Four years after the Manor of Philipseburgh had been established, on June 17, 1697, Stephanus Van Cortlandt had secured the entire northern party of Westchester County, from the Croton River to Putnam County and Connecticut--amassing together eighty-six thousand two hundred and three acres with one thousand five hundred acres more across the Hudson on the Haverstraw shore. The only sizable tract that Stephanus missed was eighteen hundred acres now occupied by part of Peekskill and Buchanan, between Verplanck's Point and Annsville Creek. That was known as Ryke's Patent, bought from the Indians by Richard and Jacob Abramsen, who afterwards changed their name to Lent and whose progeny in Cortlandt Town is now as the sands of the sea. This was patented to the Abramsens for a quit rent of 'TO bushels of good winter merchantable wheat." A smaller tract near Peekskill also escaped Stephanus, three hundred acres having been purchased by Jacobus De Kay and John Krankhyte. The quaint and precious Van Cortlandt Manor House on the Albany Post Road at the Croton River was built in 1683. By 1697, Stephanus had completed his accumulation of property and obtained from Governor Fletcher and the Crown, the Royal Letters patent of the Westchester acreage, a vast domain which covered the Towns of Cortlandt, Yorktown, Somers, North Salem and Lewisboro, and for which he was to pay quit rent of "40 shillings on the feast day of the Annunciation of our blessed Virgin Mary." Of all the colonial manors in the new world, the Manor of Cortlandt was the largest. Three years after the establishment of his great estate, when he was beginning to enjoy the charming home on the Croton River, surrounded by his wife and eleven children (whose ages ran from infancy to full maturity), Stephanus Van Cortlandt died. His remarkable life is a challenge to the so-called leaders of our modern day.