident from a memorial of thanks 
 presented b\^ his tenants in 1716. It is worth 
 publishing if only as an evidence of the amount 
 of laudation that one fairly respectable man 
 could stand in those days. It runs as follows : 
 
 " Resolved, That we take in hand and com- 
 plete, in as far as possible, our resolution to 
 
an& Sleeps 1)ollow 27 
 * 
 
 show the duty of thanks which we owe for the 
 many mercies done to your servants our parents 
 of blessed memory, but especially to us your 
 present servants and women servants, from 
 time to time by your Hon. Right Honorable 
 Lord and father of blessed memory, as also 
 from your honored mother of blessed mem- 
 ory, the Lady Margarita, as also by your 
 Lord Father's last wedded wife. Lady Catha- 
 rina, as also by your Honorable Right Honora- 
 ble and Noble, very wise and provident, our 
 Lordship the Lord Adolphus Philips, viz : for 
 the many benefits done to us your faith- 
 ful servants and women servants through 
 various favorable means and good instructions 
 — we therefore pray with all reverence that 
 your honored Lordship will receive these our 
 small thanks according to our small deserts, 
 and we your honored and obedient serv^ants 
 will remain obligated and will ever be your 
 honorable very obedient humble servants, ' ' 
 
 Imagine the feelings of the man who should 
 receive to-day such an epistle as that, couched 
 in the purest of low Dutch! A Hollandish 
 pedagogue must have framed those sentences. 
 
28 Cbronicles of (Tarri^town 
 
 Cornelius was a bachelor. He was a man of 
 talent and influence. His life was passed be- 
 tween his estate and the metropolis, where he 
 filled the office of Assemblyman, and was, like 
 his nephew Philip, a Judge of the Supreme 
 Court. Indeed, Adolphus seemed to inherit 
 not only a large portion of his father's wealth, 
 but considerable of his character. He died in 
 1750, aged eighty-five years. In person he 
 w^as tall and of commanding presence. 
 
 The member of all the Philips family to 
 whom tradition points as an object of venera- 
 tion is the stepmother, Catharina. She, too, 
 had her memorial regularly recorded by the 
 venerable Abraham de Revere, in which lauda- 
 tion chokes itself. Her name is first on the list 
 of members of the church she possibly helped 
 to build. Before it, is the preamble ' ' First and 
 before all." Her title was sometimes written, 
 * ' The Right Honorable wise pious and very 
 provident lady, widow of Lord Fredryk Flypse, 
 who did here very praiseworthily advance the 
 cause of religion." 
 
 So we see that while the lady was pious, 
 wise, and very provident (charitable ?), which 
 
ant) Sleepy Ibollow 
 
 29 
 
 makes her a truly phenomenal woman, her 
 lord is almost damned with faint praise. But 
 apparently Catherina's distinguishing piety 
 began with her widowhood. Certain it is, that 
 both the husband and wife on state occasions 
 graced with their presence the " thrones," 
 cushioned and canopied, that flanked the old 
 octagonal pulpit, there to be admired by the 
 less comfortable, but no less contented tenants. 
 And certain it is that both the lyord and his 
 Lady lie in less dignified but no less solemn 
 state beneath the church floor to-day. 
 
 We must not forget Flypse's daughters. 
 Eva, his adopted child (according to Doctor 
 Todd), married Cornelius Van Cortlandt, and 
 that part of the estate where Yonkers now 
 stands was given to her for a marriage por- 
 tion ; of one of her descendants we will have 
 something further to say. The second daugh- 
 ter, Annetje, married Philip French. In 1702, 
 I^ord Cornbury was made Governor, and that 
 same year French became Mayor. He married 
 upon his appointment to office. It will be re- 
 membered that this same year, 1702, Vredryk 
 Flypse died. 
 
30 Cbronicles of ^Tarri^town 
 
 It is not altogether easy to dismiss the char- 
 acters who moulded the thought and manners 
 of many people, and who retained for nearly a 
 century large political influence and powder in 
 what are now the counties of Westchester and 
 New York. 
 
 The tenants of the Flj^pse estate w^ere the 
 ancestors of many of the people w^ho are enjoy- 
 ing the nineteenth-century luxuries of lighting 
 and locomotion with us to-day. We are wont 
 to bestow our gratuitous pity upon the victim 
 of saddle and sail-boat and monthly post-man, 
 in the far-off days when w^heat-fields waved 
 from the manor-farm to the forest edge ; when 
 the red deer drank by the Pocantico, and the 
 red men brought furs to trade for ' * rumm ' ' at 
 the mill ; w4ien from some urchin's pocket a 
 chestnut was dropped among the corn rows, 
 where now^ the great tree with its twenty feet 
 girth lifts a coronal of plumes in the centre of 
 the fort3^-acre lot ; but have we more of life, of 
 energy, of those experiences that go to make 
 up our sum of pain and pleasure than they 
 had? 
 
 When the property passed from the hands 
 
an& Sleepy f)ollow 
 
 31 
 
 of its original owners, one of the old-time 
 guests who possibly looked back regretfully at 
 the last pages of that chapter was George 
 Washington. Tradition (the jade) tells how 
 the father of his country courted Miss Philips 
 before he met the admirable Mrs. Custis; and 
 twenty j^ears ago one could see the room in 
 which he slept, with furniture (so they said) 
 unchanged. 
 
 To some people w^ho have been accustomed 
 to regard the Flypse family as among the 
 ' ' Patroons, ' ' it will probably be a great disap- 
 pointment to learn that the}^ had no claim to 
 that very Dutchest of titles being lords by an 
 English creation, and not through the favor 
 of the States- General of Holland. 
 
 When after the Revolution the manor of 
 Philipsburg was confiscated by the new gov- 
 ernment of New York, the lands becoming for- 
 feit by the attainder of Sir Frederic Philips, 
 last of his name, one of the principal grantees 
 was a descendant from an ancient political ad- 
 versary of Vredryk the first. This was Gerard 
 G. Beekman. Years before, it will be remem- 
 bered, Eva Philips married Cornelius Van 
 
32 Cbronicles of Q:arretown 
 
 Cortlaudt. Her granddaughter, or great-grand- 
 daughter, CorneHa Van Cortlandt, married 
 Gerard Beekman, and so came back to the 
 manor and house her ancestor founded. 
 
 At the beginning of its second chapter of 
 histor}^ the old house had to undergo repairs 
 and alterations. A north end was added, 
 bearing much resemblance — externally — to the 
 old part, but not so solidly built. Within, the 
 difference in ceiling, doors, and mantels are 
 marked. At the same time a front office was 
 added to the mill, and that part is now greatly 
 damaged by time. The moral of this seems to 
 be that a house built by a carpenter has the 
 odds in its favor. 
 
 The generation that came in with the Revo- 
 lution passed away — all but old Mrs. Beekman 
 — who had been Miss Van Cortlandt. She 
 lived on and on past her generation, known 
 and loved as a Lady Bountiful, the good 
 genius of the neighborhood, and died not so 
 long ago but that many people still remember 
 her. She used to tell how during the war of 
 Independence she had lain awake all one night 
 in the old manor-house, listening to the rumble 
 
an& Sleeps Ibollow 
 
 33 
 
 and grumble of the Continental Army as it 
 passed. Commenting upon this story, one to 
 whom she had told it said in after years that 
 he did not understand how she came to be in 
 that house at the time, w^hen it w^as Philips' s 
 property. Her relation to the Philips family 
 w411 explain that fully. 
 
 Before Mrs. Beekman's death (she lived to 
 be nearly a hundred) the broad acres of the 
 estate had been cut dow^n and a host of 
 strangers had crow^ded into the town, lured by 
 the railroad that crossed the mouth of the 
 pleasant bay, and has since destroyed it en- 
 tirely by cutting off the river connection. 
 
 After a while the house passed from the 
 Beekman's hands. Mr. Foote at one time oc- 
 cupied it and Captain Jacob Storm, w^ho was a 
 descendant of one of the old settlers. It be- 
 came the propert}^ of the late Ambrose Kings- 
 land, w^ho bought it because he had an estate 
 adjoining, and w^ho " improved^' it almost past 
 recognition. One of the family removed the 
 machinery of the old mill ; another clapboarded 
 the sides of the house, not liking the looks of 
 the stone walls, and made other additions and 
 
 3 
 
34 Cbroniclcs of tTarr^town 
 
 alterations. There are now, I think, only two 
 old mantels left of the several that I can re- 
 member, and these are in the modern, or Beek- 
 man, part of the house. Some new doors, a 
 row of dormer windows in the roof, and a bal- 
 conj^ and piazza are also of a modern date; 
 while a west addition completely hides the 
 port-holes where the howitzers protruded from 
 their lair in the cellar. Still in the southwest 
 corner of the mill a number of small holes seem 
 to show^ w^here a load of shot at some time 
 missed a probable designation on the creek. 
 
 The big chimney on the west side gave place 
 to a smaller one in the centre, and its Holland 
 bricks are now lining part of a more modern 
 house in the village. Verily, the old house has 
 been changed, but its walls and roof retain their 
 integrity ! 
 
 I hardly know how to classify, or w^here to 
 mention, the many odds and ends that seem 
 only so man}^ component parts of a historic 
 rubbish-heap, a curious jumble of lonely and 
 non-assorted legends and relics that are like 
 the scraps and the drift that the wasli of years 
 has deposited as tidemarks in the old mill. 
 
ant) Sleeps IboUow 
 
 35 
 
 There, lying among shavings of more modern 
 pine, one may come across a piece of leather 
 belting and cups of the elevator still hanging 
 therefrom, marking a comparatively recent 
 date in grain milling, and find still lower down 
 a bit of century-carved oak, or a bolt that was 
 driven when New York was still the far west. 
 So, like witnesses of old-time lawsuits, or like 
 the memories of old men touching themes that 
 our cyclopaedias have forgotten to mention, 
 there comes a rabble of hints and many per- 
 plexing half-lights insisting upon our recogni- 
 tion of them. What shall we do with them ? 
 Where place the date of the vessel that found- 
 ered by the mill, whose last rib alone marked 
 the place of her resting when w^e w^ere boys ? 
 How tell the story of the old bones that a 
 frightened tenant found in the cellar corner of 
 the manor-house — and left there ? What is 
 there of story connected with the spurs that were 
 found in the same uncanny corner ; did they 
 belong to the bones ? Were the remains really 
 human, of foe, or slave, or lost traveller, of 
 colonial or revolutionary date ; or did some cel- 
 lar-housed watch-dog leave his larder there ? 
 
36 Cbroniclee of ^arrgtown 
 
 What shall we say of the little scales that have 
 presumably descended from Vredryk Flypse, 
 and which, up to the time of his death, 
 were in the possession of Mr. Jas. S. See, of 
 North Tarrytown ? If they w^ould tell us 
 whether they gave good weight or not we 
 might have something of a clue to the hand 
 that first held them. When the last resident 
 Philips collected his last rents he left the little 
 gold scales at the house of Mr. See's ancestor, 
 where they remained for more than a century. 
 They are now treasured by Mrs. James Hawes. 
 another descent of that old time tenant. 
 
 In the old church is an old oak bier — who 
 lay upon it first ? Whose ghostly hand is it 
 that rattles the door of the south parlor of the 
 old house when no one can be seen there ? 
 These are questions that the historian w^ho 
 picks them up must drop as he drops the piece 
 of leather belting or the wrought bolt back to 
 their rubbish-heap again. Someone else may 
 find in any one of them the clue to a mystery, 
 or the hinge for a tragedy to turn upon. A 
 few years more, and probably the old mill 
 would have dropped to ruin for want of care, 
 
ant) Sleeps Ibollow 
 
 37 
 
 but for repairs completed at the time of this 
 writing. A flood several years ago did dam- 
 age. Some leaks in the roof made more mis- 
 chief than a century of storm beating could 
 have done, and the willows that folded the 
 creases of their mighty trunks about its eaves 
 tried for a share in the conclusion. And the 
 inevitable downfall has only been postponed. 
 We have little regard for anything the value 
 of which is based upon sentiment only. A 
 few 3^ears, at most, and some factory or 
 dwelling must take its place, while men of an 
 antiquarian turn of mind dispute about the site 
 of this ancient port. Then, in some still, moon- 
 lit midnight, we can fancy that the old-time 
 worthies will steal across from their encamp- 
 ment on the hillside opposite, and grieve be- 
 cause they cannot find in the great house, 
 wooden-cased and land-girt as it is, any trace 
 of Flypse— his Castle. 
 
 Right well I wote, most mighty soveraine 
 That all this famous antique history 
 Of some the abundance of an ydle braine 
 Will iudged be, and painted forgery, 
 Rather than matter of iust memorie ; 
 
38 Cbronlcles of ^arr^town 
 
 Sith none that breatheth living aire doth know 
 Where is that happy land of Faerie, 
 Which I so much doe vaunt, yet no where show ; 
 But vouch antiquities which no body can know. 
 
 — Spenser's Faery Queen, 
 
Ill 
 
 TH^ STORY OF THK OI.D DUTCH CHURCH 
 
 T^HB Story of the old Dutch church is one 
 
 I which the sensitive historian commences 
 with caution and misgiving, since an antiquity 
 of only two centuries has already hidden the 
 end of its perspective in a mist through which 
 nothing very definite can be seen ; but as men 
 are more apt to do battle for their opinions 
 than for the matters that they know beyond 
 peradventure, it is impossible to hazard a con- 
 jecture upon the date of the erection of the 
 church without being halted and belabored by 
 the clubs of a score of antiquaries. 
 
 Near Flypse's castle, hard by the niillpond, 
 between the Pocantico and the graveyard, 
 Vredryk Flypse and one, or both, of his wives 
 built a sturdy stone church with gambrel roof 
 and an octagonal rear. Surmounting the front a 
 
 39 
 
40 Cbronlclcs of n:arrBtown 
 
 belfry, quaintly misfitting the structure below 
 it, pointed its dumpy spire heavenward with a 
 sturdy consistency that w^as as uncompromis- 
 ingly HoUandish as the sermons that the 
 Dominie droned from the bell-flower pulpit to 
 the drow^sy farmers of Philipsburg. 
 
 When the church was new there w^ere seven 
 window^s where there are now but six, and a 
 door on the south side instead of at the west, 
 as at present. The walls w^ere thirt}^ inches 
 in thickness, and the sills of the window^s more 
 than seven feet above the floor, so that the 
 savage foemen who lurked in the woods could 
 not look in upon the little congregation. Iron 
 bars traversing these openings gave still greater 
 securit)^ to the building which could in time of 
 danger have been converted into a fortress, im- 
 pregnable against an}' w^eapons or engine that 
 the Indians could produce. Between the door 
 and the middle south window, outside, a bench 
 used to stand, and there the old folks rested 
 while w^aiting for the dominie's appearance; for 
 it was long a custom to follow the black gown 
 into church as a flock of sheep follow the 
 bellwether. 
 
anD Sleeps Ibollow 
 
 41 
 
 The interior of the church showed evidence 
 of taste and vSkill; but its furniture testified 
 without equivocation to the recognition of class 
 distinctions even under the shadow of the pul- 
 pit. The dominie, from that ornate octagonal 
 perch, with the pendant hexagon of mahogany 
 that hung over him like an extinguisher, giv- 
 ing emphasis to his sonorous periods, ex- 
 pounded the word of God as endorsed and 
 interpreted by the Synod of Dortrecht. Before 
 him sat a congregation of solidly constructed 
 Dutchmen, whose anatomy could stand the 
 strain of a long service while seated on back- 
 less benches of unyielding oak. The farmer 
 who tilled his acres or cut his wood lot in 
 Sleepy Hollow was not carried to the skies on 
 beds of flowery ease, by any means ; but his 
 lord, who, in the divine ordination of degrees, 
 had been made to enjoy all the softer delights 
 of life, was edified while reposing in a cush- 
 ioned and canopied * ' throne. ' ' Such luxurious 
 boxes, somewhat resembling those of a modern 
 theatre, were arranged for the lord of the 
 manor and his family at the minister's right 
 and left. 
 
42 Cbronicles of tTacrgtown 
 
 The humble retainers, slaves, and redemp- 
 tioners, sat in the gallery with the boys and 
 the singers, and a precentor to keep them all 
 in order. From the top of the walls great oak 
 beams crossed the church, and above these ex- 
 tended an arched ceiling of whitewashed oak, 
 from the west end of which the lower part of 
 the belfry intruded like a great white box set 
 against the wall. The belfrj-box had a ladder 
 leading to it from the galler}', and a round 
 window from which the bellringer could see 
 when the dominie was in the pulpit. 
 
 Nowhere was the local color of Philipsburg 
 more strongly brought out than at the church. 
 The character of the peaceful community of 
 Philipsburg must have been for a while some- 
 thing between Acadia and Eden, with a dash 
 of Holland to flavor it. The people gathered 
 about their head for council and for protection 
 as in some earlier patriarchal government, but 
 there was no overstepping the bounds of caste ; 
 men had not yet begun to be bom free and 
 equal. But something more nearly approach- 
 ing equality obtained on the Sabbath day at 
 the church. Doubtless there were great and 
 
an& Sleeps Ibollow 
 
 43 
 
 influential sinners, and miserable sinners, even 
 as there are big fish and little fish, and the sal- 
 vation of the proprietor was a very difierent 
 matter from the salvation of a tenant; but still, 
 when they were all gathered at the manor 
 church on a Sunday, while Dominie Ritzemer, 
 or Dominie Mutzelius, dealt faithfully with their 
 souls, there must have been at least the semb- 
 lance of a fellow-feeling. 
 
 There came Flypse with his family and 
 guests, gorgeously arra^^ed in purple and fine 
 linen. The women wore splendid stomachers, 
 laced and pearl trimmed, with short gowns of 
 rich brocade or stiff silk, quilted and padded, 
 and cut short to show the neat ankles in their 
 red, clocked stockings. The men flourished in 
 long-skirted blue coats, with buttons of silver 
 and gold, over silken small-clothes and hose. 
 Their tie wigs, and their buckles, showed that 
 neither head nor feet were considered beyond 
 the pale of adornment. The children were 
 miniature parodies on their elders ; and the 
 dominie, who belonged to the upper ten, ap- 
 peared in his suit of respectable black. Next 
 were the farmers, dressed in home-spun, linsey- 
 
44 
 
 Cbronicles of ^Tarrstown 
 
 woolsey, and all manner of durable stufifs, the 
 girls trying humbly to imitate the splendors of 
 the great dames. After the farmer folk came 
 the negro slaves and the poorer white hangers- 
 on of the place and the few aboriginal land- 
 holders who lingered as paupers where their 
 sires had lorded it once. 
 
 A well-known character of those days was 
 old Wolfert Kcker, who was the builder and 
 proprietor of the Wolfert 's Roost," which 
 Washington Irving has made familiar to all 
 the world, as Sunnyside. Wolfert Ecker was a 
 man to be trusted both by his neighbors and 
 his landlord, and his name appears third on 
 the list of elders of the church. He was 
 elected to that office in 1698, a year before the 
 building was completed, if we are to take the 
 word of several clerical authorities. 
 
 With this mention of Kcker and the date of 
 his election the unhappy historian brings the 
 hornets about his head, for the antiquary who 
 believes that 1699 was the true date of erection, 
 as placarded on the front of the church, is im- 
 mediately up in arms against his brother- 
 antiquary who holds that the Wolfert Ecker 
 
anD Sleeps Ibollow 
 
 45 
 
 election in 1698 casts a doubt upon it. I may 
 as well, having made this plunge, do a little 
 splashing in these vexed waters. First, the 
 date on the tablet in the front or west wall of 
 the church states that the building was erected 
 in 1699 by Frederick Philips and Katrina Van 
 Courtlandt. This statement, which, so far as 
 I can discover, is entirel}^ unsupported by a 
 shadow of other testimony, is inscribed in Eng- 
 lish, a language not used in the church till 
 some time subsequent to the war for Independ- 
 ence. The character of the letters is one com- 
 paratively recent, and there is ever}^ probability 
 that the tablet was put up at the time of the 
 repairs in 1837; that is to saj^, nearly a century 
 and a half after the church was built. Cer- 
 tainly this tablet does not afford very strong or 
 convincing evidence. 
 
 On the other hand, the date on the bell is 
 1685. This bell was not one which would be 
 likely to be picked up in stock in a foundry or 
 a store. It is of fine workmanship, and is 
 ornamented with a pattern in relief and the 
 raised motto, "Sz Deus pro nobis quis contra 
 710$. ' ' In the will of Katrina, the second wife 
 
46 Cbronlclc0 of n:arrstown 
 
 of Lord Filipse, that good lady refers to ' * The 
 church which my husband, the late Lord, etc., 
 built." 
 
 The first minister of whom we have record 
 was called to the Dutch Church of Philipsburg 
 in 1697 ; this is, of course, suggestive. But 
 perhaps one of the strongest arguments that 
 can be offered by those whose happiness de- 
 pends upon adding a few years to the antiquity 
 of this church is found in the character of the 
 people. Though not fanatical, the Dutchmen 
 were great church-goers, and it seems improb- 
 able that the rich proprietor, surrounded by 
 a rapidl}^ growing tenantry, having built for 
 himself a house which won the denomination 
 of ' ' Castle, ' ' and a mill that has survived even 
 the inattention of its owners for two centuries, 
 should have waited fifteen years or more be- 
 fore building a church. There is no reason to 
 suppose that any great delay was made in 
 building it, except an incongruous tablet 
 erected about 1837 by some people who about 
 the same time proved their stupidity by turn- 
 ing the rare old inlaid black-oak communion- 
 table out of the church and afterwards selling 
 
an& Sleeps Dollow 
 
 47 
 
 it to Judge Constant for twenty-five dollars. 
 By the way, this table, which, with the silver 
 communion- service and baptismal-bowl, were 
 the gift to the church of the first lord of the 
 manor and his last wife, are now in use in the 
 First Reformed Church, which is the daughter 
 of the old Dutch church. The table was re- 
 turned to the church, and now bears a silver 
 plate with an inscription stating that it was the 
 gift of James K. Paulding. 
 
 Beyond the Rev. William Bartholf, first 
 stated minister of God's Word in the manor of 
 Philipsburg, there is a mist, if not of antiquity, 
 at least of real ignorance. If any one preached 
 to this people, married them, christened their 
 babies and buried their dead (and we suppose 
 that someone must have done some of these 
 things which even savages do not fail entirely 
 to celebrate), neither history nor tradition has 
 made a note of it. 
 
 In the year 1697, according to the records 
 begun by Abraham de Revere in 17 15, an in- 
 vitation was given to, and accepted by, " the 
 very learned and pious Guillaume Bartholf, 
 minister at Hackensack and Hagquackenon, 
 
48 Cbronlclce of {Tarn^town 
 
 to preach for them and administer the sacra- 
 ments three or four times in the year ; and 
 the continuance of these ordinances until the 
 2d of November, 1715 ; also the payment 
 of the minister for these services ; and of 
 Mr. Van Houten, who carried him on those 
 long journeys from and to his home in 
 Hakinsack." 
 
 Mr. Bartholf was an American by birth, 
 who had been educated for the ministry in 
 Holland and returned to his native land to 
 labor in what would now be considered a 
 home missionary field. His successor was 
 Frederick Mutzelius. 
 
 Johannes Ritzemer was the next preacher. It 
 is not known at what date he commenced to 
 minister to the people. He was a man of ex- 
 ceptional ability, it is said, having been hon- 
 ored with positions of trust in the church. 
 Educated in Holland, he labored in New York 
 City from 1744 to 1784. In 1755, he was pastor 
 of Harlem, Philipsburg, Fordham, and Court- 
 landt. He continued to fill the pulpit of the 
 old church, at how frequent intervals we do not 
 know, till the Revolution. In 1717, the con- 
 
atiD Sleeve IboUow 
 
 49 
 
 gregations of Courtlandt and Philipsburg had 
 united to support the religious services in the 
 latter place. 
 
 With the new era after the Revolution came 
 the Rev. Stephen Van Voorhees, who was 
 identified with the new movement by which 
 the Dutch Church in America finally separated 
 itself from its parent in Holland. Mr. Van 
 Voorhees was the first candidate licensed by 
 the independent American Synod in 1772. 
 During the struggle for independence the 
 church at Tarrytown had been frequently, if 
 not entirely, closed. The weddings waited, and 
 the babies were unbaptized, and the converts 
 unwelcomed ; this we gather from the records. 
 After that memorable struggle the little hand- 
 ful who survived resumed their church-going 
 habits and began by renovating the house, 
 which had fallen somewhat in need of repair. 
 In the first enthusiasm of victorious republi- 
 canism they attacked the ' ' Thrones ' ' of the 
 lyOrd and Lady of Philipsburg, and tore down 
 the hangings of silk and the luxurious seats, 
 substituting boxes for the elders and deacons. 
 " No more lyords and Kings," they cried. 
 
50 Cbronicle0 of ^Tarr^tovvn 
 
 But under this rampant radicalism still slum- 
 bered Dutch conservatism. They had reached 
 the limit of innovation when they established 
 backs for benches that had hitherto been back- 
 less ; comfortless oak boards supported on 
 stanchions so placed that it only needed a 
 heavy weight at the end to convert one into a 
 perilous ballista. Reform had gone as far as 
 decency permitted ; any one who should pro- 
 pose more was a dangerous radical. 
 
 The offender was the Rev. Stephen Van 
 Voorhees. After they had secured his services, 
 the worshippers in the old church began to 
 suspect that he was liable to explode, and they 
 watched him jealously. He was a new-party 
 man and they belonged — the more they thought 
 it over the more they were sure they belonged 
 — to the old party. Revolutions would do well 
 enough in State, but in Church they would 
 have none of them. 
 
 Now, let us picture a scene in the year 1785 
 or 1786. On the benches under the church 
 windows the old cronies sit and gossip in the 
 sun. A group of hardy men — men who have 
 had experiences ranging from the Sugar House 
 
anO Sleeps Dollow 
 
 51 
 
 to Yorktowii — loiter near the door, where a 
 retinue of small boys mimic their attitudes in 
 worshipful silence and gravity, cocking one 
 foot over the other and expectorating mightily, 
 while they listen to what these great men 
 have to say, belonging, as thej^ do, to the 
 original guild of hero-worshippers. Along 
 the road come young men and maidens, with- 
 out prudery or affectation, carrying their Sun- 
 day shoes in their hands. They stop at the 
 Pocantico and, having washed their dusty feet 
 and put on their shoes, ascend the bank pain- 
 fully to join their elders. 
 
 Finally the dominie appears and saluting 
 gravely to right and left, he leads the way into 
 the church ; the congregation, with much rust- 
 ling and squeaking and stumbling in the unac- 
 customed shoes, are settled in their accustomed 
 places. The choir has scrambled up the gal- 
 lery stairs and the service begins. Several of 
 the people, mothers in Israel especially, turn 
 their heads towards the door now and then to 
 scrutinize a little group of late comers. There 
 is Solomon Hawes with I/Ovine Hammon, his 
 wife (she is of the family of General James 
 
52 Cbrontclea of TTarrctown 
 
 Hammon, or Hammond), and their infant, 
 with one or two others. 
 
 After the prayer the dominie breaks an ex- 
 pectant hush with the customary formula, invit- 
 ing those parents who have children to be 
 baptized to present them and Solomon Hawes 
 and his little family gather about the altar. 
 Heretofore, there has been nothing strange, but 
 as the clergyman takes the infant out of her 
 father's arms and proceeds, " Lovinia, I bap- 
 tise thee," etc., a thrill of something deeper 
 than surprise goes over the congregation. 
 
 St. Nicholas defend us, and the States Gen- 
 eral of Holland and the Synod of Dortrecht and 
 all other things Dutch defend us. He is bap- 
 tizing little Lovine Hawes in E7iglish. 
 
 The offense was one which the people did 
 not easily forgive. The first plunge is usually 
 remembered, and, although English gradually 
 superseded Dutch in the services of the Church, 
 Mr. Van Voorhees was not popular in Philips- 
 burg. He also began to keep the church 
 records in English, thus turning the weapon 
 in the wound. His term was short. 
 
 Mr. Van Voorhees lived on the north side 
 
53 
 
 of Main Street at its intersection with Broad- 
 way. 
 
 Following Mr. Van Voorhees came Rev. 
 John F. Jackson, who preached at Tarrytown 
 and Harlem, beginning in the fall of 1791 and 
 continuing till 1806. He died pastor at Ford- 
 ham thirty years later. He was a man of 
 strong physique and strong mind, who became 
 locally celebrated both as a martyr and a 
 prophet, in consequence of a scandal which 
 arose during his pastorate at Greenburg. From 
 18 1 2 till 1820 he had kept this church full to 
 overflowing, and his popularity seemed to be 
 great till, in the latter year, he was arrested on 
 a charge preferred maliciously by some of his 
 people. Having been tried and acquitted, he 
 returned to the church to preach his last dis- 
 course, using as a text the words, " Your 
 house shall be left unto you desolate." With- 
 in a very few years the congregation had 
 dwindled to nothing, and the house was closed. 
 
 Of all the dominies Mr, Smith seems to have 
 afforded the largest fund of anecdote to the 
 antiquary. His eloquence and geniality made 
 him popular even while his eccentric habits ex- 
 
54 Cbroniclcs of ZTarrgtown 
 
 posed him to criticism. With a carelessness 
 that amounted to slovenliness in his personal 
 habits, he exhibited a degree of energy and 
 zeal in his professional work that silenced his 
 critics. Mr. Smith organized the church at 
 Unionville; built up the church at White 
 Plains largely by his own efforts; preached in 
 private houses at Dobbs Ferry till a public 
 house of worship was erected there; and drew 
 hearers for miles around when he filled the 
 pulpit at Philipsburg. 
 
 Tradition does not leave us in doubt as to 
 the figure that he cut in that pulpit, when, 
 having regaled himself from his ample mull at 
 the end of the hymn before the sermon he 
 trumpeted vigorously throughout the collec- 
 tion and rose to his discourse with the unmo- 
 lested snuff in driblets staining the front of his 
 not otherwise immaculate waistcoat. 
 
 But when he preached, as his eloquence 
 began to thrill his hearers, his own personality 
 seemed to change, and those who listened to 
 him could not remember that he was * * slovenly 
 in dress and careless in manners." 
 
 It sometimes happens that at harvest time, 
 
an& Sleeps Ibollow 
 
 55 
 
 when a farmer congregation is worked to the 
 limit of its physical endurance, its members 
 find it impossible to keep their eyes open at 
 church for the length of a sermon, though it 
 should happen to be delivered with all the elo- 
 quence of a Beecher or a Smith. An anecdote, 
 sometimes related of other ministers, but origi- 
 nal, I believe, with Dominie Smith, is to the 
 effect that upon one such occasion of general 
 somnolence he startled his sleeping flock by a 
 cry of * ' Fire ! Fire ! ' ' There was instant con- 
 sternation in the church. Women screamed 
 and men scrambled to their feet. 
 
 * * Where ? where ? ' ' was the excited outcry. 
 The dominie regarded his awakened people 
 sternly for a moment, and then with the mien 
 and accent of delegated authority he thun- 
 dered : 
 
 ** In hell ! for such sleepy Christians as you 
 are." 
 
 I^ess was thought at that day of excess in 
 the use of alcoholic stimulants than now, yet 
 there has been no whisper of undue indulgence 
 on the part of the popular, careless, convivial 
 pastor, though when a parishioner paid his re- 
 
56 Cbroniclca of ^Tarrgtown 
 
 spects at the manse, the bottle of Jamaica rum 
 was always forthcoming. It is thought that 
 the dominie's wife might have driven a man 
 of less pliant temper to drink ; for if ever a 
 Xantippe lived in these latter centuries to 
 harass a philosophical husband, Dame Smith 
 was that woman. On one occasion, having 
 some difference of opinion either with her care- 
 less lord or his elders, it does not appear 
 which, she locked him securely in his study 
 before church and left it to the distressed con- 
 sistory to discover and liberate him long after 
 the hour for the commencement of the ser- 
 vices. Another prank of peculiarly feminine 
 ingenuity coUvSisted in bringing a pillow to 
 church and ostentatiously settling herself for 
 a nap during the sermon. A peculiarly scan- 
 dalous exhibition of emotional insanity or gen- 
 eral cussedness, or whatever it was that ailed 
 her, was in driving the minister's horse at 
 breakneck speed up and down in front of the 
 church while the worshippers within were no 
 doubt casting sidelong glances through the 
 door, and wondering whether the quiver of 
 lightnings was empty. 
 
mt> Sleeps ibollow 
 
 57 
 
 As we remember these things we begin to 
 forgive the dominie his use of tobacco in every 
 form, and his careless personal attire, his 
 frayed wristbands and rumpled stock and soiled 
 waistcoat. We plead extenuating circumstan- 
 ces when his general slouchiness is mentioned. 
 Perhaps Brummel would have been a slouch if 
 he had been wedded to Xantippe. 
 
 Dominie Smith's body lies at the rear of the 
 church where he labored, and the people who 
 laid him there remembered only that he was 
 their faithful and much loved pastor. 
 
 When the Rev. George Du Bois came to 
 Tarrytown it was to gain rest after eighteen 
 years of sermon-writing and pastoral work in 
 a city parish. He officiated at the old Frank- 
 lin Street Church in New York City. The 
 call to the Reformed Dutch Church of Tarry- 
 town was accompanied with a promise that a 
 new church edifice should be built. In 1837-^ 
 38 $2032.86 was paid for repairs on the old 
 church, and between $6000 and $7000 ex- 
 pended upon the South Church and parsonage. 
 Mr. William Landrine was one of the promi- 
 nent parishioners at that time, and by his per- 
 
58 Cbronlcles ot ^rarrgtown 
 
 sonal efforts raised $761.75 out of the $2032.86 
 required for repairing the old church. Mr. 
 Smith had received but $300 per annum for his 
 services. This salary was raised to $700 for 
 Mr. Du Bois, whose labors included a ser\'ice 
 in the old church in the morning and in the 
 South Church in the evening. At this time 
 the Sundaj'-school of the old church used to 
 meet comfortably in the gallery. In 1844, Mr. 
 Du Bois followed his predecessor, and was 
 buried in the old churchyard. 
 
 In 1845, Joseph Wilson came and filled the 
 joint pulpits till 1849, when he was succeeded 
 by John IMason Ferris, who, in three or four 
 months after settlement, refused to preach at 
 all in the old church, and confined his minis- 
 trations to the South Church. This move ne- 
 cessitated the employment of an assistant, at 
 an expense parth' met by Mr. Ferris, and for 
 a 3^ear the Rev. John W. Schenck filled that 
 position, but was never installed. 
 
 With the division of the church into two 
 congregations, worshipping in separate build- 
 ings, for that was necessarily the outcome of 
 the erection of the South Church, there came 
 
anO Sleepy Ibollow 
 
 59 
 
 in a short time a complete separation of inter- 
 ests which led to divorce. The division of 
 church property followed. The North Church, 
 or old organization, retained the old building, 
 graveyard, name, seal, records, and plate; and 
 the South Church assumed a debt of $1000 and 
 gave to the North Church $2000. All other 
 realty w^as released to the South Church. 
 Church Street, south of the Benedict property, 
 owes its name to having been built upon a por- 
 tion of this estate. 
 
 It was to the pastorate of over sixty families 
 and one hundred and fifty members that re- 
 mained to the old church after the division 
 that the Rev. Abel T. Stewart was called in 
 1852. It was during his ministry that the re- 
 moval w^as made by the congregation from the 
 old building to the ' ' new ' ' one it at present 
 occupies. 
 
 But before Mr. Stewart came the Rev. Wil- 
 liam Brush was called. According to the 
 chronicler, ' ' He came, saw the state of things, 
 and in three months resigned without being 
 installed." 
 
 A man of more than ordinary strength was 
 
6o Cbronicles of (Tarrgtown 
 
 the Rev. Abel T. Stewart; the last preacher at 
 the Old Dutch Church. Of his clerical labors 
 I shall not speak here, except to say that he 
 was an earnest if not pre-eminently an eloquent 
 preacher. To the man, outside of his pulpit, 
 a tribute of admiration may justly be paid. 
 Those w^ho only knew him casually — the later 
 comers to the town — remember a somewhat 
 serious divine, whose courage, impetuosity, 
 and natural humor w^ere repressed by his sense 
 of what was due to his sacred calling ; but the 
 men who grew up under his care, the members 
 of his Sabbath-school at an earlier day, recall 
 incidents that show him to have been an ex- 
 ample of what modern slang calls ' ' muscular 
 Christianity." 
 
 He was an enthusiastic follower of Isaac 
 Walton's gentle craft, angling for trout in the 
 Gebney brook and the Carl brook and down 
 the Pocantico at a day when Sahno Fontinalis 
 was not a rarity in the neighboring streams. 
 Mr. Amada Bryant is one of those who recol- 
 lect how the " domine " used to get the cream 
 of the spring angling, appearing frequently 
 with a full creel when some of his less fortunate 
 
6i 
 
 parishioners were laboriously whipping the 
 stream over which he had gone. No matter 
 how early in the morning one started, he was 
 apt to prove himself, for that occasion, as un- 
 lucky a fisherman as Simon Peter, if it chanced 
 that Mr. Stewart had selected the same day and 
 the same stream for his fishing. 
 
 Members of Mr. Stewart's Bible-class have 
 told how the athletic pastor excelled in jump- 
 ing, running, and throwing quoits. A famous 
 jump, by which he cleared the body of a farm 
 wagon, in a line over the high rear wheels, was 
 long the admiration of the youth of the neigh- 
 borhood. Well-knit, tall, and muscular, he 
 was the ideal of an athlete in his younger days, 
 recalling vividly Lowell's line : 
 
 *' He was six foot of man, A i, clean grit and human 
 natur'." 
 
 On one occasion when the Sunday-school 
 children were proceeding on foot along the 
 railroad track to a place selected for the an- 
 nual picnic, the entire companj^, scholars and 
 teachers alike, were panic-stricken at the near 
 approach of a train. The road was then a 
 
62 Cbronlclee of ^Tarrgtown 
 
 single track, and at that point occupied the 
 crest of an embankment, on each side of which 
 the ground sloped precipitously. The one per- 
 son who did not lose his head was the minister. 
 Putting his long, athletic legs and arms in 
 motion, he rushed like an animated windmill 
 through that little crowd of juvenile humanity 
 and cleared the track effectually, rolling his 
 charges right and left dow^n the slope. I give 
 this story as I got it from several reputable 
 witnesses, though I confess I never could quite 
 ■understand how he did it. 
 
 There was an incident in Abel T. Stewart's 
 life which entitles him to be ranked among the 
 heroes. When, during the troublous times of 
 the Civil War, the terrible outbreak w^hich we 
 speak of with a shudder as " the '63 riots," 
 taxed the strength of New York's defenders to 
 the utmost, a band of several hundred rioters 
 w^as reported to be on the road to Tarry town. 
 There was consternation in every home. 
 Word came from unquestioned sources that 
 the torch was to be applied to Tarry town, and 
 men armed themselves and secured the de- 
 fences to their houses as w^ell as they were 
 
anC) Sleeps Ibollow 
 
 63 
 
 able to do. Over the hills a long line of 
 
 negroes fled to the woods to escape a threat- 
 ened massacre. I am not now speaking from 
 hearsay. I saw this. 
 
 The rioters were within a short distance of 
 the town, and no man in the community dared 
 put himself in their way till Abel T. Stewart, 
 minister of God's Word, accompanied by one 
 faithful companion, Captain Oscar Jones, a 
 soldier home on furlough, marched out with 
 splendid audacity to meet them. There were, 
 indeed, several citizens who would have gone 
 but were providentially detained b}^ appoint- 
 ments and other devices of a faint heart, long 
 before the enemy came in sight. Mr. Stewart 
 and his one companion did not dream of turn- 
 ing back. The chances were overwhelmingly 
 against them ; neither they nor any of their 
 townspeople could have reasonably expected 
 that they would return alive ; and yet the man 
 of peace and the soldier just returned from the 
 front went on their way as quietly as they 
 would have gone to church. Nowhere is there 
 a record of a braver forlorn hope. 
 
 Mr. Stewart met the rioters and reasoned 
 
64 Cbronicles of ^Tarr^town 
 
 with them. He told them that their reception 
 would be warm ; that a gunboat, which had 
 just arrived in the river, would shell the houses 
 of their sympathizers without mercy if they 
 persisted ; he used cogent reasoning, convinc- 
 ing even to such a bloodthirsty mob of anarch- 
 ists; and in the end he succeeded in turning 
 them back. Then he went quietly home and 
 began to write his sermon or do whatever duty 
 lay nearest. 
 
 You imagine no doubt that the people at 
 least thanked this man who had offered his life 
 as a buffer between them and mob violence ? 
 No. They discovered, from the narrative of 
 his companion, that Mr. Stewart, in addressing 
 the rioters, had called them, " My friends," 
 and their indignation ran so high (remember 
 the partisan prejudice of war times and try to 
 forgive them) that they could see no bravery 
 nor goodness in this man. He was a Demo- 
 crat ; as such doubtless a secessionist, and 
 therefore, of course, a friend of the rioters : 
 ergo, there was no possible danger to him in 
 facing them. 
 
 The world is full of people who have missed 
 
anD Sleeps Ibollow 
 
 65 
 
 their opportunities ; a class of people whose 
 number was greatly added to when the popula- 
 tion of Tarrytown neglected to recognize and 
 to honor A. T. Stewart, whose story, I think, 
 has never before been told in print. There is 
 only a line to add. Partisan animosity and 
 misunderstanding were so strong that the use- 
 fulness of the minister of the First Reformed 
 Church was greatly curtailed, and at last it 
 seemed wiser for him to seek new fields of use- 
 fulness, and to labor in some town that he had 
 never saved. 
 
 With the close of Mr. Stewart's ministry in 
 1866, properly closes the history of the Old 
 Dutch Church as a place of worship. Though 
 it is opened on Sunday afternoons in summer 
 for service, and many eloquent men have 
 spoken from its quaint pulpit, yet its value is 
 rather as a relic than a house of worship to- 
 day. The effort which is at present being 
 made to repair and preserve it is the result of 
 
 a strong and worthy popular sentiment, 
 s 
 
IV 
 
 SUNNYSIDB) 
 
 HE home of Wolfert Ecker, one of the 
 
 early officers of the Old Dutch Church, 
 has been celebrated under the title of Wolfert' s 
 Roost. At the time of the Revolution its 
 tenant was Jacob Van Tassel, the hero of 
 the goose gun," whose well-known patriot- 
 ism attracted men of the same stripe from Tar- 
 ry town. Sleepy Hollow, and Petticoat Lane ; 
 so that his house became a rallying point for 
 half the hot-headed 3^outh of the country side. 
 
 The property, held before the war as part of 
 the manorial right of the Philipse estate by the 
 tenant, was convej^ed afterwards to Van Tas- 
 sel under the act of forfeiture. 
 
 In March, 1802, Jacob Van Tassel sold the 
 property to Oliver Ferris, whose grandson, 
 Benson Ferris, is the President of the Westches- 
 
 66 
 
I 
 
Cbroniclee of ZTarr^town 67 
 
 ter County Savings Bank. Benson Ferris the 
 first, the father of the present bearer of the name, 
 married a lineal descendant of Wolffert Kcker. 
 
 In Washington Irving' s youth, while a 
 guest at the Paulding house, (now destroyed), 
 he frequently rowed a boat to the willows that 
 overhung the little brook that runs through 
 the Sunny side glen, and read or dreamed away 
 long summer afternoons in the shade of its 
 elms. A deep satisfaction with a spot that 
 seemed so thoroughly in accord with his own 
 gentle, retiring, and contemplative disposition, 
 gained so firm a hold upon the imagination of 
 the future author, that in all his wanderings 
 through England and the Continent of Europe, 
 he never forgot the little house with its sun- 
 flecked lawn reaching down to the river; nor 
 the quality of its beauty. 
 
 In 1835, finding himself again in America 
 and somewhat improved in worldly fortune, 
 Mr. Irving visited the familiar place and pur- 
 chased it. At that time he told Mrs. Ferris 
 that he had resolved, years before, that if he 
 ever owned a piece of ground that he could call 
 home, it would be there. It is pleasant to 
 
68 Cbronicles ot (Carrgtovvn 
 
 thiuk that the welcome guest in London and 
 Paris, the courtly minister in Madrid, always 
 cherished in his heart the picture of a little bit 
 of his own land; and that after years of exile 
 he could enjoy the fulfilment of his dream. 
 
 The rebuilding of Sunnyside, as he named 
 the house, and the elaboration of quaint con- 
 ceits in its architecture and adornment, afforded 
 Mr. Irving some of the happiest hours of his 
 life. From the simple and rather featureless 
 American cottage of that day the building 
 was developed into a very Dutch countr^^-seat, 
 unique among the many charming homes on 
 the river banks. It remains in the possession 
 of a member of the Ir\4ng family. 
 
 Washington Irving' s social life in the neigh- 
 borhood he had chosen was ideally delightful 
 to a man of his temperament. The quiet 
 round of country pleasures, long rambles, rides 
 to the village or to a neighbor's, explorations 
 and discoveries in Sleepy Hollow, and long ex- 
 citing quests after a character or a legend, were 
 alternated with congenial social intercourse, 
 and seasons of studious labor in his comfort- 
 able library. 
 
an& Sleepy Ibollow 
 
 69 
 
 Mr. Irving' s life in Tarry town was that of a 
 citizen who took pleasure in identifying him- 
 self with the interests of his neighborhood. In 
 Christ Church, which he attended regularly, 
 he was a warden. His simple, unaffected cour- 
 tesy made him a welcome guest, not only in 
 the parlors of wealthy and influential people, 
 but in the homes of many of his humbler neigh- 
 bors. It pleased him to stop for a chat at this 
 or that door-yard gate; and not a child could 
 pass without his kindly notice. The influence 
 which has spread like a charm from Sunnyside 
 has been that of its master's personality more 
 than of his genius. 
 
 Among a coterie of cultivated people who 
 enjoyed the gentle humorist's friendship was 
 General James Watson Webb, the editor of the 
 Courier and Enquirer, who lived at Pokahoe, 
 an estate on Broadway north of the village. 
 This place was afterwards the home of the 
 " Pathfinder," General Fremont, and is now 
 owned by Mrs. Monroe. The late Mr. George 
 D. Morgan was one of Mr. Irvdng's intimates, 
 and was present at his death. Another of 
 those who enjoyed his friendship was his near 
 
70 
 
 Cbroiuclc6 of Carrvitown 
 
 neighbor, Mr. Edward S. Jaffray, between 
 whose household and that of Sunnyside de- 
 lightfully cordial relations existed. Hon. 
 Moses H. Grinnell, w^ho married Mr. Irving' s 
 niece ; James H. Banker; William Hoge and 
 Henry Holdredge were also among the well- 
 know^n men w^ho were in almost dail}^ associa- 
 tion with the master of Sunnyside. 
 
 It was at this quaint Dutch cottage that the 
 Life of Washington was WTitten ; here Louis 
 Napoleon, afterwards Emperor of France, 
 called to pay his respects; and here the fine, 
 sweet spirit of Irvdng passed on November 28, 
 1859. 
 
 The ivy which overruns Sunnyside is as 
 green as the fame and memory of Irving. He 
 brought it from Melrose in Scotland, and 
 planted it by the wall of his home by the 
 Hudson. 
 
MK NEUTRAL GROUND 
 
 TV TO part of the country was so harried," 
 I ^ says Irving, ' ' by friend and foe alike, ' ' 
 as this neighborhood. When the war for Inde- 
 ependence was declared, a dozen families where 
 the village of Tarrytown now is, and perhaps 
 as many more scattered through Sleepy Hollow 
 and over towards the Sawmill River, comprised 
 all that we can reckon of the population. The 
 majority of the men were farmers, who knew 
 how to handle a gun, who could stalk a deer, 
 or encounter a bear with skill and courage. 
 Such people, abandoned by the necessities of 
 war to the tender mercies of marauders and 
 stock thieves, were not long in devising waj's 
 to defend themselves. A sort of home guard, 
 in which it is said that women as well as men 
 did duty, was organized to picket the highway. 
 71 
 
72 
 
 Cbronlcles of ^Tarr^town 
 
 and check the raids of cowboys and skinners. 
 Some joined the band which, under the leader- 
 ship of V^an Courtlandt, at Croton, patrolled 
 the river in whale-boats, and were a serious 
 source of annoyance to the British men-of-war 
 and transports. 
 
 Depleted granaries and empty smoke-houses 
 brought the people often to the verge of starva- 
 tion, and they deteriorated from a prosperous 
 little community, in which, while no one ex- 
 cept the manor-lord was very rich, neither was 
 any one very poor, to a wretched handful of 
 hungry outcasts, holding their inch of ground 
 by force of cunning and skill. During the 
 years of the war the church was empty and 
 unopened for service ; the faint tinkle of its 
 bell never called the congregation to w^orship. 
 There was no school open, and the boy who 
 was growing up in those years of conflict knew 
 more of hare-brained adventures and hair- 
 breadth escapes than of figures; while the only 
 part of speech in which he became proficient 
 was the adjective, caught in its redundant 
 variety from the passing trooper. 
 
 With the closing of the church and the ab- 
 
anD SleepB Dollow 
 
 73 
 
 sence of any minister, such familiar rites as 
 baptism, marriage, and burial were attended to 
 not at all, or, at best, in a lame, lay fashion. 
 The infants born during the war were pre- 
 sented for baptism at a convenient season after 
 the restoration of peace ; but whether the same 
 facilities were extended to marriage nobody 
 now knows. 
 
 The last lord of the manor had ' ' retired ' ' 
 from his estates, which were afterwards con- 
 fiscated by the Government and sold or granted 
 to other aspirants. There seems to have been 
 some sort of occupation of the old house dur- 
 ing part of the war time at least, for there are 
 those now living who can remember hearing 
 * * Grandma ' ' Beekman tell how she once lay 
 sleepless in one of its rooms, and heard all night 
 the rumble of the artiller}^ and the tramp of 
 men and of horses when Washington passed 
 this way to unite with the Frenchmen in an 
 advance upon New York. On this memorable 
 occasion, according to General Washington's 
 diary, he halted for rest at the Old Dutch 
 Church, which is opposite the manor-house 
 grounds. 
 
74 Cbroniclcd ot Carrgtown 
 
 Many of the young men joined themselves 
 to the American side, and suflfered wounds and 
 death for the cause of liberty. Several knew 
 the inside of the fatal prison-ships, where men 
 went mad from starvation and filth and con- 
 finement; and death was the only merciful at- 
 tendant. 
 
 There was not much law or order. Such as 
 there was was of a military stamp. Colonel 
 Hannuon — or Hammond — was a leading spirit, 
 organizing and executing with half the roy- 
 stering blades of the countryside at his back. 
 
 Van Tassels, Van Warts, Sees, Requas, 
 Martlings, Couenhovens, Deans, and others 
 whose descendants are still living in the neigh- 
 borhood, became locally celebrated, during the 
 dark days of the war, for personal courage. 
 Indeed, if the statement made by Bolton and 
 others is nearly accurate, that there were about 
 a dozen houses in Tarrj-town at the close of 
 the war for Independence, then we must won- 
 der that so small a settlement could produce so 
 large a number of heroes. 
 
 To give some clear idea of the activity of 
 this very little hamlet, w^hich seemed to swarm 
 
an& Sleeps IboUow 
 
 75 
 
 like a hornet's nest whenever molested by an 
 invader, a chronological list of the leading 
 events which occurred here between 1776 and 
 1782 has been prepared. It will be noticed 
 that the roles enacted upon this little stage 
 were usually filled by local talent. 
 
 On Saturday, July 13, 1776, George Comb, 
 Joseph Young, James Hammond, and others, 
 constituting the Committee of Safety at White 
 Plains, sent a letter to General Washington, 
 ir. forming him that frigates belonging to the 
 British had, with several tenders, arrived at 
 Tarry town. The report added that powder 
 and ball had been sent to that place, and allu- 
 sion was made to public stores there. The 
 war-ships, Phmiix and Rose, were in the Tap- 
 pan Zee, we learn from other authority, on the 
 14th and 15th of July, and General Hammond 
 wrote a letter announcing their departure on 
 the 26th. Bolton cites the original letters. 
 Washington Irving, in his Life of WasJmtgfofi, 
 states that Pierre Van Courtlandt organized 
 his famous River Guards and sent them out 
 that year. The loyalty and activity of the 
 yeomen of the neighborhood made them valu- 
 
76 Gbronicle6 ot C^arrgtown 
 
 able recruits, and their knowledge of the vari- 
 ous hiding-places along the shore, in the bays 
 and coves, enabled them to be peculiarly har- 
 assing to the British. The men, untrained to 
 war, soon found as much delight in banging at 
 the enemy's frigates as they had previously 
 enjoyed in winging duck or bagging pigeons. 
 Their flotilla consisted of whale boats that 
 found snug hiding in the * ' Hafeiije ' ' or the 
 
 Slapering Hafeyiy A patrol, which tradi- 
 tion says was composed of all brave people, no 
 distinctions of sex or color, kept the roads, 
 and the coming of the enemy's fleet was her- 
 alded by beacon-fires that blazed from Kaakiat, 
 and were reflected along the crests of the 
 Greenburg hills. 
 
 There was a convention held at White Plains 
 in July, 1776. During that month and the suc- 
 ceeding one. General Putnam tried to obstruct 
 the Hudson where it is narrower, below the 
 Tappan Zee, by sinking vessels there, and plac- 
 ing chains and chevaux de /rise to prevent the 
 escape of the war-ships that had gone up the 
 Hudson. On the i8th of August, fire-ships as- 
 cended the river for the purpose of destroying 
 
anC) SlcepB t)oUow 
 
 77 
 
 the enemy's vessels in the Tappan Zee. They 
 were partly successful, as they burned one of 
 the tenders and frightened away the ships. In 
 Irving' s Life of Washington special mention is 
 made of this encounter. 
 
 On the 9th of October of the same year, the 
 British vessels, Phoeriix, Roebuck, and Tartar 
 sailed up the Hudson. When opposite Tarry- 
 town, the watchful inhabitants of the place 
 sent a post to Peter R. Livingstone, President 
 of the Provincial Congress, at Fishkill. 
 
 On the authority of Heath's Memoirs, we 
 learn that in January, 1777, General Washing- 
 ton made a movement of the militia and volun- 
 teers under General Heath from Peekskill 
 towards New York, in order to draw the 
 enemy from New Jersey. General Lincoln's 
 division, several thousand strong, marched to 
 Tarry town on the 14th of January, and en- 
 camped here till the 17th, when they proceeded 
 towards Kingsbridge. 
 
 In March, 1777, the British force which was 
 unsuccessful in its attack upon Peekskill, upon 
 being driven off from that village made for 
 Tarrj^town, with the avowed intention of de- 
 
78 
 
 Cbronlcles of ^Tarr^town 
 
 stroying the stores at Wright's Mill. This 
 was possibly the time that the Water Guard, 
 having built a lunette, or redoubt, at the foot 
 of Church Street (which is the street which 
 runs west to the river from Broadway opposite 
 Major Hopkin's, formerl}^ Robert Hoe's, place) 
 fired upon the Vulture, sloop- of- war, which had 
 grounded on ballast reef. 
 
 Doctor Todd, in Scharf's History of Westchest- 
 er Cotinty, states that in October of that year 
 Colonel Luddington was in command of five 
 hundred militia at Tarrytown, when Sir Henry 
 Clinton ascended the river with a flotilla of 
 transports containing about five thousand 
 troops. These landed, and Luddington had 
 the temerity to parley with their officer; but 
 finding that he stood in imminent danger of 
 being surrounded and cut to pieces with his 
 little force, he wisel}^ beat a retreat. Putnam's 
 account of this matter, written from Peekskill, 
 where he was at that time guarding the High- 
 lands of the Hudson with a force of iioo Con- 
 tinentals and 400 militia, is to the effect that 
 Sir Henry Clinton had called in the Croton 
 guides, ' ' and had moved two ships of war and 
 
an& Sleeve Ibollow 
 
 79 
 
 three tenders up the Hudson, and had landed 
 their men at Tarry town. 
 
 We learn from General Parson's correspond- 
 ence that British refugees under the notorious 
 Captain Bmmerick surprised the houses of 
 Peter and Cornelius Van Tassel on the 17th 
 of November, 1777, and burned them to the 
 ground, stripping the women and children, and 
 leaving them exposed to the inclemency of the 
 weather; while the men ♦were carried away 
 prisoners, to languish in the old Sugar House 
 in New York, or to die in one of the pestilential 
 prison-ships, in the Wallabout basin. Bolton 
 speaks of the Van Tassels' houses as being near 
 " Captain Romer's " house. The destruction 
 of the Van Tassels' houses, and the outrages 
 accompanying it, were instigated by Governor 
 Try on, at New York, and were well in accord 
 with what we read of that cruel and vindictive 
 man's character. A further order to destroy 
 Tarry town emanated from the same source, 
 and drew forth a strong and indignant letter 
 of remonstrance from General Parsons of the 
 Continental Army. This letter may be found 
 in the Colonial History of New York. 
 
8o Cbroniclcs of ^Tarrgtown 
 
 ' ' A party of liberty boys, headed by the 
 daring and impetuous Martlings, came down 
 from the American lines on the 25th of Novem- 
 ber, 1777, and burned his [Oliver de Lancey's] 
 house at Bloomingdale, by way of revenge," 
 says Mary L,. Booth in her History of New York. 
 Bolton, in alluding to the same occurrence, saj-s 
 that it was in retaliation for the burning of the 
 Van Tassels' homes. There were a number of 
 Tarrytown boys in that fora}', which was cer- 
 tainly as daring and wild as any border-raid that 
 Scott has recorded. Probably the clan mus- 
 tered — w^e can imagine the'm dropping in by 
 twos and threes, Van Tassels, Couenhovens, 
 Sies, Yerks, Van Weerts, Storms, and all the 
 other patriotic 3^outh of the neighborhood — at 
 Elizabeth Van Tassel's tavern. Their leader, 
 the impetuous " Martlings, was Abraham, the 
 brother of that Isaac w^ho is known as the 
 Martyr. Hot with indignation, the brave fel- 
 lows pushed on over the twenty miles that lay 
 between them and the British lines, and then, 
 with admirable recklessness, penetrated those 
 lines and applied the torch to the dwelling of 
 one of the principal citizens of New^ York, the 
 
anD Sleeps f)ollow 
 
 8i 
 
 brother of the lieutenant-governor. There 
 were men in Tarrytown, even in those days. 
 
 February, 1778, opened with an attack (on 
 the 2d and 3d) upon Young's house in the 
 valley of the Neperhan. Young's was famous 
 as a yoeman's rendezvous for the sympathizers 
 with the Continental cause, and it was a thorn 
 in the side of the British, or rather a hornet's 
 nest, hung just beyond their outposts, where 
 turbulent spirits swarmed and issued only to 
 sting. Although Young's was but an ordinary 
 dwelling house, 3'et it was defended in such a 
 vigorous and spirited manner that it took six 
 companies of infantry, besides cavalrj^ and 
 guns, under Colonel Norton, two days to sub- 
 due it; and then the garrison were only dis- 
 lodged when the house was burned over their 
 heads. A great many men were killed in this 
 action, and prisoners to the number of ninety 
 were taken to the old Sugar House in New 
 York. 
 
 That same year saw a sharp skirmish on 
 Broadway south of Petticoat Lane; or, as it is 
 now called, the White Plains Road. A com- 
 pany of Tinnop's yagers were on their way from 
 
82 Cbrontcles of ^Tarr^town 
 
 Kingsbridge to White Plains when the}' were 
 met and defeated by Colonel Richard Butler 
 and a company of cavalry under Major Henry 
 Lee. 
 
 In Gaines' IVeekfy Aferairj' there was pub- 
 lished an account, which Bolton quotes, of the 
 landing of one thousand one hundred English 
 troops at Tarrj'town, on the 9th of October, 
 1778. The British embarked on bateaux at 
 Peekskill and proceeded the same night to 
 Tarrytown, where, coming ashore at daybreak, 
 they occupied the adjoining heights. 
 
 It was in 1779, on the 20th of May, that 
 Isaac Martlings, the son of Abraham Mart- 
 lings, Sr., and brother of Captain Daniel 
 Martlings, was inhumanely slain," as his 
 tombstone states, by Nathaniel Underbill. A 
 popular account of this affair based upon Bol- 
 ton's story, confounds it with one, and perhaps 
 two, other tragedies under the general name of 
 the Massacre of Sleepy HoUotv. There were 
 without question people killed in Sleepy Hol- 
 low^ and ' ' Polly ' ' Buckhout was, at another 
 time and place, shot by mistake because she 
 had a man's hat on; but the murder of Mart- 
 
anb Sleepy iboUow 
 
 83 
 
 lings, " the Martyr," seems to have been dis- 
 tinct from these. According to the narrative 
 of his great-granddaughter, as published some 
 time ago by Mr. M. D. Raymond, Sergeant 
 Isaac Martlings was crossing the road to the 
 spring, not far from the old Daniel Martlings' 
 house (the only one of that ancient group of 
 dwellings still standing on Water Street), 
 when Underbill set upon him and killed him. 
 He was taken into a house near by and the 
 murderer escaped. 
 
 The cause of this attack is said by tradition 
 to have been an old grudge which Underbill 
 held against Martlings, who had tied him by 
 his heels to a beam in his own barn and made 
 him eat oats out of a measure. It was at a 
 time when the people were starving, and Un- 
 derbill refused to share with them the grain 
 with which his lofts were filled, and which his 
 Tory influence had preserved and protected. 
 It is further believed that after Martlings was 
 slain, Underbill never dared to show his face in 
 Tarr>^town again. 
 
 The foregoing account of Martlings' death 
 is gathered from Bolton, Raymond, and other 
 
84 Cbroniclee of ^arretown 
 
 authorities; from local legends, and from Isaac 
 Martlings's tombstone, which is still standing. 
 
 A party of cowboys (date not given) were 
 checked in a skinnish with John Dean and 
 others near the Couenhoven place, which was 
 afterwards Martin Smith's tavern, on the cor- 
 ner of Broadway and Main Street. 
 
 The great event of 1780, not only for Tarry- 
 town but for the United States (and therefore 
 for the world) occurred upon the 24th of Sep- 
 tember. On that memorable date, the British 
 spy. Major Andre, was captured while on his 
 way, in disguise, to New York, with treason- 
 able dispatches from Benedict Arnold. Various 
 sentimental efforts have been made to palliate 
 the conduct of a man who had worked long 
 and successfully to corrupt the military virtue 
 of one whose reputation had before been un- 
 blemished. Not only by his act of entering 
 the American lines in secret and trying to 
 escape in disguise, while engaged in a business 
 which was certainly nefarious, did Andr6 ren- 
 der himself liable to the penalty he afterwards 
 paid, but he merited it even more, by his pa- 
 tient and laborious preparations to effect Ar- 
 
MONUMENT TO THE CAPTORS OF ANDRE 
 
 FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY F. AHRENS 
 
85 
 
 nold's treason. His was the guilt of one who 
 systematically worked to corrupt another. 
 
 This, however, is not the place for such a dis- 
 cussion. Our history has only to do with 
 events enacted upon the local stage, and of 
 these the capture of Andre was by far the most 
 important. His captors, John Paulding, David 
 Williams, and Isaac Van Wart, were militia- 
 men who were scouting. They had come across 
 country from the Eastward the day before, 
 stopping over night at a hay-rick near Pleas- 
 antville, and crossing by way of Buttermilk 
 Hill, on the morning of the 24th, to the Tarry- 
 town side. There were, according to Williams's 
 narrative, four others in their party. They 
 separated at the Davis, or Davids, farm, now 
 the residence of Mr. James Hawes, whose wife 
 is a descendant of the original tenants. 
 
 The trio followed the road for about a mile, 
 and then hid in the bushes on the east side, on 
 what is now Mr. Eugene Jones's property. 
 Two of the party played cards in their conceal- 
 ment, while the other watched the highway. 
 In this manner they spent the time till a horse- 
 man appeared, riding south, and they promptly 
 
86 
 
 Cbroniclcs of tTavrgtown 
 
 halted him. Andre, for it was he, bhindered 
 ill the first place, by asking them to what party 
 they belonged, and announcing himself as of 
 the " southern," /. e., the English party. The 
 result of this indiscretion was a more rigorous 
 search than would, perhaps, otherwise have 
 been made, and the eagerness of the captors 
 increased with that of the prisoner, who offered 
 them his watch, his horse and a large sum of 
 money if they would let him go. The same 
 class of sentimentalists who have whitewashed 
 Andre have belittled his captors, trying to show 
 that they were mere bandits. If they had been 
 so, no one who reads the historical testimony 
 carefully can doubt that Andre would have 
 gone on his way to New York a free man, and 
 Arnold's treachery would have been successful. 
 
 But John Paulding and his fellows were in- 
 corruptible ; their lo^^alty was above bribes, 
 and their sj^stematic search was rewarded by 
 finding in the prisoner's stockings the papers 
 which Arnold had written to Sir Henry Clin- 
 ton, betraying the post and army entrusted to 
 him. When Major Andre was taken from the 
 place of capture, the first stop made was at a 
 
anD Sleeps Ibollow 
 
 87 
 
 house which is still standing on the old road to 
 White Plains, on the opposite side of the valley 
 from the Northern Railroad depot. There the 
 Adjutant- General of the British Army rested 
 on a wooden step at the bottom of the stairway 
 and was regaled by a kind-hearted hostess with 
 a bowl of bread and milk. The step upon 
 which Major Andre sat is still preserved, and 
 little alteration has been made in that part of 
 the house. Shortly after the war the house in 
 question became the property of a family named 
 Reed and was sold at a later date to William 
 lyandrine, whose son, William B. Landrine, 
 sold it to Mr. Kingsland. It is now the prop- 
 erty of Mr. John D. Rockefeller. 
 
 The capture of a large party of British at the 
 Van Tassel tavern (the Jacob Mott homestead) 
 by Major Hunt, occurred in 1780. Hunt and 
 John Archer, with others, had gone to West- 
 chester. I have found no record of the source 
 by which information reached them of the 
 presence of the English party at the Tarry- 
 town inn. They came, surrounded the house 
 and broke in upon the unsuspecting guests, 
 who rose in astonishment and consternation 
 
88 Cbronicles of CTarrgtown 
 
 from a game of cards they were playing, at the 
 challenge of Hunt, who carried a heavy stick 
 in his hand. 
 
 " Gentlemen, clubs are trumps." 
 
 In the struggle which ensued before the 
 prisoners were secured Major Hunt prevented 
 Archer from killing one of his adversaries, tell- 
 ing him that ' ' the highest sense of honor in a 
 soldier is to protect his prisoners." What 
 makes this cbnduct seem the more humane is 
 the fact that Hunt's brother had been slain by 
 the British only a short time before. This 
 story is one of several with which Major Hunt's 
 name is associated. Upon another occasion he 
 was at See's store, on the Bedford road, when 
 he saw a party of English, or Hessians, coming 
 down the road. He was unable to cope with 
 them and there was nothing to do but to run 
 for his life. He set out at a nimble pace in the 
 direction of the Cold Spring bridge, where an 
 icy little rivulet crossed the Albany turnpike 
 (Broadway), in the valley north of the present 
 cemetery gate. A prosaic drinking-trough 
 now marks the place. Three men followed the 
 " rebel," sure that at last they could overhaul 
 
I 
 I 
 i 
 
anD Sleeps Ibollow 
 
 89 
 
 and overpower him. But Hunt was a man of 
 rare wind and muscle, and not being bothered 
 with the accoutrements of his pursuers, he soon 
 tired them. I^ooking back from time to time, 
 he at last perceived that they were tailing off. 
 Then he turned (whether he recollected that 
 there was a classic precedent for what he did I 
 cannot say) and succeeded in mastering them 
 one at a time, proving the truth of the adage 
 and living " to fight another day." 
 
 On the 6th of July, 1781, the French army 
 marched from Northcastle to Philipsburg, on 
 the Tappan Zee, to unite with the Amerian 
 encampment there. The place of this camp 
 was on hills overlooking the river, between 
 Tarrytown and Dobbs Ferry. Between the two 
 armies, according to an eye witness, at the bot- 
 tom of a ravine there flowed a rivulet. On the 
 8th, two days after the arrival of the French- 
 men, General Washington reviewed both 
 armies. We are told that several of the French 
 officers constructed a pretty garden about 
 their abode which showed that the encampment 
 made some approach to permanency. Kleven 
 days passed in this pleasant location, when the 
 
QO Cbronlclcs ot ^Tarr^towii 
 
 General " brought the whole allied force to 
 arms. The cause of this alarm was the sound 
 of firing which came from the direction of 
 Tarrytown, which was close at hand. But 
 after " remaining in line of battle for half or 
 three quarters of an hour, ' ' according to Count 
 de Deux Fonts, they " received orders to re- 
 turn to their tents." What happened at 
 Tarrytown to make the allied French and 
 American armies cock their ears was an action 
 as spirited as anything which occurred during 
 the whole course of the war, although it w^as not 
 sufficiently important in its connection with 
 other events to warrant a place in general his- 
 tory. Several British vessels, frigates and 
 tenders, had been hunting for American vessels 
 loaded with supplies for the army. On the 
 evening of the 15th of July, w^hich was a Sun- 
 day, two sloops, which were going down the 
 river, loaded with powder and cannon, put 
 into Tarrytown to avoid the British fleet. The 
 enemy followed these vessels closely and there 
 seemed little possibility of escape. There were 
 in Tarrytown at the time only a sergeant's 
 guard of French infantry, and a troop of 
 
an5 StecpB Ibollow 
 
 91 
 
 mounted dragoons, commanded by Colonel 
 Sheldon, whose regiment lay at Dobbs Ferry. 
 The latter were at once commanded to dis- 
 mount and assist in unloading the stores. But 
 although they worked with great celerity, it 
 was impossible to anticipate the arrival of the 
 English ships which came to an anchor and 
 began a heav}^ fire, under cover of which two 
 gunboats and four barges were sent to destroy 
 the sloops. Captain Hurlburt, of the Second 
 Regiment of Light Dragoons, was on board of 
 one of the vessels, with twelve men, whose 
 equipments consisted onl}' of swords and pis- 
 tols. Th^y made what resistance they could, 
 but in the end were obliged to jump overboard 
 and swim for the shore, upon which the English 
 boarded the sloops and set fire to them. They 
 could not hold the position more than a few 
 moments, owing to the galling fire of the 
 French infantry and the dismounted dragoons, 
 and hardly had the}^ retired when Hurlburt 
 and sev^eral other brave men plunged into the 
 river and, swimming back to the burning 
 sloops, succeeded in extinguishing the flames. 
 When we consider the nature of the cargoes 
 
92 Cbroniclcd of C^arrgtown 
 
 which these Uttle vessels carried, and the ter- 
 rible risk from explosion which Captain Hurl- 
 burt and his companions braved, their act does 
 not seem less than heroic. It may be added 
 that these brave men received the commenda- 
 tion and thanks of General Washington in the 
 General Orders of July 19th, four days after 
 the event. Captain Hurlburt was wounded 
 while in the water and never recovered from 
 the effect of his hurt, suffering terribly till death 
 relieved him, nearly two years later. As 
 authority for this account of the action at 
 Tarry town, w^e have Count William de Deux 
 Pouts' s Campaigns^ Dr. Thatcher's Military 
 yo2ir7ial, Moore's Diary of the A77terican Revo- 
 lution, and General Washington's Journal for 
 1 78 1, besides Doctor Coutant's account and 
 minor mention from several sources. 
 
 And now having got down to 1782, we must 
 close this chronology with an untow^ard event. 
 In the spring of the year three American militia- 
 men, Yerks, Van Wart, and Henr}^ Strong, 
 were at Strong's house, w^hich was near the 
 Underbill place, when the house was sur- 
 rounded by a small party of Tories under 
 
93 
 
 Ivieutenant Acherl^^ and the inmates captured 
 and taken to New York. Whether they were 
 released before the end of the war I have no 
 way of knowing. 
 
 A few words relative to Andre's capture may 
 not inappropriately be added. The Westchester 
 Herald, in its issue of Jan. 28, 1823, published 
 the following communication : 
 
 It seems that Andre cautiously avoided 
 the more public routes and travelled on through 
 the interior until he arrived within about two 
 miles of the present poor-house belonging to 
 this town. He stopped at the house of an old 
 lady, still living, and made the most minute in- 
 quiries respecting the precise position of the 
 American encampment, informing her that he 
 was extremely desirous to arrive at the camp 
 by the shortest route and as quickly as possible ; 
 especially anxious to know whether the troops 
 were near the White Plains or at Tarrytown, 
 and very solicitous, apparently, to understand 
 all the intelligence respecting their stations. 
 She informed him that the last she had heard 
 of them was that they were towards the White 
 Plains ; upon this he proceeded towards Tarry- 
 
94 
 
 Cbroniclcs of Carrgtovvn 
 
 town. . . . Thus the old lady's inform- 
 ing Andre that no American troops were in the 
 vicinity of Tarrj town, was the primary cause 
 of the defeat of that complicated treacher>- 
 which menaced wdth destruction the freedom 
 and independence of the United States. ' ' 
 
 Another account, which I have seen pub- 
 lished but once, is to the effect that when Andre 
 was captured the horse that he rode was covered 
 with burrs from the pasture, he having made an 
 exchange in the course of his journey, leaving 
 his own tired nag in the place of a fresh one 
 which he " borrowed." 
 
MYTHS AND LEGENDS 
 
 95 
 
VI 
 
 THK SPOOK ROCK 
 
 IN the days before the railroad was built, the 
 population of Tarrytown was small and the 
 majority of the inhabitants were farmers ; good, 
 plain, practical people, not given to romancing 
 and the inveterate foes of novelty. Some 
 elderly folk, whose memories take them back 
 to the thirties, remember the story of the 
 Spook Rock as it was transmitted to them from 
 their parents and grandparents, which should 
 satisf}^ any sceptic of its genuine antiquity. 
 
 Not far from the cottage of Hulda, the witch, 
 it stood ; but it was an ancient landmark before 
 Sleepy Hollow mothers ever used Hulda' s 
 name to frighten their babies into obedience. 
 Tradition says that sachems and medicine men 
 of the Leni Lenapes built their council-fires 
 
 7 
 
 97 
 
98 Cbronicles of ^Tarri^town 
 
 about it when the world was young ; for the 
 Spook Rock was an Indian shrine. 
 
 One night a young Indian returning late from 
 a hunt and passing near the council rock, was 
 surprised to see lights moving in that direction, 
 while at the same time his ears were assailed 
 by the sound of musical voices. Not being 
 ignorant of the sacred character of the place 
 and the miraculous things that had occurred 
 there, his curiosity was at once aroused and he 
 crept cautiously from tree to tree till he came 
 upon a sight of extraordinary interest. A 
 dozen girls, beautiful beyond anything that the 
 young man had ever imagined, were dancing 
 on the surface of the rock. Linking hands, 
 and leaning far outward in the rapid figure, they 
 seemed to tread on the very edge of the stone, 
 if indeed they touched anything more solid 
 than the air at all. To the bewildered and de- 
 lighted watcher they were like a ring of forest 
 leaves that have been caught up and whirled 
 around by the wind. 
 
 Their voices were as sweet as their bodies 
 were beautiful and graceful, and no one could 
 have mistaken them for anything less than 
 
anD Sleepy Ibollow 
 
 99 
 
 celestial, even if there had not been, in the 
 centre of the circle around which they danced, 
 a great basket, which, as every one knows, 
 is the approved vehicle when heavenly maids 
 pay a visit earthward. 
 
 The scene was lit by unearthly flambeaux 
 that flared among the trees like Will-o'-the- 
 wisps. 
 
 The singing and the dancing grew wilder 
 and madder and more fascinating every mo- 
 ment, till the solitary spectator forgot himself 
 and gave a cry of admiration. In a moment, 
 half frightened and half laughing, the bevy 
 scrambled into the basket, with little screams 
 and pretty panics, like girls that would fain go 
 a-slumming and retreat at the first sight of a 
 tipsy man. In they crowded, hugger-mugger, 
 higgledy-piggledy, all but one, who lingered a 
 moment and looked back. She was the most 
 beautiful of them all. Then, in a moment, she 
 took her place, or rather was dragged in by the 
 rest and, amid a chorus of laughter, they were 
 all whisked out of sight and the young Indian 
 was left standing alone in the dark woods. 
 Directly over the rock, as he followed the basket 
 
TOO Cbrontclcs of ^Tarrgtown 
 
 with his eyes, a large star was shining, and he 
 knew, of course, that it must be their home. 
 
 That night the young man turned and tossed 
 and could get no sleep. When day came he 
 discovered that his appetite had failed, which 
 is a most unusual thing to happen to an Indian. 
 He waited impatiently till night had settled 
 down once more, and then, as soon as the vil- 
 lage w^as quiet, he sought the Spook Rock. 
 
 It may have been on that very next night, 
 or after weeks or months of waiting, — I do not 
 know, — the basket w^as let down again, and its 
 occupants, with many a titter and many inno- 
 cent pranks, disembarked and began to dance as 
 before. While they were in full swing there was 
 a sudden dash among them as a hungry panther 
 might drop into the midst of a covy of quail 
 that are gossiping together at bedtime. Never 
 did birds take to wing more quickly, whirring 
 away from danger, than the maidens ; but one 
 of them, the most beautiful of all, was held by 
 the young hunter, who took her home, tri- 
 umphantly, to his empty lodge. 
 
 The quail may be tamed, but be careful that 
 on some spring morning it does not hear the 
 
anO Sleeps fjollow 
 
 lOI 
 
 piping of its mates. The star girl taade a good 
 and loving wife, and when a baby was born to 
 her she forgot any longing she may have had 
 for her old companions. Three years passed, 
 and one night, when the air was peculiarly 
 still, a sound of distant singing came to the 
 hunter's lodge, and his star wife grew restless, 
 and her eyes burned like coals. She murmured 
 in her sleep and sang little snatches of strange 
 songs. The following night she was missing. 
 
 The little babe in the lodge cried and refused 
 such food as the hunter had to give it and 
 finally, when it was dead, he hollowed a grave 
 for it by the Pocantico and sat down alone once 
 more. After a while he took his bow and ar- 
 rows and went hunting, but never returned and 
 the lodge fell to ruin, so that when the snow 
 came it drifted between the bare poles. When 
 three years more had gone, and the smell of the 
 spring was in the air again, the star wife came 
 back. A few hours of absence, she thought, 
 and probably her husband had not even missed 
 her. A few hours of pleasure — how the time 
 had flown ! 
 
 She found the empty lodge sticks with as- 
 
102 Cbronicles of ^arr^town 
 
 tonishment. Even the grass was growing 
 rank where she had lain by the side of her 
 husband and baby only a few hours before. 
 Something must be wrong. She had mistaken 
 the place and would search for her home. 
 
 Up and down the Pocantico w^oods — you may 
 meet her any spring night, for doubtless she is 
 looking there still for the lost lodge. 
 
 Within the present generation the lights 
 have been seen moving at night in the neigh- 
 borhood of the Spook Rock, and if any adven- 
 turous youth will run the risk he may find the 
 dancers still tripping and singing on spring 
 nights. 
 
 andre:'s ghost 
 
 When Major Andre had been safely disposed 
 of at Tappan, and the American arms had re- 
 covered from the shock of Arnold's treachery, 
 that incident was thought to be concluded. 
 After Yorktown, men turned from their swords 
 to their plowshares again and gave their atten- 
 tion to the arts of peace. Before quiet had 
 
THE POCANTICO RIVER 
 
anD SleepB t>ollow 
 
 103 
 
 fairly settled upon the neutral territory it be- 
 gan to be whispered that a war reminiscence 
 of an alarming character insisted upon recogni- 
 tion. Down the post road, on still autumn 
 nights, belated wayfarers sometimes heard the 
 sound of hoofs. A madly galloping horse 
 seemed to approach, but no horse or horseman 
 was visible to the keenest eyes. A few re- 
 ported that they had seen a formless gray 
 shadow w^hisk by in the neighborhood of the 
 swamp that lay by the side of the highway, and 
 others declared that the word " halt " had been 
 pronounced in a soldierly tone just before the 
 galloping ceased. All agreed that the hoof- 
 beats stopped as though the rider had reined 
 in suddenly, and that they were never heard 
 further south than the immense old tulip tree, 
 known as Andre's tree, that spread its gaunt, 
 ghost-like arms in the moonlight. 
 
 This more than usually unsubstantial ghost 
 is pertinacious in his appearing, having been 
 heard several times within the present decade, 
 as the writer, among other witnesses, can 
 testify. 
 
 About Andre's tree, another tale may be told. 
 
104 Cbrontclcs of (Tarrstovvtt 
 
 This conspicuous landmark gained its name, as 
 everybody knew, from the fact that the cap- 
 ture of the British spy was accomphshed 
 directly beneath it. Long after the war it 
 stood, a reminder not only of the heroism of 
 Paulding, Williams, and Van Wart, but of the 
 treachery of Arnold, whose execrated name 
 was coupled with that of Judas. The traitor, 
 hidden in England, lived for many years ; but 
 w^hen at last the end came, and the news of 
 his death had travelled slowly to Tarrytown, a 
 strange, dramatic scene occurred. While men 
 met at the crossroads or the tavern and' told 
 each other with stern satisfaction that Arnold 
 was dead, and decrepit veterans on the store 
 ' ' stoep ' ' became animated once more, recall- 
 ing old days ; while the more youthful mem- 
 bers of the community w^ere for gaining the 
 dominie's consent to having the old church 
 bell rung, the sky clouded and a storm burst 
 over the village. In the midst of it a terrific 
 discharge of lightning, accompanied by a peal 
 of thunder that shook the houses, startled the 
 villagers. 
 
 After the storm had cleared away, a wonder 
 
an5 Sleeps "fcollow 105 
 
 came to light that surprised even the most 
 rational. Andre's tree, the giant tulip tree 
 under which Arnold's schemes had been frus- 
 trated, was riven and splintered by the light- 
 ning, 
 
 cuffy's prophkcy 
 
 When the old church was a-building, say 
 the gossips, Vredr3^k Flypse bethought him 
 that he would interrupt that pious labor, to the 
 end that the dam of his new mill might be in 
 readiness for the harv^est. It was, so to speak 
 and in a way, meat before grace that he con- 
 templated. But as soon as the dam was com- 
 pleted a storm came and washed it away ; so 
 that the Lord of the Manor waxed impatient 
 and swore incontinently. Thrice did this thing 
 transpire after the manner that we have already 
 related, and to this day it might have continued 
 to happen — Flypse being a firm man and stead- 
 fast of his head, which some call obstinate — 
 had not one of his slaves. Cuff}', dreamed a 
 dream, to the effect that the destruction of the 
 dam was due to the abeyance of the work upon 
 the church. With that Flypse finished the 
 
io6 Cbroniclee of tlarrgtown 
 
 church and had no further trouble with the 
 dam. 
 
 THE FI.YING DUTCHMAN 
 
 Hendrick Hudson — may his glory never 
 grow less — has been a veritable Man-in-the- 
 Moon — albeit only a Half Moon" — to the 
 dwellers on the banks of the river that per- 
 petuates his name. Some say that he still tacks 
 across the length and breadth of the Tappan Zee 
 from Dobbs-his-Ferr}^ to Point-no-Point, though 
 whether he is thus rewarded with beneficent 
 powers with an endless career of discovery, or 
 condemned for some unstoried deed to per- 
 petual labor, is a disputed point. It is even 
 stoutly maintained — or was some years ago, 
 when people thought it worth while to cock 
 their beliefs saucily — that the Flying Dutch- 
 man is not Hendrick at all, but a pirate or 
 smuggler of a later day. 
 
 At the risk of being thought an indifferent 
 antiquary I must tell what I know about this 
 ghostly vessel, which to my eyes appeared alto- 
 gether too modern a craft to have been the 
 Half Moon, 
 
anD Sleeps IboUow 
 
 107 
 
 Late on a moonlight evening, several years 
 ago, as two friends sat on the rocks by 
 Kingsland's round-tower, at the old quarry, 
 and looked down upon the river, their atten- 
 tion was attracted to a schooner that moved 
 swiftly and silently past the point. She was 
 coming up the stream and towards the shore 
 upon the port tack. In the bright moonlight 
 that illuminated her sails, they seemed to stand 
 out distinct from the gray of the river. While 
 the friends w^ere looking at this inviting craft, 
 she disappeared — vanished as completely as 
 though she had been engulfed in the Tappan 
 Zee, leaving not a single spar to mark the place 
 where she went down. But no ship since the 
 world began ever sank as quickly as that 
 schooner faded from sight. The spectators 
 rubbed their eyes and marvelled, but the night 
 kept its secret for full twenty minutes w4ien — 
 presto ! — there she was again, as fresh as a 
 duck that dives and comes up uninjured from 
 its bath. Now the vessel was on the starboard 
 tack and standing away from the east shore. 
 Three times or more the prank was played, and 
 the friends wondered. 
 
io8 CbronlclcB of Carrgtown 
 
 Was it the Flying DiUcluyian ? I, who saw 
 this, am willing enough to agree with you that 
 it was ; but my friend, who is scientific, ofifered 
 so plausible and rational an explanation that I 
 would repeat it here if I was not sure that it 
 would wreck 3^our faith as it did mine. 
 
 HUI.DA, THE WITCH 
 
 Reference has been made to the cottage of 
 Hulda, which was not far from the Spook 
 Rock. To-day nothing is left of that humble 
 habitation but a few stones in the side of an 
 alder-covered bank, and the trace of a path 
 leading to a walled spring. But in the days 
 of our nation's birth- throes he was a brave man 
 who passed the cottage of the witch, even in 
 the daytime. A hundred years ago the people 
 took witches seriously. 
 
 Hulda was a Bohemian woman, who came 
 without references or kin and settled in the 
 midst of conservative folks who were familiar 
 with each other's grandparents. To be a 
 stranger was to be open to suspicion ; to be 
 alone was not respectable. Acting upon a 
 well-known principle, recognized in most rural 
 
anb Sleeps "Ibollow 
 
 log 
 
 communities, the newcomer is held to be guilty 
 till he has proved himself to be innocent. 
 
 Hulda gathered herbs, * ' simples, ' ' in the 
 mill woods ; she knew where the boneset grew, 
 and vervain, and mandrake, and calamus. Her 
 cabin was full of tUe sweet odor of plants a- 
 drying ; specifics for colds and fevers and the 
 unsophisticated pains and aches of simple folk. 
 She wove baskets, too, and w^as wise, as a 
 woman ought not to be. Rumor, as busy in 
 Sleepy Hollow in 1770 as she is in 1897, said 
 that the witch had commerce with the Indians 
 who came occasionally into this region from far 
 up the State, and exchanged with, them secrets 
 of black art and ' ' j^arbs. ' ' 
 
 A tapu, as eflfectual as ever existed in the 
 South Sea islands, cut this woman off from 
 human intercourse, and when the war came 
 she, alone, had no friend to discuss her hopes or 
 tell her fears to. From first to last the neutral 
 ground got the worst of the Revolution. 
 Friends and foes struggled across it and fought 
 or fled back again. Every crime in the calen- 
 dar was committed in the names of King and 
 Congress alike, till the harried remnant of the 
 
no CbroiUclcs of ^arrgtown 
 
 people sat among their denuded fields and de- 
 pleted barns, and faced starv^ation and sickness 
 with such stoicism as they could muster. 
 Sometimes an undetected hand left dainties 
 that were hard to procure, on the door-step or 
 the window-sill of some house where want and 
 pain had settled together ; but the donor was 
 invisible. 
 
 In those days men patrolled the highways to 
 intercept the cattle-thieves that ran ofif their 
 stock, and as the population became smaller, 
 the women sometimes took their places with 
 flint-lock and powder-horn. Hulda, the witch, 
 presented herself for this service, but no one 
 wanted her companionship. At last one da}^ a 
 force of British landed from one of the trans- 
 ports that had sailed up the Hudson and com- 
 menced a march which was to bring them, by 
 means of the King's highway, to the rear of 
 Putnam's position, at Peekskill. As they 
 marched in imposing array a volley greeted 
 them from behind walls and tree-trunks. It 
 was lycxington repeated in Westchester County. 
 Not to be repulsed this time, Hulda fought 
 with her neighbors, using her rifle with great 
 
III 
 
 effect, so that she was singled out for ven- 
 geance ; and before the redcoats retreated to 
 their boats they had, by means of a sortie, 
 overtaken and killed the witch. 
 
 Animated by a new respect, those who had 
 seen her fight avowed that, witch or no witch, 
 she had earned a right to Christian burial. 
 Reverently they carried her to her cabin, and 
 while there discovered between the leaves of 
 her Bible (?) a paper informing them of a little 
 store of gold that she desired to have dis- 
 tributed among the widows whose husbands 
 had fallen for their country. 
 
 Hulda's grave, it is said, is close by the 
 north wall of the old church, as though her 
 neighbors, having done her what despite they 
 could during her lifetime, were desirous to 
 atone after her death by an exhibition of hearty 
 respect. 
 
 RAVKN ROCK 
 
 Nowhere in this part of the country are the 
 ravens to be found, though it is thought that 
 they may have been plentiful a century or 
 more ago. The crows, who are known to be 
 
112 Cbroiuclce of ^arrgtown 
 
 inveterate neighbors of their larger cousins, 
 perhaps drove them out. Upon their exodus 
 these birds of ill-omen left their names in more 
 than one lonely spot, to couple with dark asso- 
 ciations. 
 
 Raven Rock is a detached portion of the 
 steep, rocky, eastern side of Buttermilk Hill, 
 which a deep fissure has long separated from 
 the mass, and the fragment, becoming inde- 
 pendent territory, set up a mythology of its 
 own. Not content with one legend, it has two, 
 at least, to boast. 
 
 A woman, so we have read, wandered out of 
 the path in a blinding snowstorm and sought 
 shelter from the blast of the wind in the ravine 
 behind Raven Rock. The snow drifted in 
 upon her and she went to sleep never to waken 
 again. Ever since, that cleft has been a melan- 
 choly place of refuge, for it is said that the 
 spirit of the poor wayfarer meets the belated 
 wanderer with cries that sound like the scream- 
 ing of the wind, and gestures that remind one 
 of the sweep of snowdrifts, warning others 
 away from the spot that she found so fatal. 
 There are, in all the land, many legends of 
 
mt> Sleeps Ibollov^ 
 
 113 
 
 many ghosts, but none I think of so kindly and 
 Christian a complexion as this poor spectre of 
 Raven Rock. 
 
 But the wraith of the white woman is not the 
 only one that the rock boasts. An Indian girl, 
 who perished of a jealous lover, has an older 
 claim ; and the ravens used to tell of still a 
 third, a Colonial Dame, who fled from the 
 dreadful attentions of a too amorous Tory 
 raider in the dark days of* The Old War." 
 
 Nebulous legends they are, every one, and 
 in these hard days of unbelief there are people 
 who, not knowing the stories in detail, have 
 even expressed a doubt concerning the ghosts 
 themselves. 
 
 THE WOMAN OF THE CI.IFF 
 
 It is no discredit to a ghost or a ghost-story, 
 but rather in the nature of them both, to be 
 evanescent. No apology need be ofifered there- 
 fore for the Woman of the Cliff, who flits along 
 the top of the rocks on a certain ledge that 
 overlooks the village. When a storm is rising 
 she is sometimes seen hurrying among the tree- 
 trunks and over the moss, and her voice rises 
 
114 Cbrontclea of ^arrgtown 
 
 with the wind, which it resembles not a Httle. 
 Whatever the tragic story of this poor ghost, 
 she has not yet found an opportunity to tell it 
 to any one. 
 
 kidd's rock 
 
 This has long been the name of a rock that 
 is a part of the river-wall on the outer side of 
 Kingsland's point. There is a summer-house 
 built over the rock and if there were ever gold- 
 en riches beneath it, or if there are treasures 
 hidden there still, it is not (fortunately) the 
 duty of a sober historian to tell. When it is 
 remembered that the first Vredryk Flypse and 
 his confreres were charged with being the 
 partners in Kidd's nefarious trade, and that 
 the rock was at the very entrance to the bay 
 upon the upper end of which stood the castle 
 and port of Sir Vredryk, it does not seem at all 
 impossible that the pirate may have found a 
 convenient trysting-place at the rock. 
 
 THE HKADI<KSS HESSIAN 
 
 The "Legend of Sleepy Hollow " belongs to 
 Washington Irvdng, and it is an enchanted 
 
fruit that crumbles into ashes if any one touches 
 it but the magician who fashioned it. But the 
 Headless Hessian belongs to the neighborhood, 
 and Brom Bones is well remembered still. 
 
 About twenty 5'ears ago the writer was pass- 
 ing, one morning, through the little lane that 
 borders the Pocantico, between Broadway and 
 the site of the burned factory (Brombacher's), 
 when he overheard an Irishw^oman, who stood 
 by her cottage gate, relate this marvellous tale 
 to her neighbors : 
 
 " It was n't late, mebby not mower than tin 
 o'clock, an' me waitin' here be the gate for 
 Dinny to come in an' he only shteppin' up to 
 Johnny Manin's wid de can, when upon me 
 sowl, thrue as I 'm standin' here, I see right 
 out there in the road a big, black, shadder-like, 
 widout any head, an' him on horseback at 
 that." 
 
 There was no doubting the sincerity of the 
 tones. I looked at the ghost-seer. Honesty 
 and ignorance shared the realm between them. 
 Had she possibly had her imagination fired by 
 reading Irving ? It was easier to believe that 
 she had actually seen the Headless Hessian. 
 
ii6 Cbronicles ot Carrgtown 
 
 Allow the possibility of the apparition, and I 
 will show you why the place where the woman 
 thought she had seen him was most appropri- 
 ate. A few rods up the stream the ford and 
 abutments still show where the ancient bridge 
 stood, before the course of the post-road was 
 changed : a few rods down one finds the pres- 
 ent bridge. What more natural than that a 
 poor, headless spook should wander irresolute 
 between the old site and the new ? 
 
 That some untoward influence occasionally 
 manifests itself at the new bridge is not un- 
 known. A few years ago a sober and careful 
 citizen from the lane, returning from the dis- 
 tant saloon w^th a pitcher of beer which he was 
 expecting to drink in the bosom of his family, 
 was dragged upon the bridge by invisible hands, 
 though it was clear moonlight, and flung over 
 the high parapet into the water of the Pocan- 
 tico, where he swam for some time, being 
 miraculously unable to find the shore, and was 
 at last rescued by his neighbors. Another, 
 who had been in the clutches of the same un- 
 canny wrestler, succeeded in escaping without 
 a ducking. 
 
an& Sleeps "Ibollovv 
 
 117 
 
 Brom Bones, who figures in the courtship of 
 * * Sleepy Hollow ' ' as the practical joker who im- 
 personated the Headless Horseman, was in Mr. 
 William See's store, with a lot of other ancient 
 cronies, when the first copy of the immortal I^e- 
 gend reached Tarrytown. No longer ' ' Brom, 
 the devil," butolduncleAbr'm Van Tassel, the 
 patriarch listened in great wrath when someone 
 told him that Washington Irving had put him 
 in a book. Grasping his ponderous stick, he 
 started for the door. 
 
 " Hole on. Uncle Brom ! where you goin' so 
 fast ' ' ? they cried. 
 
 " Goin' to lick that writin' feller till he can't 
 see! " roared the newly immortalized. 
 
 JACOB THE ROMAN 
 
 The stor>^ of ' ' Jacob the Roman ' ' belongs by 
 courtesy, if not by copyright, to the Rev. Dr. 
 John Knox Allen, who received it from the 
 late Mrs. Eliza Ann See, and told it first in 
 a historical address, which was afterwards pub- 
 lished by the Tarrytown Historical Society. 
 We give it in his own words : 
 
 "Just at the foot of the high point called 
 
ii8 Cbronicles of ^Tarr^town 
 
 Kyk-uit,^ there long ago dwelt a man who w^as 
 called Jacob the Roma?i. He was a Gennan by 
 birth, and in the centuries past his ancestors 
 had come, perhaps w4th Julius Caesar, from 
 Rome, and after the conclusion of the war with 
 the Gauls had settled among the now friendly 
 lVar-7?ie?i, whom w^e to-day call German. 
 Living in the highlands of Southern Germany 
 the old name still clung to them. ' Jacob the 
 Roman ' was well educated, but he was poor. 
 He was respected in his native town, and had 
 w^on the affection of the Herr Obermeister's 
 lovely daughter — her name Judah Trenagh. 
 But poverty hindered the progress of his suit, 
 and he determined to try his fortunes in this 
 New World. Judah w^ould not be left be- 
 hind. By night they left the town, and trav- 
 elling by unfrequented paths at last reached 
 the coast. But now^ their money was ex- 
 hausted. Nothing daunted, they secured their 
 
 * "Lookout," now pronounced Kakeont ; a name 
 given to a sharply-defined hill rising about five hun- 
 dred feet above tide water, and situated about a mile 
 and a half due east from the Hudson River. It was 
 once a coast survey station, and was used in early 
 times by the Indians as a signal-hill. 
 
mb Sleeps Dollow 119 
 
 passage across the ocean by articles of agree- 
 ment with the captain of a vessel, which 
 articles allowed him to sell the two for a term 
 of years to whoever in this land would pay the 
 price of their passage, and secure it from the 
 proceeds of their labor. This was no unusual 
 thing in that day. Those thus sold were called 
 Rcdemptioners , because the price of their re- 
 demption from bondage was fixed at so much 
 labor, or its equivalent in money. A calamity 
 not anticipated befell them on arrival — they 
 were sold away from each other. Exchanging 
 vows of eternal fidelity, they parted. 
 
 ' ' In time Jacob worked his freedom, and on 
 the east side of Kyk-uit near a little brook 
 bought a little homestead and built for himself 
 a house. He had learned to speak the Low 
 Dutch of the people, and as he was a tailor by 
 trade they came to him to make their garments, 
 and came to listen to his many stories of life in 
 the Old World. He was respected by all ; he 
 increased in goods, but was not happy. It was 
 years since he had seen Judah. Where was 
 she ? Was she living ? How should he ever 
 find her ? His former master told him he had 
 
I20 Cbronicles of Q:arrstown 
 
 heard she had been sold somewhere west of 
 the river. His love stimulated his wits. 
 Anthony Segere was der Post-reiter, and made 
 his monthly circuit with the colonial mail from 
 New Amsterdam to Fort Orange, going up the 
 west vside of the river and down the east. Jacob 
 confided in him, and the postman espoused his 
 cause with sympathy, and promised to inquire 
 in every village for ' one Trenagh,' according 
 to the description Jacob gave him ; and if he 
 found her, and she were willing, he promised to 
 bring her back with him on his horse. For this 
 service Jacob was to give him seven dollars in 
 New York currenc3^ Jacob sliow^ed him the 
 money, and laid it away against the demand. 
 The postman went and made inquir\', return- 
 ing month after month on his steady old horse, 
 and brought no new^s. Jacob's heart sank 
 within him, just as do the hearts of people in 
 more splendid romances. 
 
 ''At last the old postman met a man wiio 
 thought he knew a woman who answered the 
 description. He would see her, and if she 
 were the one w^ould bring her to Fort Orange 
 against the time of the next circuit. Jacob was 
 
anD Sleeps IboUow 
 
 121 
 
 wild with excitement. Was this the woman 
 or not ? What joy or sorrow would the post- 
 man bring him next month ? The month 
 rolled round. The slow steed came ambling 
 down the river-roads and up the hills and bore 
 Anthony and his saddle-bags, and on the 
 pillion w^as seated Judah too. Any good novel 
 will tell you what they did when they met. 
 
 ' ' One incident is to be added. Judah often 
 told how she attracted the attention of whole 
 villages on the first day's ride on horseback 
 from Fort Orange. She wondered why the 
 people stared and smiled as they saw her, for 
 she was a comely woman and decently dressed. 
 She asked the old postman why they were 
 amused. He smiled. She was not an eques- 
 trian, and in her innocence supposed it w^as not 
 possible to ride a horse safely except astride. 
 And she had not liked to embrace the old man, 
 and so had mounted looking the other way. 
 It was hardly to be wondered at, that the peo- 
 ple smiled as they saw her clinging to the sad- 
 dle-bags, and with her face turned toward the 
 scenes they were fast, or rather slowly, leaving. 
 This story she herself told to Mrs. See. The 
 
122 Cbroniclea ot ^arri^town 
 
 old postman showed her how to ride upon the 
 pillion, and their journey ceased to attract 
 especial attention. There was, of course, love 
 in a cottage, though the furniture at first was 
 little, one old chest, containing crockery and 
 utensils, serving also as tailor's bench and 
 table. Eight children were born to them, 
 whose descendants are said to be with us to 
 this day. These two were members in good 
 and regular standing of the old church, and 
 Mrs. See especially emphasized their piety. 
 In his old age the good Jacob said one day : 
 * I prays mine Cott, I never knows a sick ped.' 
 That very evening as his wife approached to 
 help him to bed, he met her with the old look 
 of love, stretched out his hands to her, tried to 
 speak, and was gone." 
 
 THE CHARTER OAK 
 
 As late as the Civil War there was standing 
 upon the bluff which overlooks the old mill 
 from the south, a mammoth oak-tree, whose 
 story, according to the old people, had to do 
 with the signing of a charter or some other im- 
 portant paper beneath its shade. Some said 
 
anD Sleeps IboUow 123 
 
 that the deed of the old church was executed 
 there, others that Flypse concluded his pur- 
 chase of the Pocantico from the Indians on this 
 spot ; and again it was stated that the important 
 affair occurred at a later day and was connected 
 with Washington. The story, whatever it was, 
 had been forgotten, and all that remained was 
 a fixed recollection that there had been a legend 
 of some kind connected with the old tree. 
 
 Some time in the sixties I think it was, that 
 this noble relic of the forest primeval fell a 
 victim to the village vandals. It had escaped 
 their notice by some happy chance for many 
 years, but at last its day of doom came and the 
 axe destroyed in a few hours, what the forces 
 of nature had been centuries in bringing to 
 perfection. 
 
 THE KYK-UIT VOYAGER 
 
 " I '11 do it, if it takes me a month of Sun- 
 days ; " said Rambout Van Dam, adding by 
 way of confirmation a reference to the old 
 gentleman who had better be nameless. Van 
 Dam had attended a merrymaking at Kyk-uit, 
 and being in a pot-valiant mood he swore 
 
124 Cbronlcles ot ^arrgtown 
 
 roundly that he would reach the Palisades in 
 his boat before the dawn of the Sabbath, 
 though Saturday night was far spent when the 
 vow was registered. 
 
 ' * You ' 11 never, ' ' said his friends. 
 I will," quoth Rambout. 
 Better make a night of it here ! '* 
 Not if I row from now till doomsday." 
 
 Rambout found his boat where he had left it, 
 rocking quietly in the bay by the old mill. 
 Embarking, bravely he set out for his destina- 
 tion at a rate of speed that bid fair to fulfill his 
 promise and land him at the foot of the Pali- 
 sades an hour before sunrise. 
 
 But w^hen Sunday morning came Rambout 
 did not appear in his accustomed place, and his 
 neighbors shook their heads seriously, having 
 their own opinion of the morality and sobriety 
 of Tarry town. A week passed, and another 
 Sabbath did not restore Van Dam. Then in- 
 quiries w^ere made and finally the fact was 
 accepted that the bold little navigator was lost. 
 
 As time passed, a new sensation disturbed 
 the people who lived near the river bank. 
 Skippers plying from point to point along the 
 
ant) SleepB fJoUow 125 
 
 Tappan Zee had a strange story to tell. They 
 had heard the sound of rapid oars on still 
 nights and had been hailed by an invisible 
 boatman. A new ghost was on his rounds. 
 How long the Dutchman is doomed to pull his 
 weary oar it is impossible to guess ; but if there 
 is a limit in time or distance, it seems as though 
 he must soon reach it after a century and a 
 half of labor. 
 
VII 
 
 OI,D SITES AND HIGHWAYS 
 
 N octogenarian, writing his eariy reminis- 
 
 /~\ cences of Tarrytown for the Pocantico 
 Gazette (1846) says : " When I was j^oung an 
 old man pointed out a maple stump as the re- 
 mains of the tree that was used by Capt. Daniel 
 Martlings to fasten his market boat to. Before 
 the Revolutionary war there was a dock run out 
 in the cove opposite the maple tree, and Captain 
 Martlings built his dwelling-house on the shore, 
 while one Abram Fogal, another boatman, 
 built a house on the lot where Jacob Requa's 
 house stands, which was occupied by George 
 Munson for a tavern. The next house was 
 built for a dwelling and store on the site of the 
 one lately belonging to Jacob Onderdonk, and 
 William Paulding erected the one now occupied 
 
Cbronicice of ^Tarr^town 127 
 
 by General Paulding, where he also set up a 
 store. The settlement was hitherto confined to 
 the water's edge, but now one Edward Couen- 
 hoven erected a building for a store and tavern 
 on the site since in possession of Martin Smith, 
 and Abram Martlings put up that occupied by 
 the late Widow Child. The splendid residence 
 of N. Bayles was then the site of a small house 
 belonging to one Dykman. Besides these, a 
 house built by George Comb on the ground now 
 owned by Thos. Dean (on the southwest corner 
 of Main Street and Broadway), a little house 
 near by and two down on the shore, one of 
 which was built where John Leonard lives, by 
 Isaac Martlings, comprised all the village pre- 
 vious to the Revolutionary war. No, there was 
 another, built and occupied by Abram Fogal, 
 which made twelve at the time that the war 
 broke out." 
 
 The octogenarian, whose account we will 
 quote further, did not mention the Van Tassel 
 (old Mott) house, nor several others which lay 
 at a greater distance, notably the Davids home- 
 stead. Sunny Side, the Manor house, and the 
 Reed, or Landrine house — to which Major 
 
128 Cbronlclcs of tTarr^town 
 
 Andre was taken after his capture. It is prob- 
 able that the aged writer confined his effort of 
 memory to the west side of the turnpike road — 
 that is to say, Broadway. 
 
 Mr. Bolton, in his History of Westchester 
 County, seems to have followed this account 
 blindly and without reflection, as he did the 
 genealogical tables of the Filipse family and 
 other data, without taking the trouble to verif}^, 
 or even to reflect ; for he gives twelve houses 
 as the total in Tarrytown up to the time of the 
 war. 
 
 From other sources the following accounts 
 seem to agree : 
 
 The old Pauldhig House was near the termi- 
 nus of Dock Street, which is the left-hand fork 
 of lower Main Street. It stood on the edge of 
 a pleasant ba}^ which used to indent the shore 
 to the south of the present depot. William 
 Paulding, who built it, was the father of Gen- 
 eral Paulding, who afterwards built where 
 Miss Helen Gould's place now is. James 
 Kirke Paulding, the friend of Ir\dng, who was 
 joint author with him of the Salmaguyidi 
 Papers y was a brother of William. He spent 
 
anD Sleeps Dollow 
 
 129 
 
 much of his boyhood at this old house. General 
 William Paulding was a member of the New 
 York State Constitutional Convention in 1821, 
 and Mayor of New York City, with an inter- 
 mission of one year, from 1824 to 1829. Philip 
 R. Paulding, son of the preceding, sold the 
 present Gould place to George Merritt. 
 
 The Martlings House. — Abram Martlings, 
 the hero of many an adventure in the troublous 
 days of the Revolution, lived on the knoll 
 which has been known in later days as the 
 CliflF house property. The Fowlers, w^ho 
 owned it several years ago, improved the 
 house and grounds greatly. This is the place 
 that occupies the inner side of the curve of 
 Main Street on the steep block between the 
 old postoflSce and the bank. 
 
 Captain Daniel Martlhigs' is still standing. 
 It is on the corner of Dock and Water Streets, 
 north of where the Paulding house used to 
 stand. This Captain Daniel w^as the boatman 
 who used to fasten his market boat to a tree 
 on the shore. 
 
 The Onderdonk house and Captain VogeV s 
 
 were near the corner of Dock and Water 
 9 
 
I30 Cbronicles ot ^arr^town 
 
 Streets. The Captain Vogel mentioned here 
 is evidently the same that ' ' an Octogenarian ' ' 
 speaks of as one ' ' Abram Fogal, another boat- 
 man." 
 
 William Couenhoven'' s house stood on the 
 corner of Main Street and Broadway, where 
 the drugstore of Russell and I^aurie now is. 
 For many years this site was known as the 
 Martin Smith tavern and every notable man 
 who travelled from New York to Albany in 
 the old stage-coach days, has probably made a 
 stop at what was, in its time, quite ? famous 
 hostelry. 
 
 " Tommy'' Deaji' s was opposite. Not a few 
 of the older residents of Tarrytown remember 
 Thomas Dean, and the store that he kept, w^here 
 the farmers for six miles around used to do all 
 their trading thirtj^-five or forty years ago. 
 The wagons, in long procession, got as near his 
 door as they could on market days, and the 
 store became an important produce exchange 
 for men who never dreamed of shipping direct 
 to New York for themselves. The old house 
 was built by George Comb. Thomas Dean 
 was the son of John Dean, w^ho was one of the 
 
mb Sleeps "IboUow 131 
 
 four men left at the Davis farm when Paulding 
 and his party separated on the day of Andre's 
 capture. He was also the hero of the skirmish 
 elsewhere cited, which took place on this very 
 corner. His grandson is Professor Dean, of 
 Columbia College. Just below the Thomas 
 Dean house was the Sniffiyi house. The west 
 half of the Bayles house, between the present 
 postoffice and the Cliff (Martlings) house, was 
 the Dyckman Homestead, once an important 
 unit in the little sum of residences. Isaac 
 Martlhigs, the martyr, lived, I believe, in a 
 house which stood to the south of the Paulding 
 place. Boyce' s-^2i^ on Franklin Street, Gabriel 
 Requa's was east of the spring on Water Street; 
 that is, nearly opposite the Paulding house. 
 
 The y acob Mott House or Elizabeth Van Tassel 
 Tavern. — More than sixty years before the 
 * ' embattled farmers ' ' at Concord ' ' fired the 
 shot heard round the world," when New York 
 City was a village w^ith five or six thousand 
 inhabitants, and the Manor of Filipsburg 
 (Tarrytown) a hamlet in the wilderness, one 
 Martlings lived in that house on the King's 
 highway. It was a solid, sturdy stone struc- 
 
132 Cbroniclce of ^Tarrgtown 
 
 ture, designed to withstand the ravages of time 
 and weather and to repel the attacks of savage 
 neighbors. So well did the builders accom- 
 plish their purpose that it has outclassed all 
 contemporary dwellings in the neighborhood 
 except Flypse's castle," the residence of the 
 I/Ord of the Manor. At last, at what date I 
 cannot say, it became a house of refreshment 
 for man and beast, and during the period of 
 the war for independence was known as the 
 Elizabeth Van Tassel Tavern. 
 
 Of course, an inn that kept its doors open at 
 that day on the harassed territory that lay be- 
 tween the opposing British and Continental 
 armies had its full share of romantic incidents. 
 More than once it must have been the victim 
 of raids by the cowboys and skinners, and 
 Mistress Van Tassel w^as no doubt a discreet 
 woman to keep a roof over her head at all in 
 such troublous times. If the old walls could 
 retain a photographic impression of the worthies 
 that stopped within them, what a gallery it 
 would be — Washington and Putnam, Light 
 Horse Harry Lee and Madcap Anthony Wayne, 
 Knyphausen, the raider, and younger sprigs 
 
ant) Slccpg Ibollow 133 
 
 of the British nobility, sent over to win their 
 spurs. About the time of the battle of White 
 Plains an American or French officer is said to 
 have lain for some time in the parlor wounded, 
 and there the Father of His Country used to 
 bow his tall figure through the doorway in a 
 daily visit to him. Once, says tradition, when 
 the British gunboats were anchored out in the 
 Tappan Zee, and were rather careless in the 
 disposition of their ammunition, a cannon ball 
 found the tavern, but was considerate enough 
 to enter by the window instead of making a 
 breach in the walls. 
 
 The tavern was the American headquarters 
 when the Continental forces were in this neigh- 
 borhood, and when public measures were dis- 
 cussed by General Hammond and the local 
 Committee of Safety, tradition says that they 
 made their rendezvous here, and there is little 
 doubt that many a plan was hatched and many 
 a movement forestalled beneath the shelter of 
 its roof Does any one suppose that the dis- 
 creet landlady would betray her kinsman. Van 
 Tassel, or the redoubtable Abram Martlings 
 (namesake of the builder) when they planned 
 
134 Cbronlclea ot tlarcBtown 
 
 their romantic and historic raid upon the 
 Island of Manhattan, or met on their return to 
 glory in having eluded the Hessian guard and 
 reduced Oliver de Lancey's house to ashes ? 
 
 I have elsewhere told how Major Hunt cap- 
 tured a party there, when "clubs were trumps. ' ' 
 But better than any of the war stories is the 
 delicious romance which Washington Irving 
 associated with the homestead when he made 
 it the scene of the courtship of Sleepy Hollow. 
 Mr. Irving was a frequent visitor at the old 
 house, especially during the time that his 
 sister boarded there with the Mott family, and 
 it is due to his direct interposition that Mr. 
 Jacob Mott refrained from making damaging 
 alterations in the building after his purchase 
 of it. Even before he himself had enriched it 
 beyond price he deemed it worth a personal 
 effort to preserve. 
 
 One of the completest folk-stories in any 
 language is that which Washington Irving 
 wrote of the loves and the floutings, the haps 
 and mishaps of Katrina Van Tassel, Ichabod 
 Crane, Brom Bones, and the rest of the people 
 of the familiar legend. The scene of the court- 
 
 I 
 
mt> Sleeps IboUow 
 
 135 
 
 ship of Sleepy Hollow, of the dance aud jeal- 
 ousies, was laid here in the old stone house. 
 Here Katrina, the belle, set her admirers by 
 the ears with her coquetries; here the quilting 
 frolic drew the lads and lassies of the country- 
 side together; here the farmers, in pewter 
 buckles and stupendous brass-buttoned coats, 
 with blue homespun stockings and eelskin 
 queues, ogled the damsels in long waisted short- 
 gowns ; and the elect were regaled with 
 doughty doughnuts and tender oly keoks, and 
 all the profusion of good things wherewith the 
 narrator makes the mouth of his reader water. 
 
 In compliance with the vote of the citizens of 
 Tarry town in 1896, the school- trustees bought 
 the old Mott house and tore it down to erect a 
 new schoolhouse on the site. 
 
 T/te Davids Homes fead, built somewhere about 
 the middle of the last century, and still the 
 property of a descendant of its builder, stands 
 on the ridge which overlooks the village of 
 North Tarr>^town from the south side of the 
 Bedford Road. Here Washington made a halt 
 and was entertained after the battle of White 
 Plains. Pursuers w^ere then upon his track, 
 
136 Cbroniclea of ^arrstown 
 
 and, arriving at the house soon after he had left, 
 slashed the door-posts with their sabres in 
 wanton anger at having missed him. The 
 marks of the cuts are still there. It was at the 
 Davids place that the party who were with 
 Paulding on the night preceding the capture 
 of Andr6, separated just before that important 
 event, and so excluded worthy John Dean from 
 a share in the glory which still attaches to the 
 names of Paulding, Williams, and Van Wart. 
 
 The Wm. Landrine House ^ that was bought 
 of a family named Reed, and by them from the 
 people who occupied it during the Revolution, 
 is the place where Andr6 was taken after his 
 capture. It faces the South from the old county- 
 house road, and is on the north side of the reser- 
 voir lake. It is still standing and is owned by 
 Mr. John D. Rockefeller. 
 
 Wolff ert Ecker's. — The house that Washing- 
 ton Irving has described in Wolferf s Roost, and 
 which he made his own home, will be spoken 
 of under its better known name of Sunny- 
 side," in the account, given elsewhere, of 
 Irving' s life in Tarrytown. 
 
 The Andre Brook divides the twin villages. 
 
anD Sleeps Ibollow 
 
 137 
 
 Tarrytown being in Greenburg, and North 
 Tarrytown in Mount Pleasant. The seat of 
 the ancient Manor of Filipsburg, which be- 
 came the property of the Beekmans after the 
 Revolution, was in what is now North Tarry- 
 town. The estate dwindled to a mere fraction 
 of its former size till in December, 1822, the 
 ' * Beekman Farm ' ' was advertised for sale, 
 upon the death of Gerard G. Beekman, the 
 elder. The boundaries given are mainly those 
 of the village of North Tarrytown as it is to- 
 day. The advertisement in the Westchester 
 Herald was as follows : 
 
 ' ' For Sale. Forty-five (probably 450) acres 
 of very Valuable I,and : Situated near the 
 banks of the North River, about twenty-eight 
 miles from the city of New York and being a 
 part of the farm of the late Gerard G. Beekman, 
 Esq. The above tract of land lies nearly ad- 
 joining the village of Tarry-Town, and is 
 bounded on the East by the Highland Turn- 
 pike Road, on the West and North by the 
 Public Market Road leading to Martling and 
 Van Wart's landing, and on the South by a 
 brook called Major Andre's Brook, being the 
 
138 Cbroniclcs ot XLm^town 
 
 Division I^ine between the , towns of Mount 
 Pleasant and Greenburg. 
 
 * ' This land has manj- advantages as a stand 
 for Business. The land itself is excellent a?id 
 there are several pleasaiit situations for building 
 upon it. It is, besides well w^atered and may 
 be conveniently laid out and sold in Small 
 Lots. In the hands of an enterprising man it 
 would soon become the site of a Flourishing 
 Village. Upon the w^hole it cannot be justly 
 appreciated without viewing it. 
 
 ' ' Persons inclined to purchase will please ap- 
 ply to Mrs. Cornelia Beekman, or Gerard G. 
 Beekman, w^ho reside near the premises or to 
 Frederick Depeyster or Stephen D. Beekman 
 in the city of New York. The terms w411 be 
 moderate and accommodating to the pur- 
 chaser. ' ' 
 
 The ''Highland Turnpike Road," the 
 Albany Post Road," and '' Broadway" are 
 the same. " The Public highway leading to 
 Martlings and Van Wart's Landing " was the 
 road, long since disused, which was a con- 
 tinuation of Bedford Road between Broadway 
 and the river, to the north of the present Beek- 
 
anD Sleeps Ibollow 
 
 139 
 
 man Avenue. The name by which all of that 
 portion of Tarrytown situated between Van 
 Courtlandt Street, Beekman Avenue, and the 
 river was known until quite recently, was 
 Beekmantown, and indeed, is still called so by 
 many old residents. North Tarrytown, the 
 incorporated village, is only Beekmantown 
 under an alias. 
 
 Probably few of the older inhabitants of 
 either town have forgotten a certain sermon, 
 preached by a minister of one of the Tarrj^town 
 churches, in which he asked, ' ' Can any good 
 thing come out of Beekmantown ? ' ' The witti- 
 cism was uncalled for, and belonged to the 
 same boomerang family as Doctor Burchard's 
 famous three R's. 
 
 The Albany Post Road was generally the 
 same as the present Broadway, as far north as 
 the Andre monument, or that neighborhood. 
 From near that point it swerved more to the 
 east than it does now and met the present road 
 again at the old church. Exactly what its 
 course was between those two landmarks has 
 never been determined, or rather, has been de- 
 termined differently by every man who has 
 
140 Cbronlclee of tCarcBtown 
 
 written on the subject. It seems to me proba- 
 ble that the eastward trend brought it some- 
 where near the intersection of the aqueduct 
 and the Bedford Road, and that thence it 
 swept in a liberal curve through the Anderson 
 or Weber property toward the old church and 
 mill. It crossed the Pocantico by a bridge 
 which was several rods northeast of the present 
 one. The abutments may be found by follow- 
 ing the stream up to the old ford. 
 
 Petticoat I^ane, the present White Plains 
 Road, was the first to intersect the Post Road 
 south of the town. The next was the Market 
 Road that is now Main Street, and the third 
 the Bedford Road, which at various times has 
 been known as the Connecticut and the old 
 White Plains Road. There were other roads, 
 built by farmers for their convenience in get- 
 ting to church or to market, but the ones men- 
 tioned were the principal, and, with the excep- 
 tion of Water Street and Franklin, and a little 
 part of Washington, long the only streets in 
 Tarry town. 
 
 Carl's Mill afterwards became Hart's, and 
 the modest building was overshadowed by 
 
OLD LANE 
 
I 
 
an5 Sleeps Dollow 141 
 
 roomy ice-houses. All are now in ruins. It 
 was of unknown antiquity, the original Sleepy 
 Hollow Mill, where Mr. Irving loved to come 
 to listen to the musical flow of the cool water 
 over the brown old wheel, and gossip with 
 Tom, Dick, and Harry over all the quaint and 
 curious lore of the countryside. The original 
 mill at Carl's was a little saw-mill and the 
 Pocantico above and below it was the angler's 
 delight for many a year. 
 
 The Sleepy Hollow Road ran north from the 
 Bedford Road. Its settlement has not been in- 
 cluded with the original Tarrytown nucleus 
 because they were not parts of the same com- 
 munity. Just above the junction, on the Bed- 
 ford Road, another house of Revolutionary 
 date stood. I think it was Captain Romer's. 
 
 The valley which is immortal under the 
 name of Sleepy Hollow, is several miles in 
 length, its general course being north and 
 south, and the hills which border it broken by 
 tributary valleys. Its most extensive branch 
 is that through which the Pocantico Creek 
 leaves the Sleepy Hollow valley for the valley 
 of the Hudson. 
 
142 Cbronicles of ^arrgtown 
 
 In the year 1827 slavery was abolished in 
 the State of New York, though whether the 
 institution would not have died a natural 
 death, without the intervention of the law, is 
 an open question. Without doubt the yoke of 
 servitude in New York State was a very mild 
 one. Public sentiment had as much to do with 
 the matter as the law had, and public sentiment 
 refused to sanction cruelty. To be sure, pun- 
 ishment had to be resorted to at times, but it 
 is a notable fact that the servant was not left to 
 the tender mercies of an offended master when 
 he transgressed. The jUvStice and deliberation 
 of the people of this part of the country were 
 never better attested than in the appointment 
 of a public slave-whipper, whose duty it was 
 to see that punishment was fairly administered 
 to refractory slaves. 
 
 The Tarrytown slave-whipper (dreadful 
 title !) was a mild and humane Quaker gentle- 
 man named Conklin, who lived in a pleasant 
 farm-house which is yet standing on a hill- 
 slope north of the lyongwood Road, between 
 Sleepy Hollow and Pocantico Hills. Two very 
 tall pine trees tower above the dwelling and 
 
aiiD Sleeps Dollow 
 
 143 
 
 near it, to the east, is an old stone mill. Be- 
 yond the house, northward to the Sleepy Hol- 
 low Road, extends a walled road bordered by 
 ancient locust trees, and in a field only a few 
 hundred yards away, a large bowlder stands 
 from which one may overlook the valley of the 
 Pocantico. The rock is granitic, and nearly 
 perpendicular on two sides : its height is 
 twelve or fifteen feet, and its greatest hori- 
 zontal dimensions somewhat more. 
 
 The brook which has its source near this old 
 house flows beside the Longwood Road on its 
 course to the Pocantico; and where the new 
 Croton Aqueduct crosses its path it is spanned 
 by a massive and elaborate stone gate. There 
 are still left in its mimic pools a few feeble de- 
 scendants of the numerous and vigorous trout 
 that used to inhabit it. The Quaker slave- 
 whipper — whose office seems to have been 
 something of a sinecure — lived long after the 
 abolition of his office, and is well remembered 
 by men now living. 
 
VIII 
 
 TARRYTOWN IN WAR TIMES 
 
 HE call to arms which roused the entire 
 
 I country, North and South, woke the 
 people of Tarrytown and hurried many of them 
 to the front. Some of those who went away at 
 that time never came back ; their names are 
 engraved upon the soldiers' monument in the 
 cemetery, others returned to be honored by 
 their neighbors ; and a little remnant are still 
 with us. It is exactly the same story, word for 
 word, which might be written of any village in 
 the United States. The same burst of patriotic 
 enthusiasm; the same active preparation; the 
 same bravery of women, who had the harder 
 task of waiting between hope and fear; the 
 same partings and reunions — only a change of 
 names upon the muster rolls. 
 
Cbroniclee of ^Tarrgtown 145 
 
 There were the usual animosities. Some 
 men were denounced as Copperheads ; and 
 neighbors and friends were suddenly estranged 
 by the conflicting opinions of the times. 
 
 It has chanced that these words are written 
 on Decoration Day, 1897. In thirty-two years 
 the number of those who follow the drum and 
 carry the flag to the graves where their de- 
 parted comrades lie in Sleepy Hollow has 
 dwindled to a mere handful. They remind us 
 that another generation has come to the front, 
 and the event they celebrate is being crowded 
 back into the perspective of history. 
 
 Perhaps the most exciting episode of the Civil 
 War time was the exodus of the colored people 
 at the time of the '63 draft riots. In another 
 place, Rev. Abel T. Stewart's action in stopping 
 the rioters is referred to. When the danger 
 seemed imminent to citizens of negro blood, 
 large parties of fugitives of that race abandoned 
 their houses and took to the woods, not stop- 
 ping till they had reached the fastnesses of 
 Buttermilk Hill and equally secluded strong- 
 holds. The presence of a government gunboat 
 in the river soon restored confidence however. 
 
146 Cbronicles of (Tarr^town 
 
 The excitement was allayed and the refugees 
 returned to their homes after a few days. 
 
 One of the immediate effects of the war was 
 an increase in business activity, which, for a 
 while, Tarrj^town shared with the rest of the 
 country. During that period the population 
 increased somewhat, and a more extravagant 
 stj'le of living came into vogue with the influx 
 of wealthy New Yorkers. 
 
 The first body of men to volunteer from the 
 neighborhood of Tarrytown during the excited 
 days of i860, formed Company H, of the 
 Thirty-second Regiment. After seventeen 
 years two dozen of that company survive. 
 They are : 
 
 Alfred Lawrence, first lieutenant and acting 
 captain ; Thomas Rawcliffe, James Cropsey, 
 Robert Meeker, John M. Felter, Frank Taxter, 
 M. V. B. Bassett, Stephen Hammond, Sydney 
 Martin, John Verplanck, Durbin See, Robert 
 Bushell, Michael Donohue, Thomas Taxter, 
 William Covert, Oscar McCoy, Edward Baker, 
 Jeremiah Flannery, Florence Mahoney, John 
 Perry, Michael Daley, William Evans, John 
 Kenney, Charles Williamson. 
 
anD Sleeps Ibollow 
 
 147 
 
 Seventeen men from Tarrytown went out 
 with the N. Y. Mounted Rifles : 
 
 General C. C. Dodge, Major Wm. H. 
 Schieflin,^ Captain Edgar A. Hamilton, Adju- 
 tant B. H. Bngelke, Lieutenant Charles A. 
 Varick,* Sergeant John H. Briggs, Sergeant 
 Thomas Gearhart, Sergeant John Blatchley,* 
 Corporal George L. Wiley,* Corporal James 
 Portous, Corporal James B. Nation,* Abel 
 Sherwood,* William Wallace, M. V. B. Romer, 
 Peter See, Henry Palmer, F. D. Grittman. 
 
 Other Union veterans whose names occur 
 are : 
 
 John R. Burd, ist N. Y. Cal.; James Van 
 Tassel, 6th N. Art. ; Edward See, 7th N. Y. 
 Art. ; Abram Boyce, G, 7th N. Y. Art. ; Jos. 
 J. M. Slagel, G, 7th N. Y. Art. ; B. F. Davis, 
 2d, 7th N. Y. S. M. ; Patrick H. Bannon, K, 
 69th N. Y. Vol. ; James Martin ; John Gilleo, 
 95th N. Y. Vol. ; Michael Conelly ; John 
 Van Tassell I, 95th N. Y. Vol. John Yocom, 
 Caleb W. Storms, John Lafurgee, William 
 Rodman, Joseph Baker, Jacob Green, John 
 Mack, William Robinson. 
 
 * Deceased. 
 
148 Cbroniclcs of ^arrgtown 
 
 Besides these there were a number of citizens 
 who joined other organizations, and saw hot 
 ser\dce on many Southern battlefields. Living 
 or dead, we honor them all, remembering our 
 debt to them. 
 
IX 
 
 TO-DAY 
 
 FEW years ago somebody said — and no 
 
 one has contradicted the statement — 
 that the neighborhood between Sleepy Hollow 
 and Irvington is the wealthiest spot of ground, 
 in proportion to its population, in the world. 
 You cannot throw a stone, said another, with- 
 out hitting a millionaire. 
 
 No words can express more forcibly the 
 change which the hamlet of a century ago has 
 undergone. Where the Dutch settlers hewed 
 their homes out of the forest ; where the cow- 
 boys and skinners ranged over the neutral terri- 
 tory ; where the headless horseman found room 
 to throw his pumpkin without hitting any one 
 more important than poor Ichabod ; where 
 Irving wandered through sylvan lanes and be- 
 
150 Cbronlcles of Carrgtown 
 
 side babbling brooks in search of legends and 
 folk-lore — we have mansions, gardens, equi- 
 pages, and a monstrous fine population. 
 
 The Tarrytown of to-day is bounded on the 
 north by the Rockefellers, John D. and Wil- 
 liam, whose magnificent park-like estates are 
 the admiration of a neighborhood that has 
 grow^n used to grandeur ; on the south by a 
 cluster of brilliants, among which the Gould 
 place is not the least. Reference to the map 
 will show the location of the most important or 
 prominent of these country-seats, whose im- 
 portance is derived both from their own beauty 
 and the prominence of their owners. 
 
 Tarrytown was incorporated in 1870. Its 
 sister village in 1874. The present population 
 of the two combined is estimated at between 
 6741, as given by the eleventh (1890) census, 
 and 7000. Between 1880 and 1890 there was 
 an increase of over 1000. The greater part of 
 the population consists of comfortable middle 
 class and wealthy city people; the working 
 class being a minority. The only manufactory 
 of any importance which gives employment to 
 operatives is the Rand Drill Works, at the foot 
 
an& Sleepy Ibollow 
 
 151 
 
 of Beekman Avenue, in North Tarry town. 
 To discuss questions of water, sewerage, light- 
 ing, etc., is not the purpose of this book. It 
 is enough to say that the second is adequate 
 and the first has not yet proved itself to be in- 
 adequate to the needs of the place. 
 
 The streets, which probably reach thirty-five 
 or forty miles in the aggregate, are generally 
 in good condition. 
 
 The reader is referred to the carefully pre- 
 pared map which accompanies this work for 
 details relating to the location of private resi- 
 dences, points of (modern) interest, houses of 
 worship, public buildings, and streets. 
 
1 HUDSON RiVER 
 
 Dark Tines represent old roads (iSth Century). 
 Only the principal roads and streets are named on this map. The fi] 
 
 1. Old Manor House ( " Flvpse's Castle "i 
 
 2. Did Grain Mill, Imilt about 168,-4. 
 
 3. Old Dutch Churcli of Sleepy Hollow. 
 
 4. Site ofaiicif'l Saw Mill. 
 
 5. SiteofSleep\ Hollow School House. 
 6 David's House, visited by Washington. 
 
 Light Hues represent 
 es denote the sites of interest, 
 7. The Andr^ Captors' Monu 
 
 w roads (19th Century). 
 1 follows : 
 
 Dotted lines represent private roads. 
 
 Site of Old Mott House (Katrina Van Tassel's). 
 
 occupied by New High School. 
 Site of Couenhoven House, afterwards Martin i 
 Tavern. Now occupied by the Jones Building. 
 " Tommy " Dean's Store and other old houses. 
 
 11. Westchester Count v S.ivings Bank. 
 
 12. Merrick's Castle. Now u.sed as a School. 
 
 13. Christ Church, of which Mr. Irving was a Warden. 
 
 14. Old Martling House. 
 
 15. Site of Paulding and Martling Houses. 
 16-17. Kevolutionarv Kedoubls. 
 
INDEX 
 
 A 
 
 Acherly, Lieutenant, 93 
 
 Action at Tarry town, the, 90 
 
 Advertisement of sale of the Beekman farm, 137 
 
 Albany Postroad, 139 
 
 Albany Turnpike, 88 
 
 Alipconc, 5 
 
 Allen, Rev. John Knox, 117 
 Anderson property, 136 
 
 Andre, Major John, 84-86; Adjutant General, 87; his 
 ride, 93 ; capture of, 93 ; taken to Reed house 
 after his capture, 136 ; brook, the, 136 ; monu- 
 ment, 139 
 
 Andre's, horse, 94 ; tree, 103, 104 
 
 Andros, Governor, 8 
 
 Archer, John, 87 
 
 Arnold, Benedict, 84 ; his name execrated, 104 
 Arnold's treachery, 86 
 
 B 
 
 Bartholf, Rev. Guilliaume, 47 
 Battle of White Plains, 133 
 
 Bayard, Colonel, 14 ; account of grievances, 16 ; col- 
 league of Flypse, 23 ; his name coupled with 
 Captain Kidd, 25 
 
 Bayles, Nathaniel, 127 
 
 153 
 
154 
 
 Bedford road, the, 88, 135, 138, 140, 141 
 Beekman, additious to manor house, 34 ; farm adver- 
 tised, 137 ; Avenue, 138, 151 
 
 Gerard G., 31, 137, 138 
 
 Mrs. Cornelia, 32, 73, 138 
 
 Stephen D., 138 
 
 Beekmans, the, 137, 138 
 
 Beekmantown, 139 
 
 Bell of old church, 45 
 
 Bolton, his account not reliable, 128 
 
 Border raids, 80 
 
 Boundaries of the Beekman farm, 137 
 
 British, occupy heights, 82 ; frigates in the Hudson, 90 
 
 Brombacher's burned factory, 115 
 
 Brom Bones, 117, 134 
 
 Brush, Rev. William, 59 
 
 Bryant, Amada, 60 
 
 Buckhout, Polly, 82 
 
 Business increase after the war, 146 
 
 Butler, Col. Richard, 82 
 
 Buttermilk Hill, 85, 145 
 
 C 
 
 Captors of Andr^, 104 
 
 Carl brook, 60 
 
 Carl's Mill, 140 
 
 Charter Oak, the, 122 
 
 Charter of liberties, 15 
 
 Chestnut tree in 40-acre lot, 30 
 
 Church, Christ, 69 
 
 1st Reformed, 47, 57 
 
 North, division of property with the South 
 
 Church, 59 
 
 Old Dutch, 39, 46, 60, 66 ; furniture of, 8 ; 
 
 bell of, 9 ; structure of, 40 ; interior, 41 ; gallery, 
 42 ; closed, 65 ; Washington rested at, 73 
 
 South, 57 ; preaching in, 58 ; division of prop- 
 erty, 59 
 
 Civil war riots, the, 62 ; episodes, 145 
 Cliff House, 129 
 Clinton, Sir Henry, 78 
 
155 
 
 Cold Spring bridge, 88 
 
 Comb, George, built the Dean house, 130 
 
 Comb's, George, house, 127 
 
 Committee of Safety, 75 
 
 Confiscation of estate, 73 
 
 Conklin, the Quaker, 142 
 
 Constant, Judge, bought communion table, 47 
 
 Constitutional Convention, 129 
 
 Continental army passing manor-house, narrative of 
 
 Mrs. Beekman, 33 
 Cornbury, Governor of New York, 29 
 Costumes of old times, 43 
 Courtlandt, 48 
 
 Courtship of Sleepy Hollow, 134, 135 
 Couenhoven house, 84, 127 
 Couenhoven's William, house, 130 
 Cowboys, 132 
 Crane, Ichabod, 134 
 
 Croton, 7, 72 ; guides, 78; aqueduct, the, 143 
 Cufify Flypse, 105 
 
 D 
 
 Davids homestead, 85, 135 
 Dean, John, 84, 136 
 
 Thomas, house, 127, 130 
 
 de Deux Fonts, his account of review, etc., 90, 92 
 
 de Lancy, Oliver, 80, 134 
 
 de Peyster, Frederick, 138 
 
 de Revere, Abraham, 4, 7, 8, 28, 47 
 
 Dervall, John, 22 
 
 Destruction of sloops by the British, 91 
 
 de Vries, 6 ; Margareta, 6 
 
 Dobbs Ferry, 54 
 
 Dominie, the, 51 
 
 Draft riots, the, 62 
 
 Du Bois, George, 57 ; his salary, 58 
 
 Dun op's Yagers, 81 
 
 Dutch, Reformed Church, 14 ; conservatism, 50; lan- 
 guage superseded by English, 52 
 Dutchmen great church-goers, 46 
 Dykeman's house, 127, 131 
 
156 
 
 E 
 
 Ecker, Wolfert, 44, 66, 67 ; a well-known character, 
 
 44 ; his house known as Wolfert's Roost, 136 
 English, first baptismal service in, 52 
 
 F 
 
 Feet-washing in Pocantico, 51 
 Ferris, Benson, 66, 67 
 
 Mrs. Oliver, 67 
 
 Oliver, 66 
 
 Rev. John Mason, 58 
 
 Fire !" Anecdote of Rev. Mr. Smith, 55 
 Flypse, Adolphus, succeeds to estate, 25, 26 ; unmar- 
 ried, 28 
 
 Eva, 9, 31 ; married to Van Courtlandt, 29 
 
 Frederic, 6 
 
 Lady Catharina, 22, 27-29 
 
 Lady, Margarita, 27 
 
 Vredryk, 5, 9, 13, 114; Hon. Vredryk, 7; his 
 
 castle, 10, 13, 25, 37, 39, 132 ; his journeys to Tar- 
 rytown, 10; the master, 11; traditionary, 14; as 
 alderman, 15, 18; signature to certificate, 17; 
 steals a march on Leisler, 17 ; thoroughness of 
 his work, 19 ; death of his wife, 22 ; first Ameri- 
 can chosen by popular vote to represent New 
 York, 23 ; richest man in the colony, 23 ; as a 
 merchant, 24 ; his name coupled with that of 
 Kidd, 25 ; buried under old church, 29 ; died in 
 1702, 29; estate and tenants, 30; not a Patroon, 
 31 ; iDuilds a dam, 105 
 
 Flying Dutchman, the, 106, 108 
 
 Fogal's, Abraham, house, 127 
 
 Foote, Mr. occupied the old manor house, 33 
 
 Fordham, 48, 53 
 
 Fort Orange, 120 
 
 Fremont, General, 69 
 
 French, Annetje, 29 
 
 army move from North Castle, 89 
 
 Philip, 29 
 
157 
 
 G 
 
 Gould mansion, 128, 150 
 
 Miss Helen, 128 
 
 Greeuburg, 53 
 
 Grinnell, Hon. Moses H., 70 
 
 H 
 
 Hackensack, 3 
 Hafenje, the, 76 
 Half Moon, the, 106 
 
 Hammond, or Hammon, Gen. James, 52, 74 ; and the 
 
 Committee of Safety, 133 
 Harlem, 48, 53 
 Hawes, James, 85 
 
 Lovine, 51 
 
 Mrs. James, 36 
 
 Solomon, 51, 52 
 
 Headless Hessian, 114, 115 
 Heath, General, Memoirs ^ 77 
 Highland turnpike, 138 
 Hoe, Robert, 78 
 Hollanders, 3 
 Hopkins, Major, 78 
 Houses of settlers, 3 
 Hudson, Hendrick, 106 
 Hulda, the witch, 97, 108, iii 
 Hunt, Major, 87, 88 
 Hunt's escape, 89 
 
 Hurlburt, Captain of 2d Light Dragoons, 91 ; men- 
 tioned in General Orders by Washington for his 
 bravery at Tarrytown, 92 
 
 I 
 
 Indians, domesticated, 13 
 
 Irving, Washington, 67, 134 ; social life, 68, 69 ; Life 
 of Washington, 75 
 
 J 
 
 Jackson, Rev. John F., 53 
 Jacob the Roman, 117 
 
158 
 
 JafFray, Edward S., 70 
 Jay, John, the elder, 5 
 Jones, Capt. Oscar, 63 
 Jones, Eugene, 85 
 
 K 
 
 Kakeout, Kaakiat, or Kykuit, 76, 118 
 
 Kidd, William, commissioned to chase pirates, 24 
 
 Kidd's, perversion, 25 ; rock, 25, 104 
 
 Kill of Kitch Awong, 7 
 
 Kingsbridge, 77 
 
 King's Highway, no 
 
 Kingsland, Ambrose, 33, 87 
 
 Kingsland's round tower, 107 
 
 Knyphausen, the raider, 132 
 
 Kykuit voyager, the, 123 
 
 I. 
 
 Lady Margarita, 22 
 Laudrine house, 136 
 
 William, 57 
 
 William B., 87 
 
 Lee, Lighthorse Harry, 132 
 Leisler, Jacob, 14-17 
 Leislerian faction, 14 
 Leni Lenapes, 98 
 Leonard's, John, house, 127 
 Lincoln, General, 77 
 
 Livingstone, Colonel, gets Kidd a commisssion, 24 
 Longwood road, 142, 143 
 Lord Flypse, 4, 7 
 Lord of the manor, 3 
 
 M 
 
 Main Street, 140 
 
 Manor-house, the, building, 11, 12 
 Manor of Philipsburg, 137 
 Market road, Main Street, 140 
 Martlings, Abram, 133 
 
 and Van Wart's landing, 138 
 
 Captain Daniel, 83, 126, 129 
 
•ffnDea: 
 
 159 
 
 Martling's house, 129 
 
 Isaac, house, 131 
 
 Sergeant Isaac, 83 
 
 the impetuous, 80 
 
 the Martyr, 82, 83 
 
 Massacre of Sleepy Hollow, 82 
 
 Memorial of thanks by the tenants of Philipsburg, 26 
 Mill, construction, 19, 20 ; shingles of, 19 ; pond, dam, 
 
 20 ; said to be a port of entry, 20 
 Monroe, Mrs., 69 
 Morgan, Geo. D., 69 
 Mott homestead, 127 
 
 Jacob, 134 
 
 Mott's, Jacob, house, 131 
 Mounted Rifles, 147 
 Munson's tavern, 126 
 Mutzelius, Domine, 43, 48 
 
 N 
 
 Napoleon, Louis, 70 
 
 Negro exodus, 145 
 
 Neperhan, the, 8i 
 
 Neutral ground, its hardships, 109 
 
 New Amsterdam, 5 
 
 North Tarrytown, 137 
 
 Norton's, Colonel, attack on Young's house, 81 
 Notable visitors at the Van Tassel tavern, 132 
 
 O 
 
 Onderdonk house, 129 
 Jacob, 126 
 
 P 
 
 Papist, Flypse charged with being a, 14 
 
 Parsons, General, 79 
 
 Patriotism of youth, 74 
 
 Paulding, General William, 127, 128 
 
 James Kirke, 47 
 
 John, 85, 86 ; at Davids' place, 136 
 
 Philip R., 129 
 
 Paulding's house, 126, 128 
 
i6o 
 
 Peekskill, 77 
 Petticoat Lane, 81, 140 
 
 Philips, Frederick, great-grandson of Vredryk Flypse, 
 26 ; on tablet, 45 
 
 Miss, courted by George Washington, 31 
 
 Philip, Judge of Supreme Court, 25 ; married 
 
 a lady of Barbadoes, 25 
 
 Sir Frederick, 31 ; collected his rents, 36 
 
 Philipsburg, manor of, 6, 7, 18, 22, 25 ; confiscated, 
 31 ; pulpit, 54 
 
 Pocantico, the, 30, 51, loi, 141 ; manor-house, mill, 
 and church built on, 8 ; purchase, 8 ; trout fish- 
 ing, 60 ; Gazette, 126 ; bridge, 140 ; Hills, 142 
 
 Point no Point, 106 
 
 Population of villages, 150 
 
 Post Reiter, der, 120 
 
 Public money, 14 
 
 Putnam, General Israel, 76, 132 
 
 R 
 
 Raven Rock, ITI-113 
 Raymond, M. D., authority, 83 
 Redemptioners, 119 
 
 Reed house, afterrs-ards Landrine's, 127, 136 
 Reform in church service, 50 
 Report to the crown, 1691, 21 
 Requa's, Gabriel, house, 131 
 Jacob, house, 126 
 
 Riggs brings letters of instruction to L/cisler, 16, 17 
 Riots, '63, 62 
 
 Ritzemer, Rev. Johannes, 43, 48 
 Rockefeller, John D., 87, 136 
 Rockefellers,' John D. and William, 150 
 Romer's, Captain, house, 79, 141 
 Royal grant to Flypse, 5 
 
 S 
 
 Saint, Nicholas 4 
 Savings bank, the, 66, 67 
 Sawmill River, the, 71 
 Scales for weighing gold, 36 
 
i6i 
 
 Scharf 's History of Westchester Countyy 78 
 Schenck, Rev. John W., 58 
 See, James S., 36 
 
 Mrs. Eliza Ann, 117 
 
 See's store, 88 
 Segere, Anthony, 120 
 
 Sheldon, Colonel of regiment at Dobbs Ferry, 91 
 Skinners, 132 
 Slapering Hafen, 76 
 
 Sloughter, Sir Henry, 17 ; arrival in New York, 18 
 Slave-whipper, the, 142 
 Slavery abolished, 142 
 
 Sleepy Hollow, 68, 71, 142 ; mill, 141 ; road, 141, 143 
 Smith, Rev., his energy in establishing churches, 54; 
 his burial place, 57 
 
 Mrs., a modem Xantippe, 56 
 
 Smith's, Martin, tavern, 84, 127 
 
 Smoke-house, 13 
 
 Snifl&n house, 131 
 
 Spook Rock, the, 96, 98, 102, 108 
 
 Spuyten Duyvel, 7 
 
 Stewart, Rev. Abel T., 59, 60-62, 65, 145 ; meets riot- 
 ers, 63 ; calls rioters friends, 64 
 Storm, Captain Jacob, 33 
 Streets, extent of, 151 
 Sugar House, 79 
 
 Sunnyside, 136 ; glen, 67 ; rebuilt by Irving, 68 ; ivy, 
 70 
 
 Survivors of Company H, 32d Regiment, 146 
 T 
 
 Tappan, 102 ; Zee, 106 ; British fire-ships in, 76 
 Tarrytown, purchase, 8 ; in Greenburg, 137 ; incor- 
 porated, 150 
 Tenantry of estate, 4 
 Thirty-Second Regiment, 146 
 Thrones, 49 
 
 Todd, Rev. John A . , his account of British landing at 
 
 Tarrytown, 78 
 Trading boat, 2 
 
 Tr^nagh, Judah, 118 ; her ride, 121 
 Tryon, Governor, his cruelty, 79 
 
l62 
 
 ■ffnOei 
 
 u 
 
 Underbill, Nathaniel, 82, 83 
 Union veterans, 147 
 
 V 
 
 Valley of the Hudson, 141 
 Van Courtlandt, 9, 14, 72 
 Catherine, 22 
 
 Cornelia, granddaughter of Cornelius, 32 
 
 Cornelius, 31 ; signature to a certificate, 17 ; 
 
 marries Eva Flypse, 29 
 
 Katriua, on tablet, 45 
 
 Olaff, 22 ; colleague of Flypse, 24 
 
 Pierre, 75 
 
 Stephanus, 16, 22 
 
 Van Dam, Rambout, 123 
 Van Houghten, 48 
 Van Tassel house, 127 
 
 Jacob, and his "goose gun," 66 
 
 Katrina, 135 
 
 Peter and Cornelius, their houses burned by 
 
 the British, 79 
 Van Tassel's, Elizabeth, tavern, 80, 87, 131 
 Van Voorhees, Rev. Stephen, 49, 50, 53 ; baptizes Lo- 
 
 vine Hawes in English, 52 
 Van Wart, Isaac, 85 
 
 W 
 
 War for Independence, 71 
 
 War-ships on the Hudson, 75, 76 
 
 Washington, General, 77, 132 ; Life of, 70 ; mentions 
 
 old church, 73 ; reviews the allies, 89 ; diary for 
 
 1781, 92 
 Water Street, 83 
 
 Wayne, Anthony, "Madcap," 132 
 Wealth of Tarrytown, 149 
 Webb, General James Watson, 69 
 Weber property, 140 
 Westchester County, 7 
 Whale-boats, patrol, 72 
 
163 
 
 Wharf, the, 10 
 
 White Plains, convention, 76 ; road, 81, 140 ; old 
 
 road, 87 ; battle of, 135 
 William and Mary, 8 
 Williams, David, 85 
 Wilson, Rev. Joseph, 58 
 Wolfert's Roost, 44, 66 
 Woman of the Cliff, the, 113 
 
 Y 
 
 Yerks, Van Wart, and Strong captured, 92 
 
 Yonkers manor-house, 9 
 Yorktown, 51 
 Youugs house, 81 
 
-I 
 
( 
 
 1 
 
II 
 
I 
 
 i