Welcome

“In 2009, New York City was privileged to partner with the Dutch government to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the founding of New York City–or New Amsterdam as it was originally called. The Dutch spirit of diversity, tolerance, and entrepreneurship still echoes across our city streets today. This guide will highlight the history of the history of the early settlements of these new world pioneers as well as the incredible impact they had, and still have, on the world’s greatest city.”
—Michael R. Bloomberg Mayor, City of New York

“From Albany in the north to the Delaware River in the South, this is the first comprehensive travel guide to sites relevant to this region’s Dutch history. Even the most seasoned traveler in what was once called New Netherland will make new discoveries!”
—Charles Zabriskie President, Holland Society of New York

Introduction by Russell Shorto

Everyone who reads history has the same secret wish: to go back there. If you are poring through Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, somewhere in your mind you are situating yourself among the consuls, citizens and soldiers, wondering, were you somehow able actually to rub shoulders with them, just how vibrantly red the madder-dyed tunics would be, how the air would smell, what information the gaze of ancient eyes would transmit. Imagining past events is especially intriguing if the setting has been utterly transformed from what it once was. Surely no landscape of the present is so jarringly at odds with the past as Manhattan Island. When the Dutch colony of New Netherland was settled in the 1620s, with its capital of New Amsterdam at the southern tip of what the Indians called Manahatta, the island was a wilderness of oak-pine forest, red-maple swamp, marsh, pond and meadow, rimmed by beaches and reed beds, alive with heath hens, rattlesnakes, bears and wolves.

To mentally step, therefore, from the urban intensity of New York today to the natural paradise it once was is surely one of the most exquisite adventures that history can offer. And of course New Netherland was not only a wilderness. Its Indian inhabitants had their complex cultures, and the colony itself--which stretched across much of the Middle Atlantic and encompassed all or parts of the future states of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Delaware--was a purposeful settlement, which had an enormous influence not just on how New York would develop, but on the future United States and on the American identity. The Dutch who settled it--wedged between the English settlements of New England and Virginia--possessed Europe’s only republic; they were a free-trading people; their home provinces, thanks in part to the flatness of the terrain (which made the land easy to invade or to flee to), had developed an official policy of tolerance to allow different peoples to coexist. These characteristics made the Dutch unique in Europe in the 17th century. When the settlers brought those characteristics with them to their New World colony, these elements evolved into something wholly new. If you simply took two of the main ingredients of the 17th century Dutch Golden Age society--its tolerance and its proto-capitalist free-trading sensibility--you would have something like a recipe for the growth of New York City.

In fact, once the English took over New Netherland--and renamed its capital New York City--these elements stayed as part of its cultural structure. New Amsterdam’s melting pot society--there were 18 languages being spoken in its few streets--bequeathed a multiethnic mix to New York. It became colonial America’s immigrant focal point. And because New York became what it did, the influence of New Netherland extended far beyond. By the 19th century, when the great waves of immigrants reached American shores, they landed in large numbers first in Manhattan’s mean streets. There they took in what was in the legacy of the Dutch colony: a teeming concentration of different ethnicities and faiths, a mix of people all struggling to get ahead, fired by something we now call upward mobility. As these newcomers breathed this strange new air, they decided this new kind of society was “America.” In fact, it was New York, and it was New York because formerly it had been New Netherland. But as those 19th century immigrants moved from Manhattan westward to stake their own claims, and brought this ideal with them, they carried these seeds of 17th century Dutch culture with them, and planted them in new soil--in the Great Plains, the Midwest, and the Pacific coast--and so in time they ensured that the new society was, indeed, America.

If, therefore, you could travel back in time and visit New Netherland, you would find yourself in proto-America: the country’s first free-trading, immigrant society. You would also find yourself in a landscape out of Rembrandt: a place where men wore floppy, wide-brimmed hats, lace collars and high leather boots. New Amsterdam, Breuckelen, and Beverwijck were villages of gabled houses, with Indian fur trappers, Dutch housewives, English, German, Swedish and others intermixing. New Netherland was a place of rough, piratical taverns and pious, God-fearing burghers, of farming families working with bent backs against the immensity of the landscape.

It is all gone, long gone. But traces remain. Some are preserved by governmental fiat, in museums. Other traces are in the shapes of the geography, the run of a street, the slope of a roofline, the tilt of a gravestone. And of course the traces are most evident in place names. From Brooklyn to the Bronx, from Harlem to Staten Island, from Cape May, New Jersey, to Rhode Island, the Dutch left names on the American landscape that still endure.

Most of those traces are not immediately apparent. The purpose of this volume is to bring them into focus. New Netherland is a curiously forgotten piece of our landscape and history: curious because it is simply bizarre that something so elemental to the American psyche could be so thoroughly expunged from our collective memory. Without New Netherland, would there be a Statue of Liberty? Would there have been an Ellis Island? Would the phrase “American melting pot” have come into being? American society today--free, democratic, multiethnic yet with the multiplicity of identities complementing rather than competing with a national identity--is almost a template for modern societies everywhere. It is an ideal that so many other places aspire to. And its roots are to be found here, in this volume. They can be found at places like the Swanendael Museum in Lewes, Delaware, the Hopper-Goetschius House in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, the Old Huguenot Burial Ground in New Paltz, New York, or in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. They can be found in the street pattern of Lower Manhattan and along the course of Broadway (or parts of it, anyway). They can be found by car, by ferry, on foot, or, of course, simply by sitting in a chair with an open book. Searching for those roots--trying to will that lost world back into being--is a worthwhile endeavor. As the great Dutch historian J.H. Huizinga once said, to understand history, “we cannot do better than start from that mainspring of all historical knowledge: our perpetual astonishment that the past was once a living reality.” And appreciating the living reality that once was informs, enriches, and maybe even ennobles our own.

Media

Dutch in America.com

New York Times

NU.nl

RTL 4 Nieuws, June 21st 2011 (Dutch national television)

RTL.NL

Bibliography

Archdeacon, Thomas J. New York City, 1664-1710: Conquest and Change. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976.

Blackburn, Roderic H., and Geoffrey Gross. Dutch Colonial Homes in America. New York: Rizzoli International, 2002.

Blackburn, Roderic H., and Ruth Piwonka, eds. Remembrance of Patria: Dutch Arts and Culture in Colonial America, 1609-1776. Albany: Albany Institute of History and Art, 1988.

Burrows, Edwin G., and Mike Wallace. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Cohen, David S. The Dutch-American Farm. New York and London: New York University Press, 1992.

Fabend, Firth Haring. Zion on the Hudson: Dutch New York and New Jersey in the Age of Revivals. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000.

Fitchen, John. The New World Dutch Barn. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1968.

Frijhoff, Willem. Fulfilling God’s Mission: The Two Worlds of Dominie Everardus Bogardus, 1606-1647. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007.

Gehring, Charles T. A Guide to Dutch Manuscripts Relating to New Netherland. Albany: University of the State of New York,1978.

Goodfriend, Joyce D. Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in New York City, 1664-1730. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.

------, ed. Revisiting New Netherland: Perspectives on Early Dutch America. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2005.

------, Benjamin Smith, and Annette Stott, eds. Going Dutch: The Dutch Presence in America, 1609-2009. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2008.

Gosselink, Martine. New York/New Amsterdam: The Dutch Origins of Manhattan. Amsterdam: Nieuw Amsterdam Uitgevers/Nationaal Archief, 2009.

Grumet, Robert Steven. Native American Place Names in New York City. New York: Museum of the City of New York, 1981.

------. Historic Contact: Indian People and Colonists in Today’s Northeastern United States in the Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Centuries. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995.

Israel, Jonathan I. The Dutch Republic. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Jacobs, Jaap. The Colony of New Netherland: A Dutch Settlement in Seventeenth-Century America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009.

Klooster, Wim. The Dutch in the Americas, 1600-1800. Providence: John Carter Brown Library, 1997.

Krabbendam, Hans, Cornelis A. Van Minnen, and Giles Scott-Smith, eds. Four Centuries of Dutch-American Relations,1609-2009. Albany: SUNY Press, 2009.

Krewson, Margrit B. New Netherland 1609-1664: A Selective Bibliography. Washington D.C.: Library of Congress, 1995.

Krohn, Deborah L., and Peter N. Miller, with Marybeth De Fillipis, eds. Dutch New York between East and West: The World of Margrieta van Varick. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009.

Meeske, Harrison. The Hudson Valley Dutch and Their Houses. Fleischmanns, NY: Purple Mountain Press, 2001. First published 1998.

Panetta, Roger, ed. Dutch New York: The Roots of Hudson Valley Culture. New York: Fordham University Press/Hudson River Museum, 2009.

Pritchard, Evan T. Native New Yorkers: The Legacy of the Algonquin People of New York. San Francisco/Tulsa: Council Oak Books, 2007.

Rose, Peter G. Food, Drink and Celebrations of the Hudson Valley Dutch. Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2009.

Shattuck, Martha Dickinson, ed. Explorers, Fortunes, and Love Letters: A Window on New Netherland. Albany: Mount Ida Press, 2009.

Shorto, Russell. The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America. New York: Doubleday, 2004.

Snow, Dean R., Charles T. Gehring, and William A. Starna, eds. In Mohawk Country: Early Narratives about a Native People. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996.

Stevens, John R. Dutch Vernacular Architecture in North America,1640-1830. New York: The Society for the Preservation of Hudson Valley Vernacular Architecture, 2005.

Stott, Annette. Holland Mania: The Unknown Dutch Period in American Art and Culture. Woodstock: Overlook Press, 1998.

Van der Sijs, Nicoline. Cookies, Coleslaw and Stoops: The Influence of Dutch on the North American Languages. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009.

Venema, Janny. Beverwijck: A Dutch Village on the American Frontier, 1652-1664. Albany: SUNY Press, 2003.

------, Kiliaen van Rensselaer (1586-1643): Designing a New World. Albany: SUNY Press, 2011.

This publication was made possible by:

Major sponsorship was also provided by:

For further reference see www.deloitte.com.

Additional support has been received from:

Atlantic Investment Management
Sybase Inc.
Van Dyk Baler Corp.
Rosabianca & Associates, PLLC
Hogan Lovells
Alston + Bird LLP
Furthermore: A Program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund
Ted Moudis
The Society of Daughters of Holland Dames

Links

The Holland Society of New York
Since 1885
President: Mr. Colin Lazier
www.hollandsociety.com

The Netherland-America Foundation
Since 1921
Chairman: Ennius E. Bergsma
www.thenaf.org

Society of Daughters of Holland Dames
Since 1895
Directress General: Mrs.Peter Kimmelman – Elbrun
www.hollanddames.org

The Netherland Club of New York
President: Mr. Rutger Lambriex
Since 1903
www.netherlandclub.com

The Dutch Young Professionals, a committee of The Netherlands Club of New York
www.dutchyp.com

The Dutch Settlers Society of Albany
President: Mr. Jay H. Jakovic
Since 1924
www.dutchsettlerssociety.org

Netherlands-America Association of the Delaware Valley
President: Cisca Jansen
Since 1957
www.naadv.org

The Saint Nicholas Society of New York
President: Rev. Thomas F. Pike
Since 1835
www.saintnicholassociety.org

The Netherlands American Community Trust
President: Mr. Reinier Mesritz
Since 1999
www.nactrust.org

Holland America Friendship Foundation
Since 2004
www.haffoundation.nl

The New Netherland Project
Director: Mr. Charles Gehring
Since 1974
www.nnp.org

New Amsterdam History Center, USA
Since 2005
www.virtualnewamsterdam.com

The Collegiate Reformed Dutch Church, USA
Organized on Manhattan in April 1628
www.collegiatechurch.org

St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery, New York, USA
Built in 1660
www.stmarksbowery.org

New York Public Library, New York, USA
Since 1895
www.nypl.org

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA
Since 1870
www.metmuseum.org

Amsterdam Historical Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Since 1926
www.amsterdammuseum.nl

Het Scheepvaart Museum Amsterdam, The Netherlands
www.hetscheepvaartmuseum.nl

The Roosevelt Study Center, Middelburg, The Netherlands
Since 1982
www.roosevelt.nl

TOC - Essays

A Short History of New Netherland, , Jaap Jacobs 19
New Netherland on Old Maps, Robert Braeken 32
Dutch Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walter Liedtke 47
Remembering the Dutch, David William Voorhees 52
The Dutch Influence on the American Kitchen, Peter G. Rose 60
Double Dutch, Nicoline van der Sijs 69
Holland Mania, Annette Stott 74
What’s in a name? Gajus Scheltema 85
New Netherland’s Architecture, Heleen Westerhuijs 95
Dutch Footprints on Staten Island, Lori Weintrob 105
The Knickerbocker Story, Elizabeth Bradley 127
Dutch Immigrants after 17th Century, Hans Krabbendam 135
The First Jews in New Amsterdam, Paul Finkelman 148
The Dutch Reformed Church in New Netherland and in British Colonial America, Francis J. Sypher 163
American-Dutch Antiques, Roderic Blackburn 190
The Enslaved Africans and the Native Americans, Jaap Jacobs 205
Dutch Words in American English, Nicoline van der Sijs 219

TOC - Traveling

Foreword by Susan Hensaw Jones, Ronay Menschel Director Museum of the City of New York 7

Editors’ Notes, Gajus Scheltema and Heleen Westerhuijs 10

Introduction, Russell Shorto 13

New York City 24
MAP 1 Manhattan/New Amsterdam: Downtown Manhattan 26
MAP 2 North of New Amsterdam: Manhattan and the Bronx 42
MAP 3 Queens and Nassau Counties 64
MAP 4 Brooklyn 78
MAP 5 Staten Island 102

Hudson Valley 114
MAP 6, 7, 8 East of the Hudson River, Traveling North 120
MAP 8 Albany 142
MAP 8 Schenectady 150
MAP 8,7,6 West of the Hudson River, Traveling South 156

New Jersey and Delaware 172
MAP 9 Northern New Jersey: Bergen and Passaic Counties 176
MAP 10 The Delaware Water Gap: Sussex and Warren Counties 186
MAP 11 Central New Jersey: Hudson, Monmouth, Middlesex and Somerset Counties 196
MAP 12 Delaware: Cape May to Burlington 216

List of Sites 224
Illustration Credits 237
Bibliography 238
Editors’ Acknowledgements 240
Contributors 241
Index 244
About the Museum of the City of New York 256

Exploring Historic Dutch New York

The Dutch imprint remains remarkably intact in the area—now encompassing New York City, the Hudson Valley, New Jersey, and parts of Delaware—that was once the Dutch colony of New Netherland. Considering that the formal Dutch sojourn in this region ended 350 years ago, the influence of the early colonizers is uncommonly strong: not only in the character of the Mid-Atlantic states, but also in family and place names, in language, and in physical structures that dot the landscape from Albany, New York, to Wilmington, Delaware.

Exploring Historic Dutch New York will take you on a journey of discovery of the region’s Dutch origins, introducing you to courageous settlers and historical figures, both real and imagined; to houses that remained in the same family for centuries; to barns and cemeteries and crossings redolent with the spirit of the intrepid pioneers who made the New World home. This comprehensive traveler’s guide to important sites of Dutch history in New York and surrounding areas also serves as an engrossing cultural and historical reference with fascinating essays, written by sixteen internationally renowned scholars, about the early maps of the area, the persistence of the Dutch language and its influences on American English, the endurance of Dutch place and family names, the wealth of Dutch art in major museums and collections, Dutch cooking in the American cuisine, Dutch architecture, Dutch immigration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Dutch memories in the New York society, the Holland Mania, American Dutch antiques and many other realities and myths of the Dutch past.

In fact this book shines a spotlight into many undiscovered corners. Enjoy!

Dover Publications

Contact

Please send all comments and questions to dutch@historicdutchnewyork.com

Maps

In the 17th century, maps were an important part of Dutch national culture. They were indispensable during the 80-years war with Spain; for the reclamation of flooded terrain into polders; and for the trade with overseas markets. No wonder, that Dutch maps are also important testimonials to the colonisation of New Netherland, from its beginning until the end in 1674.
This view of “Nieuw Yorck, eertys Genaemt Nieuw Amsterdam op ‘t Eylandt Manhattans” (Nieuw Yorck, formerly named Nieuw Amsterdam on the Island of Manhattans) appeared on Dutch maps after the British takeover of the town in 1664.

Book Launch 2012

Pictures	Video

Editors

Hugo Gajus Scheltema

Dutch diplomat, Consul General of the Kingdom of The Netherlands in New York, 2007–2011; coordinated Dutch participation in the NY400 celebrations in New York, 2009; author of several publications on the history of art, archaeology, and political matters.
Essay: What’s in a name?

Heleen Westerhuijs

Independent scholar of Dutch architecture in the New World; master’s degree in architectural history from the University of Amsterdam, 2009; she currently serves as director of Dutch New York projects for Citco Corporate, Inc., part of the Citco Group of Companies.
Essay: New Netherland’s Architecture

Special

Russell Shorto

Director, John Adams Institute, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; contributing writer, New York Times Magazine; author of several books, including The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America.

Charles T. Gehring, PhD

Director, New Netherland Project, New York State Library; translator and editor of the 17th-century records of the Dutch West India Company colony centered in Manhattan.

Jaap Jacobs, Ph.D.

Independent scholar; curatorial consultant for the Museum of the City of New York’s 2009 exhibition Amsterdam/New Amsterdam: The Worlds of Henry Hudson; author of several books, including The Colony of New Netherland: A Dutch Colony in Seventeenth Century America; currently at work on a biography of Petrus Stuyvesant.
Essay: A Short History of New Netherland
Essay: The Enslaved Africans and the Native Americans

Traveling

David Steven Cohen, PhD

Former senior research associate and director, Ethnic History Program, New Jersey Historical Commission; former assistant professor of history, Rutgers University; author of six books, including The Dutch-American Farm.

Firth Haring Fabend, PhD

Historian; novelist; author of several books, including A Dutch Family in the Middle Colonies, 1660-1800; Tappan: 300 Years, 1686-1986; and Zion on the Hudson: Dutch New York and New Jersey in the Age of Revivals.

Donald R. Friary, PhD

President, Colonial Society of Massachusetts; Principal, History for Hire, Salem, Massachusetts.

Gary Hermalyn, PhD

Executive director, Bronx County Historical Society; president, History of New York City Project; associate editor, The Encyclopedia of New York City; author of Morris High School and the Creation of the New York City Public High School System.

Phillip Papas, PhD

Associate professor of history, Union County College; author of That Ever Loyal Island: Staten Island and the American Revolution; co-author, with Lori R. Weintrob, of Port Richmond and The Other New York: The American Revolution beyond New York City, 1763–1787.

Ruth Piwonka

Independent scholar; historian; author of A Portrait of Livingston Manor, 1686-1850 and Wooden Churches: Columbia County Legacy; co-author (with Roderic Blackburn) of Remembrance of Patria: Dutch Arts and Culture in Colonial America, 1609-1776 and A Visible Heritage: Columbia County, New York: A History in Art and Architecture.

Don Rittner

Schenectady County Historian; Schenectady City Historian; educator; publisher of Skenectada, a quarterly newsletter.

Sean Sawyer, PhD

Lecturer, master of arts program in decorative arts and design, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum/Parsons, The New School for Design; executive director, The Royal Oak Foundation

Essays

Roderic H. Blackburn

Author of Dutch Colonial Homes in America; co-author (with Ruth Piwonka) of Remembrance of Patria: Dutch Arts and Culture in Colonial America 1609-1776; and A Visible Heritage: Columbia County, New York: History in Art and Architecture.
Essay: American-Dutch Antiques

Elizabeth L. Bradley PhD

Deputy director of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the New York Public Library; author of Knickerbocker: The Myth Behind New York; editor of Washington Irving’s A History of New York; contributor to The Encyclopedia of New York City.
Essay: The Knickerbocker Story

Paul Finkelman

President William McKinley Distinguished Professor of Law and Public Policy and senior fellow, Government Law Center, Albany Law School; author of more than 100 scholarly articles and more than 20 books.
Essay: The First Jews in New Amsterdam

Hans Krabbendam, PhD

Assistant director, Roosevelt Study Center, Middleburg, The Netherlands; Honorary Research Fellow, Hope College, Holland, MI; co-editor of European Journal of American Studies; author of Freedom on the Horizon: Dutch Immigration to America, 1840-1940.
Essay: Dutch Immigrants after 17th Century

Walter Liedtke, PhD

Curator of European paintings, the Metropolitan Museum of Art; author of several books, including: Architectural Painting in Delft; Rembrandt/Not Rembrandt; The Royal Horse and Rider: Painting, Sculpture and Horsemanship; Vermeer: The Complete Paintings; Vermeer and the Delft School; Vermeer and His Contemporaries; and A View of Delft.
Essay: Dutch Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Peter G. Rose

Food historian; 2002 Alice P. Kenney Award winner; author of The Sensible Cook: Dutch Foodways in the Old and the New World; Foods of the Hudson: A Seasonal Sampling of the Region's Bounty; Food, Drink and Celebrations of the Hudson Valley Dutch; and Summer Pleasures, Winter Pleasures: A Hudson Valley Cookbook.
Essay: The Dutch Influence on the American Kitchen

Eric Roth

Executive director, Historic Huguenot Street, New Paltz, New York; author of For the Village: The Story of Huguenot Street.
Essay:

Annette Stott, PhD

Director, School of Art and Art History, and associate professor, art history and women's studies, University of Denver; author of Holland Mania: The Unknown Dutch Period in American Art and Culture; co-editor of Going Dutch: The Dutch Presence in America, 1609-2009.
Essay: Holland Mania

Francis J. Sypher Jr. PhD

Editor of: Liber A of the Collegiate Churches of New York, 1628-1700; The Charter of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church of the City of New York; Minutes of Coroners Proceedings, City and County of New York, John Burnet, Coroner, 1748-1758; translator of the Collegiate Church archives.
Essay: The Dutch Reformed Church in New Netherland and in British Colonial America

Nicoline van der Sijs, PhD

Linguist; etymologist; author of several books, including Cookies, Coleslaw, and Stoops: The Influence of Dutch on the North American Languages; winner of the ANV-Visser Nederlandia Prijs; winner of the Prijs voor de Geesteswetenschappen, Prins Bernard Cultuur fonds.
Essay: Double Dutch
Essay: Dutch Words in American English

David William Voorhees, PhD

Director, Jacob Leisler Papers Project, New York University; trustee emeritus, the Holland Society of New York; editor of de Halve Maen, a quarterly scholarly journal devoted to New Netherland studies.
Essay: Remembering the Dutch

Lori R. Weintrob, PhD

Associate professor of history and department chair, Wagner College; director, Project Pericles, a program emphasizing civic learning and participatory democracy.
Essay: Dutch Footprints on Staten Island