It does not appear that any of these first colonists were placed in Westchester County, or even within the northern limits of Manhattan Island. Arriving in May, with seeds and agricultural implements, they were able to raise and garner a year's crop, and consequently suffered none of the hardships which made the lot of the Puritans during their first winter at Plymouth so bitter. Although distributed into little bands, which might have been easily exterminated byorganized attack, they sustained, moreover, peaceful relations with the Indians. Thus from the very start fortune favored the enterprise of European colonization in Xew York. Having in this and the preceding chapter, with tolerable regard for proportions, as well as attention to minuteness in the more important 1 Van Pelt's Hist, of the Greater New York, i.. 13.

HISTORY

WESTCHESTER

COUNTY

ing prematters of detail, outlined the general conditions prevail viously toand at the time of discovery, and traced the broader historwe ical facts preliminary to the settlement of Westchester County, began, ent settlem that when period the upon g shall now, in enterin gradual have mainly to do with the exclusive aspects of our county s and history general the to , however development, giving proper notice, es. conditions of the changing times as the narrative progress

CHAPTER EARLIEST

SETTLERS

-- BRONCK,

HUTCHINSON,

ANNE

THROCKMORTON,

CORNELL

URING the first fifteen or so years after the beginning of the colonization of New Xetherland there was no attempt at settlement north of the Harlem River, so far as can be de^^ termined from the records that have come down to us. The earliest recorded occupation of Westchester land by an actual white settler dates from about 1639. At that period at least one man of note and substance, Jonas Bronck, laid out a farm and erected a dwelling above the Harlem.