The Early History of Kingston
& Ulster County, NY
by: Marc B. Fried

Introduction

This book, the most recent assessment of these sources for the sole purpose of reconstructing the origins of Kingston, is a natural outgrowth of the author’s interest in the region where he spent his early childhood and most of his summers, and where he has lived for the past nine years. The wide view across the Wallkill toward the Shawangunk Mountains which his home affords is one explanation for his attachment to the area; his intimate knowledge of its topography enables him to reach conclusions which might elude other students less familiar with this region. While he stands last in a long line of Kingston historians and has, in many instances, benefited from their research and conclusions, Mr. Fried was inevitably led back to primary sources, the documents of the area’s earliest settlement. As he sorted and reordered frequently conflicting evidence, his wonder grew at moments when he was "able to cut through generations of historiographical misinterpretation . . . to make certain factual connections concerning a statement or event of three centuries ago."

Today, as one drives or walks in Ulster County’s "exceedingly fine country," it seems to more than fulfill the description of three centuries ago. The beauty of its landscape is as compelling now as ever it was then, but often it is the old houses and public buildings that offer the greatest pleasure and make one wish to know more about this area midway along the west bank of the Hudson. Kingston is one community in which much of its center still stands to illustrate its early history. While the pale-colored Senate House and other stone dwellings are not quite as aged as the history recorded in this book, their walls repeat the pattern of an even more ancient stone outcropping that rises in the Kingston area to mark streams and road beds. This low wall of natural stone repeats the celebrated palisades dissecting river and land further down the Hudson. Marc Fried reminds us that a bluff once outlined another palisade, the tree trunks stripped of bark that protected the earliest settlement from Indian marauders and from the wild creatures who preyed on its cattle. In much the same way, he guides us to fertile flatlands along the river north of Kingston, where for centuries Indian fields had been planted, tended, and harvested-- revealing the colonists’ pigs and horses in the Indians’ corn.

Colonization of the Kingston area--and, in fact, of all New Netherland--was a slow process. In 1643 a New England observer, the Reverend William Castell, found that "four things give New Netherland precedency over New England... the land in general is richer, the fields more fragrant with flowers, the timber larger, and therefore more fit for building and shipping, the woods fuller of Bevors, and the Water of Salmon and Sturgeon." Despite such superior rating, the white population of the Hudson Valley and Long Island settlements was estimated at only 10,000 when the English took control of New Netherland twenty years later--in marked contrast to the estimated 80,000 colonists living in adjacent English colonies.

Before 1664, the year of the English takeover, New Netherland had been administered as a wide-ranging commercial interest by a director general representing the Amsterdam-based Dutch West India Company. (Throughout the period of Kingston’s Dutch colonization, Peter Stuyvesant was director general.) Unlike the self-governing colonies of New England and Pennsylvania, New Netherland offered opportunity only to a privileged few, and was almost the least productive of the company’s military and trading concerns.

If the population was small, the national representation was greatly varied. In 1643 the Jesuit missionary Father Isaac Jogues remarked on the "eighteen different languages" spoken in New Amsterdam. Within the period of this account, many of these might have been heard at the new settlement halfway up the Hudson, where not only Dutch, but also French and English were common European tongues. In consecutive order the new town was first known as Esopus, as Wildwyck when the Dutch established a local court there, as Kingston during the English takeover, as Swaenenburgh when New Netherland was briefly recaptured by the Dutch, and finally, again under English rule, as Kingston.

Mr. Fried introduces us to early Kingston’s first landowner of record, Thomas Chambers, also spoken of as "Thomas the Clabbort." His family name was almost never rendered into Dutch, but his Dutch nickname lends credence to the legend that it was he who introduced to New Netherland the English house-carpenter’s method of finishing a house in wood clapboards. (The author cites a 1642 order for 500 clapboards used by Chambers to cover Jan Jansen Schepmoes’s house in New Amsterdam in support of the legend.) Thomas Chambers is a central figure in the history that follows: he is the first patentee, briefly an Indian captive, an early town commissioner, and the builder of the first large stone house in the area, "Fox Hall," noted as standing as early as 1670.

Mr. Fried outlines the role of the mid-Hudson as the main source of supply for the fine wheat that, along with beaver skins and naval stores, formed the economic base for both the Dutch colony and the later English province. Albany dominated the fur trade--in fact, until 1639 Kingston was excluded by the West India Company from fur trading with the Indians. In this early period, however, it was the beaver which served as the New York monetary unit for exchange with other colonies, Holland, England, South America, and the Atlantic islands. Eventually wampum or zeewant becomes--with the beaver--the standard unit against which the metal currency of Europe and Great Britain is measured.

By the time the settlement of Kingston began, the Upper Hudson colonists in what is now Albany had already made peace with the native populace, the Mohawks, who were the keepers of the eastern door of the Iroquois. But at the middle Hudson, for most of the brief time that is central to this book, the colonists’ exchanges with the local Indians were warlike. The history of the two wars with the Esopus Indians is set in order in Mr. Fried’s book. The first violent action is reconstructed from many sources, but, to the benefit of the modern historian, the second of the wars between the Esopus Indians and the Esopus colonists is minutely reported by the military leader sent from New Amsterdam by Stuyvesant to direct the action against the natives. The Indian forts are destroyed in retaliation for the massacre and the capture of Esopus’s white citizens, but warfare and torrential rains destroy the crops of both Indian and white combatants, and the colonists suffer from mysterious fevers.

There are small asides in Mr. Fried’s narrative that give us pleasure or set us to imagining. There is the settlers’ wish for proper grain measures to replace the inequalities of wheat weighed in "little tubs or kegs." There is the nagging note of Thomas Chambers giving the Esopus Indians liquor in exchange for their help in husking corn. There is an Indian attack on the settlers "near the ball court." (We ponder whether it was handball or an adaptation of the Indian’s lacrosse or football that was played.) A northbound yacht is rerouted southward to warn of the first major Indian attack on Esopus. Premaeker, greatest and oldest of the sachems in the first Esopus War, is dispatched by his own axe, and his colonial destroyers are inexplicably led back to Esopus by his own son. The wife of a ship’s gunner, whose cargo of liquor had flowed away to intoxicate both white and red men, is fined not for sales of liquor but for her Rabelaisian suggestions to the schout of Esopus. Other celebrations are noted as an ordinance is passed against the shooting of guns on New Year’s Day.

Following the takeover of New Amsterdam in 1664, we see that the English soldiers sent to keep peace within the town become almost as great a plague to the settlers as the Indians had been. But before the decade is spent, the soldiers begin to be assimilated into town life. Eventually, when the garrison is disbanded at the end of five years of peace that followed the Second Esopus War, they are granted land at Marbletown.

By the 1670s the government of Esopus becomes more orderly. The schout and commissioners formalize a town watch, order the repair and maintenance of the redoubt, seek to improve the quality of grain exports from the central Hudson, and order draining of the swamps around the town. Esopus Creek is bridged, and lots and boundaries are surveyed. Finally, the residents begin to build outside the wood palisade. The first structure beyond the walls may have been Thomas Chambers’s stone mansion. Two years later, this man who had come to Kingston as a carpenter in 1652 was privileged by the royal governor to establish a manor--like those of Livingston and Van Rensselaer on the upper Hudson but smaller in acreage and number of tenants. With this event, Mr. Fried concludes his exciting and exact account of the early colonial history of Kingston.

To be entirely accurate it should be stated that the real introduction to this absorbing narrative of the first generation of Kingston’s colonial settlement is the appended material at the end of the book. Here we may meet the first settlers one by one and become familiar with the wilderness and Indian settlements and fields that they encountered as they entered upon this land. With this introduction the reader may then set forth into a reliable and conscientious recounting of Kingston’s early years in which fewer than thirty families tilled the fertile land and learned--finally--how to live in peace with the native populace.

Mary Black