Article
Number 5a - The Van Vechten Patent No. 3 -
Dirk Teunisse, Samuel and Teunis Van Vechten
Originally published in the Catskill Examiner by Henry Brace between the years
1876 and 1879. Article 5a was published on February 26, 1876. Extracted from the microfilm copies of the Catskill Examiner
located at the Vedder
Research Library. Transcribed by Barbara Bartley.
Saturday, Feb. 26, 1876 Local Sketches.--No. 5. An Outline of The History
of the Town of Catskill, To the Year 1783. By Henry Brace.
Five years after Dirk Teunisse Van Vechten had made his purchase, his title was
confirmed by the Colonial Government. The Patent to him is dated the
twenty-first day of March, 1686. It grants the Van Bremen estate, or the Flats;
another “piece of land lying before his door,” or the Streeke; a hundred
acres of adjoining woodland, and the mill and mill-dam, on the Hans Vosen Kill.
On this estate Van Vechten, coming down from Albany, or from its neighborhood,
with his wife and children, lived during the remainder of his life. The farm
produced nearly everything the family needed for use, wool, tobacco, maize, and
perhaps a little flax. But the chief harvest was wheat, which the fertile low
lands bore abundantly. A portion of the crop was, of course, consumed at home.
Another portion was brewed into beer, which took the place of tea and coffee on
the tables of the yeomen of the valley of the Hudson. The remainder was carried
from the farm, at high tide, in boats of light draft, to the small sloops which
plied between Albany and New York, and which, while waiting for their load, lay
at anchor in the deeper water of the Catskill. But Van Vechten himself had no
need of working with his own hands; his business was chiefly the oversight of
his farm and his little mill. Besides this duty of superintendence Van Vechten,
after 1689, and until the year of his death, was a Justice of the Peace for the
County of Albany. But his labors as a magistrate could not usually have been
arduous. The arraignment of a drunken Indian for theft, and the occasional trial
of an action at law between his neighbors,--if the amount in dispute was not
greater than forty shillings,--were the sum of his official duties at home. He
was paid by fees, and these, if I rightly interpret an obscure statement in the
records of the County at Albany, in a year of unwonted press of business, ran up
to the sum of fifteen beavers, or about sixty dollars in silver. But the office
was an honor, as it was only conferred on men of established position in the
county.
Three times a year Van Vechten went to Albany to attend the quarter Sessions.
This court had all the authority which the Quarter Sessions of the English
counties exercised during the last half of the seventeenth century. It was a
court of criminal jurisdiction, and while it had the power to try crimes of
every grade, it, in fact, took cognizance only of lesser offenses, petty thefts,
assaults and batteries, the sale of spirits to the Indians, violations of the
law relating to bastards.
The court was composed of the Mayor, Recorder, and Aldermen, of the city, and
the Justices of the Peace of the county. I cannot find, however, that the
Aldermen ever took part in the proceedings. But with the gentlemen who were wont
to be present, with Peter Schuyler, with Kiliaen Van Rensselaer, with Marte
Gerritse Van Bergen, with Dirk Wessels, Van Vechten took his seat. And, if the
members of the court were in any degree of like habits with the members of its
famous model, as that model is described in English novels and plays of the
beginning of the eighteenth century, we can readily believe that, in one of the
little rooms in the Stadt Huis, after adjournment had been proclaimed, and when
the constable had lighted the long pipes of their worships, there went on much
friendly discussion over the news of the day, the movements of the French on the
frontier, the temper of the Iroquois, the renewal of the stockades and of the
block-houses of the city, the condition of the harvests, the state of the fur
trade, and the price of wheat flour at Barbadoes.
In the autumn of 1689, there were rumors abroad of an invasion by the French, by
the way of Lake Champlain. Preparation was immediately made at Albany for their
coming. Stockades were built at Saratoga, at Half-Moon, at Paepsknee, and at the
Groote Stick. Power and arms were brought from Fort William, in New-York.
Men,--among whom were Francis, the son of Silvester Salisbury, and John and
Teunis, the sons or nephews of Dirk Teunisse Van Vechten,--were enrolled, at the
daily pay of twelve pence, with their provisions, “to serve their Majesties
and the Country upon the Frontiers.” Letters were written to the chiefs of the
Five Nations to keep them in their allegiance. Their Sachems and chief warriors
were invited to Albany, with a promise that, if they came, “their feet should
be well greased.” In all this unwonted bustle, Van Vechten took a share. One
reads of him in the old records, that he was in Albany in consultation with
Peter Schuyler, the Mayor, and in convention with the members of the Quarter
Sessions and the officers of the fort. He was sent to Esopus to get men ready
for a march to the frontiers. He entertained, at his house in Catskill, the
messengers who were sent to Connecticut for assistance.
Van Vechten died on the twenty-fifth day of November, 1702. His wife, Janetje
Vrelant, and his son Samuel, survived him. To the latter, I know not whether by
devise or by inheritance, came his father’s lands.
The portrait of Samuel Van Vechten is in the possession of his great
great-nephew. The name of the painter has been forgotten, and I have not been
able to find any signature on the canvass by which the name might be traced. As
Van Vechten was born in 1673, and as the picture represents him as between
thirty and forty years old, it must have been painted about the year 1710. It is
between a three-quarter and a full length portrait, and is in a state of
excellent preservation. Van Vechten is painted in the fashionable dress of the
day, in a flowing brown wig, in a brown coat with large cuffs, and with a
Sleinkirk of lace or of lawn about his neck. He seems to have been a man of fine
presence. His eyes are full of intelligence and a pleasing smile is about his
mouth.
His Dutch Bible is also in the possession of the same descendant. It is a noble
folio, bound in hog-skin now black with age, and secured by heavy clasps of
brass. The book was printed at Dordrecht or Amsterdam, in 1702, in black letter
and in clear type, and with ink which has not faded by the lapse of one hundred
and seventy-five years.
Samuel Van Vechten died a bachelor in 1741, at the age of sixty-eight years. His
lands on the Catskill he devised to his nephew Teunis, the son of his brother
Teunis.
I know little of Teunis, the nephew. In 1748 he received a commission as a first
lieutenant of a company “of militia foot, whereof Kasparis Bronk is Captain in
the first battalion of the regiment of the county of Albany, whereof William
Johnson is Colonel.” But it is no longer remembered whether he served under
this commission on the frontier. He seems to have been a thrifty man, for he
added to his ancestral estate by the purchase of lots five and fourteen in the
second sub-division of the Lindesay Patent, of land in the Catskill Patent
surrounding Greene’s Lake, of land in the Loonenburg Patent, in Coxsackie, and
of land in the Vrooman Patent, on the Mohawk, known by the name of Jersey Field.
He moreover added largely to the value of his farm by building, about the year
1770, a grist and saw-mill and a mill-dam on the Catskill, at a cost of a
thousand pounds. This mill stood on the bank of the Creek, at the place where
the northern end of the mill-dam now is, while the mill-dam, a structure of
timber, was built about a hundred feet further up the stream. Teunis Van Vechten
died on the third day of April, 1785, at the age of seventy-eight years. His
will is of record in the office of the Surrogate of the City and County of New
York. He bequeaths his large Dutch Bible, and the portrait of his uncle Samuel,
to his oldest son Samuel, “in right of primogeniture,” and devises to him
the lands on the Catskill. To his other sons, Jacob, Teunis, and Abraham, and to
his only daughter, Elizabeth, the wife of Hezekiah Van Orden, the testator left
a large share of the remainder of his estate.