History of Westchester County, New York, from its Earliest Settlement to the Year 1900
To him was conveyed also a tract owned by " Hew MacGregor, Gentleman, of the City of Xew York," lying above Verplanck's Point. Thus Stephanus Van Cortlandt became the proprietor of nearly the whole of Westchester County along the Hudson from Croton Bay to the Highlands. In the interior his bounds, both at the north and the south, ran due east twenty miles to the Connecticut border incial agreement between Con(which border was, by the interprov necticut and New York, considered to be at a distance of twenty miles from the Hudson). But there were two strips of land above Verplanck's Point of which neither Van Cortlandt nor his heirs ever a obtained the ownership. One was the so-called Ryke's patent, tract called by the Indians Sachus or Sackhoes, embracing about
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CORTLANDTS
eighteen hundred acres between Verplanck-s and Peekskill Creek, whereon a large portion of the village of Peekskill has been built. This tract was bought from the Indians, April 21, 1GS5, by Ei chard Abramsen, Jacob Abramsen, Tennis Dekey (or DeKay), Seba, Jacob, and John Harxse, and soon afterward was patented to them for a quit-rent of " ten bushels of good winter merchantable wheat yearly." The name of Ryke's patent is Dutch for Richard's patent, so called after Richard Abramsen, the principal patentee, who later assumed the English name of Lent. Substantially the whole tract passed to Hercules Leut, Richard's son, about 1730. The second of the two strips on the Hudson which always remained independent of the Van Cortlandt estate was a three-hundred-acre parcel fronting on the inner and upper part of Peekskill Bay, which was deeded, on April 25, 1685, to Jacobus DeKay " for the value of four hundred guilders, seawant," and which ultimately became the property of John Krankhyte (ancestor of the Cronkhites).