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Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

NEW YORK CITY TIMELINE - 1665-1669

1665

Mar 10

The approximate date delegates of New York colonies meeting at Hempstead, Long Island, rubber stamp the Duke's Laws, as their new legal code. Long Island, Staten Island and parts of Westchester are divided into ridings, with an appointed sheriff in charge of each. All Protestants are granted continuing religious freedom.


Jun 12

Royal governor Sir Richard Nicolls grants a charter to the City of New York, denying it self-government.


City

Population: 1,500. ** Governor Nicolls appoints Thomas Willett the city's first mayor, for the year. For many years the post will remain appointive and mostly ceremonial. ** Governor Nicolls opens the first court of admiralty at the old Stadt-Huys. ** Peter Stuyvesant is recalled to Holland to explain the loss of New Amsterdam. ** Constable Thomas Tourneau is born in Harlem to Daniel and Jacqueline De Parisis Tourneau.




1666

February

Royal Governor Nicolls confirms the 1645 letters patent granted for the Queens village of Flushing.


Mar 6

Nicolls confirms the 1652 letters patent granted for the Queens village of Newtown.


City

Thomas Delavall is named mayor for the year. ** British army officer Captain John Manning acquires Minnahannock Island, in the East River. It will become Roosevelt Island. ** Nicolls has a well dug within the walls of Fort Amsterdam.


1667

Feb 13

Royal governor Sir Richard Nicolls grants merchant and speculator Isaac Bedlow/Bedloe nearly a mile of Hudson River-front property on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the first grant outside the settlement in lower Manhattan.


Jul 21

New Netherland is transferred to the British and Acadia is restored to France.


Oct 11

Nicolls confirms the 1652 land patent for Brooklyn's Flatbush area.


City

Former mayor Thomas Willett is again appointed to the post. ** Former Dutch director-general Peter Stuyvesant has the tile of his bouwerie (farm) confirmed. ** The West India Company grants a Dutch resident 200 acres at the future site of Greenwich Village, in exchange for one tenth of his crops and an annual Christmas present to the director of "a brace of capons". ** Brewer Johannes van Brugh, tobacco planter Thomas Hall, Jacob Leenders, Egbert Wouterson, brewer Jan Vinje and Isaac Bedlow takes possession of 1300 acres on the future Upper West Side – between today’s West 89th Street and the West 30s - of Manhattan. Hall, one of the first two Englishmen on Manhattan, having arrived as a prisoner captured by the Dutch in a earlier raid on the South (later the Delaware) River, now owns much of the east central portion of the island, centered around East 42nd Street.



1668

May

Royal Governor Richard Nicolls is recalled and replaced by Colonel Francis Lovelace.


September

A epidemic (possibly yellow fever) kills many New Yorkers.


City

Cornelius Van Steenwyck is appointed mayor, serving for the next three one-year terms. ** Peter Stuyvesant returns from the Netherlands.


Queens

The approximate date Prospect Cemetery is established.


1669

Oct 9

Lovelace writes to the mayor and alderman, presenting them with a seal for the corporation, a silver mace and seven gowns for the mayor, aldermen and sheriff.


City

Lutheran minister Jacobus Frabriceius arrives in the colony. ** The approximate date Welsh immigrant Thomas Hall and local landowner dies (birth date c. 1614-1618).


Bronx

The settlement of Fordham is founded.


© 2011 David Minor / Eagles Byte

Monday, May 10, 2010

Paleontology

Rochester, New York, fossil fan Samuel J. Ciurca’s

website features fossils (especially eurypterids) of the world

with a huge number of links. Everything you ever wanted to

know. Plus.

Eurypterids.net/EurypteridLinkIndex.html


Thursday, May 6, 2010

Cornucopia of Apostles (script 64)

© 1998 David Minor / Eagles Byte


Eastward of Duluth-Superior, along the south shore of Lake Superior, lie several small fishing villages. Here, along the shoreline, Port Wing was the first consolidated school district in Wisconsin; early settlement and development of the territory was along the shore of the lakes.


Port Wing, by the way, may have been one of the first communities in the U. S. to bus students, so to speak. Wagons and sleds were used to bring them to the large three-story clapboard schoolhouse.


It was just to the east that Minneapolis lawyer Thomas J. Stevenson sailed along the shore around the turn of the century and noticed the abundance of wild fruit and grasses growing throughout the countryside. Remembering the mythological horn of plenty, he named the town he founded here in 1902 Cornucopia. He may have been a bit optimistic; the coming railroad bypassed the area.


The land past Cornucopia ends in a blunt, red-banked point, then Chequamegon Bay curves briefly back to the west. At the tip of this point the Red Cliff Reservation is home to nearly 500 Chippewa natives. It was one of these Chippewa, named Nanabazhoo, that caught the imagination of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, although it appears he didn't fancy the name. Instead he borrowed the name of a legendary Onondaga chief here in New York, shifted it to the other end of the Great Lakes, and called his hero Hiawatha. So, if you're looking for the shores of Gitcheegoomee you might try north of Syracuse.


The final North American glacial period ended here somewhere around 14,000 B. C., in the period known as the Wisconsinian. One souvenir it left behind was a series of islands off the northern and eastern shore of the point. A group of Jesuits priests settled on the 21 islands in the group, later British trader Jonathan Carver set up a post there. Someone decided that there were twelve of the islands, and so they were named the Apostles. Curiously enough, none of the islands actually took on the name of apostles, unless there was a different set we don't know about, with names like Madeline, Basswood, Hermit, Manitou, Rocky, Gull, Stockton, Michigan. And Devils? I don't think so.


The islands became hosts to waves of tourists as resorts of the wealthy sprang up along the lake shore. If you ferry out to Madeline Island today you can tour a museum of the American Fur Company (which means it was British-owned) or play on a golf course designed by Robert Treat Jones. The Apostles have five lighthouse and six shipwrecks. One of the latter, the schooner barge Noquebay caught fire in 1905 and was beached on Stockton Island. Unlike many Lakes wrecks, there was no loss of life. But 600,000 board feet of hemlock lumber never made it to its final destination, the lumberyards of Buffalo.

Monday, May 3, 2010

NEW YORK CITY TIMELINE - 1660-1664

1660s

Staten Island

Captain Thomas Stillwell builds a house – one-and-a-half story rough-cut fieldstone - on the future Richmond Road. Later it will be known as the Billiou-Stillwell-Perine House.


1660

Nov 15

Asser Levy is the first kosher butcher to be licensed in New Amsterdam.

City

The Costello map, discovered in Florence, Italy's Villa Castello in 1910 depicts the streets and residents of lower Manhattan in this year. ** Nicasius de Sille compiles a manuscript street directory of the city.


Brooklyn

Breukelen has a population of thirty families and contains a church with its own dominie (pastor). The congregation complains that his sermons are too short. ** Director Peter Stuyvesant establishes the Town of Boswyck, or Woods (Bushwick) on Long Island, including today's Greenpoint, Williamsburg and Bushwick.


1661

City

Oude Dorp (Old Town) is founded on Staaten Eyelandt (Staten Island). ** The approximate date the sheriff is instructed to remove substandard privies. ** A ferry between the city and Communipaw, New Jersey, goes into service. ** When Quaker John Bowne challenges Governor Stuyvesant’s intolerance toward the sect he removes himself to Queens and builds a two-story house on the future Bowne Street as a meeting place for Quakers. The building will become the oldest in he future borough and a City Landmark.


Brooklyn

Carel de Bevoise opens a school in Breukelen. ** Cornelius Van Werkoven establishes New Utrecht, one of the first towns in Kings County (the future Brooklyn).


1662

Feb 21

Brooklyn settler Joris Jansen de Rapalje, a Walloon, dies at Wallabout, Long Island, at the age of 57.

City

Lithuanian Protestants settle in the colony. ** Flushing Quaker John Bowne is imprisoned and fined for allowing fellow Quakers to meet in his home. Bowne appeals the case in Holland to the directors of the Dutch West India Company; they instruct Governor Peter Stuyvesant to overlook such cases where they do not actually interfere with local government. ** Dutch emigrant Willem Gerritsen dies in Brooklyn.

England

Historian Thomas Fuller refers to the gullible qualities of people of the mythical Gotham.


1663

Jun 12

The wife of New York resident Hendrick Cousterier (Coutrie) appears before the Burgomeisters to testify that the burgher-right had been granted her husband by Peter Stuyvesant, for painting a picture of himself and sons.

City

Caught trying to sell his wife, Laurens Duyts is flogged and loses an ear. ** Willem Gerritsen's widow Mary marries Gerrit Remmersen. ** Stuyvesant travels to Boston to meet with the Commissioners of the United Colonies. ** Stuyvesant convenes the second Provincial Assembly.

Staten Island

The Dutch build a blockhouse at the southern end - the future site of Fort Wadsworth.


1664

Mar 12

Charles II grants his brother James, the Duke of York, the land between the Delaware River and the Connecticut River, including all of Long Island. Annual payment is forty beaver skins, payable if demanded. Charles transfers all feudal power to James.

Apr 2

The Duke of York names Richard Nicolls as deputy-governor of New Netherland, still held by the Dutch, orders him to sail at once.

Apr 6

German immigrant and leatherworker Jan Harberdinck (Herberding) joins the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church.

Apr 10

The First Assembly of New Netherland delegates convenes in New Amsterdam.

July

New Amsterdam carpenter Willem Abrahamsen Van der Borden and Red Lion Brewery owner Daniel Verveelen file a complaint against the town for allowing the establishment of a tannery between their two Prinsen Straet properties, endangering the water in their wells. They are ignored. ** New Amsterdam learns by way of Boston that an English fleet has recently departed.

Aug 18

Nicolls sails into New York harbor, with four vessels, and sets up a blockade.

Aug 29

When Nicolls demands the colony's surrender Stuyvesant stalls, playing for time, tears up the surrender demand.

Sep 8

When the council refuses to back him Stuyvesant surrenders the town to the English. It will be renamed New York City. The transfer ceremony is held at the Stadt-Huys. The newly-named Albany (for James, Duke of York and Albany, formerly named Fort Nassau, Fort Orange, Beverwyck, New Albany, and Willemstadt. Stuyvesant gets the British to agree to protect the colony's records.

City

New Amsterdam's population reaches 1500. Eighty of them are importers. ** Law courts are held at the State House. ** Dutch settlers avoid sailing around the dangerous waters off Brooklyn's Red Hook by digging a canal from the East River to Gowanus Cove. ** Abraham Rycken (later Riker) Van Lent purchases an offshore island from Peter Stuyvesant. ** Wolfert (Wolfort, Wolphert) Webber opens a tavern on a small hill near the present Chatham Square. ** Wolfert (Wolfort, Wolphert) Webber opens a tavern on a small hill near the present Chatham Square. ** Brooklyn area farmer Pieter Claesen becomes a magistrate, adds the surname Wyckoff (wyk = parish; hof = court).


© 2010 David Minor / Eagles Byte