(Part II continued from the story published on April 4)
By CHRIS ATKINS and LAUREN LETTELLIER, Hilldale Town Historians
DUTCH WOMEN HAD more property rights than other female colonists in the New World. Prenuptial agreements were common in New Amsterdam, and they enabled women with money and/or property to keep their wealth after they married.
Roeliff Jansen’s death in 1636 left his wife Anneke Jans for a time, at least on paper, one of the wealthiest women (if not the wealthiest woman) in the New World. In 1638, she married the Rev. Everardus Bogardus (1607-1647) after securing a prenuptial agreement.
Bogardus had arrived in New Amsterdam in 1633 as the dominie, or pastor, of the colony and the second minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, the oldest established church in present day New York. They lived at what is now 23 Whitehall Street near the old fort in New Amsterdam, renting out their bouwerie farmhouse. In addition to the 62 acres of land Anneke owned, Bogardus owned another 84-acre farm on the Long Island shore near the Hellgate, bordering on the East River. Anneke’s farm became popularly known as “Dominie’s Bouwerie,” and the 84-acre-parcel was known as “Dominie’s Hook.” (The Dominie’s Bouwerie section of Manhattan is still known as The Bowery.)
Bogardus was frequently combative with the directors of New Netherland and their management of the colony, going up against the often drunk Director-General Wouter van Twiller. On one occasion he verbally attacked Van Twiller at a wedding feast, giving his reason (as the event was later reported) “that he called your wife a whore.” Bogardus reserved special ire for Willem Kieft, the director who followed Van Twiller in 1638.
By 1647, Bogardus and William Kieft were at war with each other. Dominie Bogardus was castigating Kieft from the pulpit every Sunday. He stepped up his denouncements when Kieft tried to place a tax on beer. (Bogardus liked his beer.) Kieft, in turn, chose Sunday mornings to have his troops drill outside the church with drums beating, trumpets blaring and cannons firing.
Kieft’s directive from the Dutch West India Company was to increase profits from the port at Pavonia (today’s Jersey City) and his solution was to attempt to extort tribute from the Indians with claims that the money would buy them protection from rival groups. When his demands were ignored, he ordered attacks on Pavonia and Corlears Hook, a Lenape Indian encampment on today’s Lower East Side, on February 25, 1643, which erupted into a horrific massacre (129 Dutch soldiers killed 120 Indians, including women and children). The Dutch local citizen advisory group had been specifically against such a raid, and were aghast when they heard the details. This was followed by retaliations resulting in what would become known as Kieft’s War (1643–1645). The war took a huge toll on both sides, and the Dutch West India Company Board of Directors fired Kieft in 1647, replacing him with Peter Stuyvesant.
Anneke was reputed to have an abrasive personality which, along with her husband’s fulminations against the colony’s directors and her attempts to be repaid by the Dutch West India Company, led to a few lawsuits. In one she was accused of “mooning” a group of burghers after an exchange of sarcastic and possibly ribald remarks. Her defense was that she merely lifted her skirts to keep them out of the filth in the street. This defense was accepted.
Meanwhile, Kieft’s position as director-general and Bogardus’ position as dominie made them the two most powerful people in the colony. Neither had any real control over the other and the situation was getting out of control. Both were flooding the authorities back in Amsterdam with complaints about the other even after Kieft was no longer director, and eventually they were summoned to Amsterdam to answer for their quarrel.
Bogardus and Kieft, their fates tied, climbed the gangway of the Princess Amelia to return to the Netherlands. As the ship passed to the north of England on September 27, it hit a violent storm in the Bristol Channel and sank. Both men were drowned. The people of New Amsterdam mourned for their minister, but there was little sorrow felt for the former director who had plunged the colony into war by his obstinate and cruel temper.
After the English took possession of New Amsterdam in 1664, all property holders were required to obtain new titles for their lands. Anneke’s heirs secured a new patent for the farm from Governor Nicolls on March 27, 1667.
After Bogardus’s death, Anneke moved back to Beverwyck, the former name of Albany. She lived at what is today the intersection of State and James streets. A plaque is on the wall of the bank that occupies that corner today.
She died in 1663 and in her will, she divided the Manhattan farm among her seven surviving children, who sold the land thinking it was worthless. On March 9, 1671, the farm was sold to Francis Lovelace (c. 1621–1675), the second governor of New York colony. All of Anneke’s heirs signed the deed of transfer, except the wife and child of Cornelius Bogardus, Anneke’s son who had died in 1666. And that omission caused an epic legal battle that lasted well into the 20th century. By the time Anneke’s heirs figured out they were wrong about the value of the land, it had been seized by Queen Anne and eventually presented to the founders of Trinity Church.
In 1896, the Oshkosh (WI) Daily Northwestern estimated the value of the land to be between $400 and $500 million (about $50 billion in 2023 dollars). Descendants of Roeliff and Anneke alleged that the property was still theirs, based on the lack of a signature from Cornelius Bogardus. Litigation ensued and continued for more than 250 years, through generation after generation of descendants, until in 1909, Trinity Church prevailed. Efforts to re-litigate the case continued well into the 20th century. It ranks as one of the most prolonged litigations in American history.
Despite the prominence of Roeliff Jansen as a place name on our land, Anneke seems to have left the more enduring historic record. Her status as a woman of importance in the early Dutch colony has endeared her to enthusiastic amateur genealogists claiming to be her descendants by either Roeliff or Bogardus.
At some point the romantic and certainly false rumor was spread that she was the granddaughter of William the Silent, Prince of Orange, by a secret marriage. Some family trees list Louisa May Alcott, Montgomery Clift, David Crosby, Michael Douglas, Henry Fonda, and Herman Melville among her descendants. A detailed genealogy of Anneke’s descendants can be found in “Dear Cousin: A Charted Genealogy of the Descendants of Anneke Jans Bogardus (1605-1663) to the 5th Generation” by William Brower Bogardus.
Oddly enough, there is a restaurant in Kittery, ME, called “Anneke Jans” in her honor.
Neither Jim Polk nor we have unearthed any evidence that Roeliff Jansen ever set foot in this part of the county, and why would he have? In the 1630s, there was nothing here but virgin forest and some Mohican settlements. By the time Robert Noble established Nobletown (the forerunner of Hillsdale) in 1750, Roeliff Jansen had been in the ground for 114 years.
The earliest print reference to the Roeliff Jansen Kill we found was a real estate ad in the January 5, 1852 edition of the Albany Evening Journal, but there may be reason to think that the kill was named much earlier than that. How much earlier?
Now we venture, with Mr. Polk’s help, into speculation and lore. Supposedly, in 1633, Roeliff and a group of prospective settlers were making their way up the Hudson in late winter or early spring after a visit to New Amsterdam. As the yacht neared today’s Linlithgo, the waters froze and the boat became stuck. Fortunately, the ice became solid enough for the passengers to walk ashore and they soon came upon a “friendly encampment” of local Indians, as well as the mouth of a large stream. The freeze lasted for three weeks. When the ice thawed and the passengers prepared to sail the rest of the way to Fort Orange, supposedly the party wanted to commemorate their adventure and the means to do this was to name the stream in honor the alderman accompanying them. Hence we refer to that stream as the Roeliff Jansen Kill. (Kill, or Kil, is the Dutch word for “riverbed” or “water channel.”)
Fact or fiction? We’ll never know.
An operetta, “Roeloff’s Dream,” written by a Mr. and Mrs. Alexander Bloch, was performed at dedication of the new the Roeliff Jansen Central School in 1933. It depicted the history of the area as revealed to a sleeping Roeliff Jansen in the 17th century, and sounds like it might owe something to the Washington Irving short story, “Rip Van Winkle.”
