EASTERN NEW YORK TIMELINE - 1794

1794

January                 

New York governor George Clinton addresses the

state legislature, urges strengthening defenses

against the British. They vote £30,000 for fortifying

New York City and £12,000 for the frontiers to the

west and north.    

Jan 5                 

Erie Canal engineer and surveyor Holmes 

Hutchinson is born in Port Dickinson to

highways commissioner and former army

paymaster Amaziah/Amassa Hutchinson

and Elizabeth A. Mack Hutchinson.

February        

New York Indian agent General Israel Chapin,

noticing desertions from local reservations and

fearing trouble from his charges, meets with

them at Buffalo Creek and stay close to them

on through this year and into the next.    

Mar 5                 

Onondaga County is carved out of Herkimer

County. The town of Manlius is formed, with

Comfort Tyler as Justice of the Peace.   

Mar 22

The state legislature votes to extend the

Mohawk Valley Road west from Fort Schuyler

(Utica) to the Genesee River. The extension

will be named the Main Genesee River Road.

Apr 16                 

The 28,245-acre second Chenango Township

is granted to William Smith, who is also

granted the third (24,624 acres), fourth

(24,400) and fifth (26,200) townships.   **

The 25,780-acre eighth Chenango Township

is granted to William S. Smith. The 

24,200-acre ninth Chenango Township is

also granted to William S. Smith. The

24,186-acre twelfth Chenango Township,

is granted to William Matlack, Sr.

Albany

Simeon DeWitt publishes a map of the

Albany area.    **   The Bayard Land

Company is formed.

State

County boundaries are surveyed in the

Military Tract.    **    Judge William Cooper

is elected to Congress.    **   Connewango

pioneer Sarah Ash (Metcalf) is born in

Rennsselaer County.    **     A group of settlers

on the banks of Esopus Creek petition the

governor for pasture and firewood land in

the Catskill region. Traders Jacob Rutsen

and Johannis Hardenbergh take notice.    **

The legislature authorizes the surveying of a

road between Utica and the Genesee River.

**     Joseph Lothrop and A. Mead are the first

to settle at the future site of Chenango County's

North Norwich.    **    The first church services

in the Oneida County town of Augusta are held

in the Fairbanks home.    **    The population of

Herkimer County is 1500; Otsego County 12000.

**    The Fabius area is settled.    **    Jason Parker

of Utica and several partners establish a stage

line to Albany.    **    After a subscription of 200

shares is taken up by the state, work on the stalled

Western Inland Navigation Company canal at 

Little Falls is resumed.    **    Medina horse trader

Richard Gordineer is born to Jacob Gordineer,

a Dutch settler in the Mohawk Valley, and a

slave woman. He and his mother will be sold

to Joseph Grant when he is two months old.

**    The approximate date Utica merchant

Peter Smith acquires proprietary rights for close

to 50,000 acres from the Oneida Indians, the

land stretching from Syracuse to the Oneida

County town of Augusta.

©  2013            David Minor                        Eagles Byte

EASTERN NEW YORK TIMELINE - 1793

1793

Jan 13                 

The 24,200-acre tenth Chenango Township is granted to James Talmadge.

Jan 28

The 24,186-acre eleventh Chenango Township, is granted to Leonard M. Cutting.

Jan 31                 

The 24,186-acre seventh Chenango Township is granted to Robert C.

Livingston.

Feb 14                 

The boundary of Rennsselaer County's Town of Pittstown is changed.    **    The 18,713-acre sixteenth and the 18,068-acre seventeenth Chenango townships are granted to John Taylor.

Feb 20                 

Lawyer and land speculator James Wadsworth writes from New York City to his cousin Jeremiah Wadsworth in Connecticut, suggesting he buy a particular tract of land in the Genesee Valley.    **    The Brantingham Tract, 74,400 acres of the 1787 Macomb Great Purchase of New York lands in Lewis County, is sold to William Inman. The Inman’s Tract, 25,000 acres in Lewis County’s Leyden and Lewis towns, is sold to William Inman.

Mar 2

Congress appropriates $20,000 to build a lighthouse at Montauk, Long Island.    **    The U. S. revenue Collection District at Plattsburgh is established, with satellite offices at Burke, Centerville, Champlain, Chateaugay, Fort Covington, Hogansburgh, Malone, Mooers, Perrysville, Rouses Point, Trout River, Westville, and Whitehall.    **    The 24,384-acre sixth Chenango Township, is granted to Thomas Ludlow, Jr.. The 24,218-acre 13th Township is granted to Thomas Ludlow and J. Shipperly

Mar 12                 

The Fulton County towns of Mayfield (later Broadalbain and Johnstown) and Amsterdam are formed from Caughnawaga.

Apr 12                 

The Chassanis Tract, 210,000 acres of the 1787 Macomb Great Purchase of New York lands in Lewis and Jefferson counties, is sold to Pierre Chassanis & Company.

May 3                 

The 22,565-acre eighteenth, the 20,750-acre nineteenth, and the 24,856-acre twentieth Chenango townships are granted to John J. Morgan.   

Jun 1                 

The 26,030-acre fourteenth Chenango Township is granted to Leonard M. Cutting.

Jun 14                 

The 27,187-acre first Chenango Township is granted to Alexander Webster.   

Jun 15                 

Pro-French New Yorkers display a Cap of Liberty on a pole in front of the Tontine Coffee House at Wall and Water streets.

Jul 31

Harriet Weld, future wife of businessman Erastus Corning, is born in Troy.

Nov 25                 

An insurrection of slaves in Albany is put down after a number of buildings have been burned.

State

The state’s Council of Appointments, a Federalist-controlled body, now controls every political appointment in the state.    **    A pioneer named Gunn first settles the Oneida County village of Oriskany Falls.    **    West Bloomfield’s first church services are held.    **   Construction begins on the Little Falls Canal. A shortage of funds will delay the work until next year.    **    Massachusetts farmer Cornelius Treat arrives on foot in the Town of Mendon by way of the new Mendon-Iona Road, builds an elm bark cabin, then returns to New England to bring his family here.    **    Ezekiel Gilbert of Hudson is elected to Congress.    **    Putnam County resident Samuel Morehouse moves to the Peaceful Valley area of the Adirondacks (his settlement will later be named Sodom, for disputed reasons).    **    William Aulls and his son Thomas settle in Steuben County’s Pleasant Valley.    **    Suffolk County sheriff Silas Halsey moves upstate, settles in Lodi, and establishes a grist mill.    **    Wood Creek is cleaned out and the channel connecting Schenectady and Fort Stanwix is shortened seven miles by the cutting of 13 isthmuses. The trip that used to take larger boats two weeks is greatly shortened.    **    A school opens in Clifton. In 1812 it will be chartered as Hamilton College.

Albany

A fire destroys several downtown blocks.    **    The Society for the Promotion of Agriculture, Arts, and Manufactures is incorporated.

Utica

The United Society of Whitestown and Old Fort Schuyler is formed, presided over by the Reverend Bethuel Dodd.

Maryland

Slave and future freedman and Hudson River valley gardener James F. Brown is born.

© 2013 David Minor / Eagles Byte

SCRIPT No. 457, April 8, 2006

1830s, Here We Come

 

December of 1829 had been an unusually warm month; the following month remained so for a while. New York harbor remained free of ice. Visitor James Stuart was able to make quite a few visits to Manhattan from his boarding house in Hoboken, New Jersey, where he and his wife were staying.

Quite often his fellow passengers aboard the Stevens family steamboats were males; men did most of the marketing in the shops and stalls of Manhattan, returning later in the day with their produce and meats. Stuart had heard that even U. S. Chief Justice John Marshall, who occupied his residence on Staten Island when the Supreme Court was not in session, was often seen returning home with his dinner tucked under his arm, even the occasional turkey.

Most New Yorkers ate quite well. Stuart went to meet some friends for dinner once at a Manhattan boarding house. His shoes got dusty on the trip over; he stopped at a boot black’s house on Leonard Street for a polish, and found the man and his wife, “persons of colour”as he described them, “at dinner, consisting of one of the fattest roast geese I had ever seen, with potatoes, and apple-pie.”

In the several months they spent in Hoboken, many Sundays would find the Stuarts attending divine services in Manhattan. He mentions attending services at Episcopal, Presbyterian, Reformed Presbyterian, Baptist and Roman Catholic churches, as well as at several Methodist meetings. He found the various ministers to be equally impressive in their abilities. He was a little surprised when, turning up at the Oliver Street Baptist Church to hear the Reverend Spencer Wallace Cone, to find that he really had to hunt to find a vacant seat. “. . . the tide of Mr Cone's popularity was so great when I heard him, that the regular sitters were in some degree tenacious of their rights.”

It’s not too surprising that Cone was a popular preacher. The Princeton, New Jersey, native, had become an actor, much to the dismay of his devout mother, when he turned twenty. It may have been his presence during a fire that killed 72 people at the Richmond Theatre in the Virginia capital in 1811, including the state’s new governor, that made him decide to leave the stage. Afterwards, during a stint as a newspaper editor and writer, he was inspired by the biography of English divine John Newton to enter the Baptist church. Commanding a rifle company in the War of 1812, during which he witnessed the burning of Washington and the attack on Fort McHenry, he then moved to the nation’s capital. After preaching in the Washington and Philadelphia areas he moved to New York City in 1823 to take up the pastorate at the Baptist Church. Certainly Cone had a wealth of experiences to draw on, and by the time Stuart heard him, knew well how to work up a crowd.

The Stuarts must have done a bit of clothes shopping while they were in the area, probably in expectation of being on the road before long. He notes that most of the work in the fashion trade is done by women, apparently as opposed to the custom in Britain. The visiting couple may also have been refurbishing their outfits for the New Year’s celebrations to come at the end of the month. Well before Times Square was imagined.

                                                     

© 2006 David Minor / Eagles Byte

NEW YORK CITY TIMELINE - 1796

February        

English actor Joseph Jefferson makes his New York City debut in The Provoked Husband.    **    New York City's council solicits bids for a municipal water system, receives two. Nothing is done.

Mar 26                 

Matthew Clarkson, Thomas Eddy, John Murray, Jr., Isaac Sloatenburgh, and John Watts, are authorized by the state of New York to build a state prison on newly-acquired property on Greenwich Street in New York City, to be known as Newgate.

November

The New York City owner of a Barclay Street building destroyed by fire this month starts a public subscription drive for financial aid in recouping his losses.

December        

A warehouse fire in lower Manhattan spreads northward from Wall Street, destroying close to 70 buildings between there and Maiden Lane, and costing $1,000,000. Water from the Tea Pump is used in fighting the blaze.    **    New York City's council once again solicits bids for a municipal water system, receives two (one from Westchester doctor Joseph Browne), both of which die in committee.

Dec 6                 

Leather dresser William Thomson, son-in-law of the Hardenbrook family, who took over the Collect property in lower Manhattan a few days ago, advertises in the New York Minerva promoting his tea water pump business on the property and countering some bad publicity.

City

Some black members of the John Street Church ask Bishop Francis Asbury to conduct separate services for them. He creates the African Chapel  (later the Zion A. M. E. Church) under the jurisdiction of the Methodist Episcopal Church.    **    The council rejects a state offer to purchase the site of the former Colles Water Works for a prison, turns the land into a dump for street waste.    **    Yellow fever kills several dozen people.    **    John Fitch tests his screw-propeller steamboat on New York City's Collect

 Pond. Passengers include Robert Fulton, Chancellor R. Livingston, passenger and inventor Nicholas Roosevelt, and young John Hutchings, who acts as steersman. John Stevens also experiments with steam on the pond.    **    The city attempts to get property owners around The Collect to agree to a canal to drain the pond. Nothing happens.    **    A steeple is added to St. Paul's Chapel.    **    The approximate date Benjamin Davis erects the Broadway House tavern on Broadway at Grand Street.     **    James Blackwell erects a clapboard farmhouse on Blackwell’s Island (formerly Varckens Eylandt, or Hog Island; later Welfare, then Roosevelt Island).    **    John Rogers buys four acres of the former Warren estate in lower Manhattan. The property will become the site of the first house to be built on Washington Square North (No. 20) in 1828 and 1829.

©  2013         David Minor         Eagles Byte

NEW YORK CITY TIMELINE - 1791

 1791

Jan 5

The 14th New York State Legislature, having assembled a quorum on its second day, begins sitting at the second City Hall at the north End of Broad Street.

Feb 7

The legislature re-apportions the state Senate and Assembly districts.

Feb 12

Inventor and industrialist Peter Cooper is born in New York to Newburgh, New York Methodist hat maker John Cooper and his wife.

Mar 24

The 14th New York State Legislature concludes its 14th session.

Jun 9                 

Playwright-composer John Howard Payne is born in New York City.

Oct 14

The Old American Company drama group out of Philadelphia performs the tragedy The Gamester and a farce called The Mock Doctor or, the Dumb Lady Cured in a John Street Theater.

Dec 17                 

Manhattan's first one-way street is created.

City

The city begins a ten-year project to fill in the Collect Pond, a source of drinking water, after pollution makes it unfit to drink. It purchases all land claims previously granted to the Rutgers family.    **    Trinity Church, rebuilt in 1788, is consecrated by Bishop Provost.    **    New Jersey express coaches travel to New York City and back at the rate of twenty a week, mostly on commercial travel.    **    The city suffers a relatively mild outbreak of yellow fever, although close to 100 died in the Peck Slip area.    **   A tontine organized by Lewis Morris to fund a toll drawbridge across the lower Harlem River fails to raise enough money.    **    The Tammany Society has over 300 members.    **    Andrew S. Norwood goes into business in Manhattan as a merchant.    **    Brig owner Joseph Rose and his family move from their Georgian-style homer at 273 Water Street to Pearl Street, leaving the former property to his son.    **    Merchant Benjamin Seixes builds a double house at 76 Broad Street.    **    The city establishes the Northern Dispensary for treatment of the poor, in Greenwich Village.    **    The Society for the Promotion of Agriculture, Arts and Manufactures is founded. It will move to Albany in 1797.    **    Only 4% of the city’s households – mostly elite merchants -are owners of stock.    **    The 1784 Bank of New York receives a corporate charter. It currently has 190 shareholders    **    The city is divided into seven wards.    **    Free black future dry cleaner Thomas L. Jennings is born to Joseph Jennings and Marry Baker.

©  2013    David Minor / Eagles Byte

EASTERN NEW YORK TIMELINE - 1695-1699

1695

Nov 1

The Caterskill (Katerskill) Patent, in New York’s Greene County – total acreage unknown - is granted by governor Fletcher, to Jacob Lockerman.

Dec 2

Kingsfield Manor, 24 miles to the north of Schenectady, is created.

State

All remaining Renssalaerwyck grants revert to Killian van Renssalaer, son of Jeremiah. ** The colony’s exports near 200,000 pounds sterling, just about equaling imports. ** British army chaplain John Miller draws a map of Albany.

1696

Jun 25

The Kakiate Patent, part of the future Rockland County, is issued to Daniel Honan and Michael Hawdon.

Aug 20

The English government reports on the importance of a Five Nations (Iroquois) alliance.

State

Canadian governor Louis de Buande Frontenac conducts a foray out of Montréal against New York’s Onondaga Indians, camps at Isle aux Chevreuils (Carleton Island) in the St. Lawrence River. His force of 2,000 kills many Onondaga and Oneida.

Albany

Dutch Reformed Church minister the Reverend Dellius obtains a patent for 537,600 acres of land from Governor Fletcher, including the site of today’s Fort Edward.

1697

May 9

Colonel Lewis Morris is granted Morrisania Manor, in the southern part of the town of Westchester.

May 21

Captain Thomas Chambers registers New York's Fox Hall Manor. It will be annexed to Kingston, New York, in 1787.

May 27

The Great (or Upper) Nine Partners Patent, in Dutchess County, is granted to John/Jan Aarston, William Creed, James Emott/Emmot, Hendrick ten Eyck, Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Filkin, Major Augustin Graham, Colonel Caleb Heathcoate, David Johnstone, and Jarvis Marshall. It includes a small piece of property on the Hudson (just north of the future Poughkeepsie), granted last year.

June

Richard Coote, the Earl of Bellomont is named to succeed Fletcher as Royal Governor of New York. He will not arrive in American until the following April.

Jun 17

Stephanus van Cortlandt is awarded Cortlandt Manor, in northern Westchester County – land he bought from the local Indians in 1683 - by a grant from England’s King William III.

State

Albany's population reaches 714.

Connecticut

A settlement is formed at Bedford, which will eventually becomes a New York State town in Westchester County.

1698

Dec 15

Governor Bellomont, writes to the Board of Trade in London, complaining of the ethics of the legal profession in the colony.

State

Approximately 1230 Senecas remain in the colony, down from nearly twice the number nine year ago, due to war and disease. ** Lord Bellemont is named Royal governor.

1699

State

Kingston settler Johannis Hardenbergh marries Catherine Rutsen, of Ulster County.

©2011 David Minor / Eagles Byte

NEW YORK CITY TIMELINE / 1740-1744

1740

Mar 18

The home of the Royal governor in New York City’s Fort George, along with the nearby Dutch church, is destroyed by fire.

Jun 13

Richard Nicolls is commissioned as a examiner in New York City’s Court of Chancery.

City

Rumors circulate that blacks are intending to poison the city's wells. ** The Society of Friends (Quakers) move their meeting house from Green Street Alley to nearby Liberty Street. ** Pennsylvania, involved in a boundary dispute with Maryland, sends an agent here to transcribe early Dutch records. ** Greenpoint, Brooklyn, landowner Pieter Praa dies. Having no sons he leaves his property to his five daughters and their husbands, the settlement's sole residents - the Bennetts, Calyers, Meseroles, Provosts and Van Zandts.

1741

February

A series of fires and thefts occur in New York City.

Feb 28

The Manhattan tobacco shop of Robert Hogg is burglarized. The money is later found at Hughson's Alehouse and rumors spread of a slave insurrection - the "Alehouse Plot" or "The Negro Plot". By the time calm is restored, four whites and 25 blacks (including tavern owner John Hughson and his wife, alderman John Pintard's servant Caesar and his white mistress Peggy Kerry) will have been hanged on an island in The Collect pond. 13 additional blacks are burned at the stake. 70 blacks and seven whites are banished. Also hanged is the Catholic teacher John Ury, who supposedly performed the duties of a priest.

Mar 18

The 1640 Dutch church on Manhattan is destroyed by rebellious slaves.

Apr 7

Journeymen bakers go on strike in New York City, are prosecuted for criminal conspiracy.

City

The city forms a volunteer firefighting company. ** 20% of New York's population is black.

1742

City

A law is passed allowing slaves to get water only from the nearest neighborhood well.

State

Future governor John Taylor is born in New York City.

1743

Oct 2

Physician and Presbyterian churchman Dr. John Nicoll dies in New York City at the age of 64.

November

The provincial assembly meets in Manhattan's City Hall, considers a citizens petition to ban various sources of pollution.

City

Smallpox kills 217 people this summer. ** James Parker begins publishing the New-York Weekly Post-Boy.

1744

February

New York City's Common Council orders that copies of the 1731 street cleaning laws be prominently posted.

May

The New York council orders an overhaul of the city's sanitary laws, going after tanners, hog owners and starch makers, and moving them outside of the city. Waste dumping on public property is prohibited.

July

Annapolis physician Dr. Aledxander Hamilton visits New York City, criticizes the water.

City

Stephen Bayard is appointed mayor for six consecutive one-year terms. ** The population is approximately11,000. There are 166 licensed taverns.

© 2011 David Minor / Eagles Byte