Old Hellebergh: Historical Sketches of the West Manor of Rensselaerwyck, Including an Account of the Anti-Rent Wars, the Glass House and Henry R. Schoolcraft

Yesterday's Muse Verified independent store

→

vii, 188 pp. Includes fold-out map. "The Manor of Rensselaerswyck, Manor Rensselaerswyck, Van Rensselaer Manor, or just simply Rensselaerswyck (Dutch: Rensselaerswijck Dutch pronun ciation: ['r?ns?la?rs???ik]),[a] was the name of a colonial estate—specifically, a Dutch patroonship and later an English manor—owned by the van Rensselaer family that was located in what is now mainly the Capital District of New York in the United States. The estate was originally deeded by the Dutch West India Company in 1630 to Kiliaen van Rensselaer, a Dutch merchant and one of the company's original directors. Rensselaerswyck extended for miles on each side of the Hudson River near present-day Albany. It included most of what are now the present New York counties of Albany and Rensselaer, as well as parts of Columbia and Greene counties. Under the terms of the patroonship, the patroon had nearly total jurisdictional authority, establishing civil and criminal law, villages, a church (in part to record vital records, which were not done by the state until the late 19th century). Tenant farmers were allowed to work on the land, but had to pay rent to the owners, and had no rights to property. In addition, the Rensselaers harvested timber from the property. The patroonship was maintained intact by Rensselaer descendants for more than two centuries. It was split up after the death of its last patroon, Stephen van Rensselaer III in 1839. At his death, van Rensselaer's land holdings made him the tenth-richest American in history to date.[1] The manor was split between Stephen III's sons, Stephen IV and William. Tenant farmers began protesting the feudal system and their anti-rent movement was eventually successful. Stephen IV and William sold off most of their land, ending the patroonship in the 1840s. For length of operations, it was the most successful patroonship established under the West India Company system.[2]" "Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (March 28, 1793 – December 10, 1864) was an American geographer, geologist, and ethnologist, noted for his early studies of Native American cultures, as well as for his 1832 expedition to the source of the Mississippi River. He is also noted for his major six-volume study of Native Americans published in the 1850s. He served as United States Indian agent in Michigan for a period beginning in 1822. There he married Jane Johnston, mixed-race daughter of a prominent Scotch-Irish fur trader and Ojibwa mother, herself a daughter of Ojibwa war chief Waubojeeg. Jane taught Schoolcraft the Ojibwe language and much about her maternal culture. They had several children, two of whom survived past childhood. She is now recognized as the first Native American literary writer in the United States. In 1846 the widower Schoolcraft was commissioned by Congress for a major study, known as Indian Tribes of the United States, which was published in six volumes from 1851 to 1857. He married again in 1847, to Mary Howard, from a slaveholding family in South Carolina. In 1860 she published the bestselling The Black Gauntlet, an anti-Uncle Tom's Cabin novel." Show more