Home / Bacon, Edgar Mayhew. The Hudson River from Ocean to Source: Historical, Legendary, Picturesque. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1903. / Passage

The Hudson River from Ocean to Source (Bacon, 1903)

Bacon, Edgar Mayhew. The Hudson River from Ocean to Source: Historical, Legendary, Picturesque. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1903. 331 words

Here General Armstrong, the boy hero of the Revolution, father-inlaw of William B. Astor and ex-Secretary of War, lived in 1S04, previous to his departure as Minister to the French Court, leaving a small marble fireplace, the first ever seen in Kingston, as a memorial of his residence; and here, last spring. General Arthur, the Republican candidate for Vice-President, bowed his tall head to escape collision with the time-honoured and smokebegrimed rafters; and here we -- the honoured Drs. Van Sant-

Rondout and Kingston 459

voord and Hoes, with the host and the writer -- sat and (hseussed the history of Kingston; its first and seeond Indian wars, 1659 and 1661, and the l)urning of the fort, 1663 ; Stuyvesant's treaty of peace, 1661, at which ]:)eriod the wily savages ceded him the land on which the city now stands, "to grease his feet" in return for the compliment of his visit, on which occasion the renowned warrior changed the Dutch name of Esopus, or Groote Esopus, variously stated to be derived from the Latin falailist and from a soft place, to Wiltwyck, or Wild man's village. The Dutch regained the town after its capture along with the Swedish possessions east of the Hudson in 1664, holding it, however, only for a very short time, as said one of my informants, adding thereto much of the intermediate history till its consolidation with Rondout and Wilbur into a city in 1872, and the building of the splendid new City Hall and Arniory, the latter onlv just completed. There are many other buildings and several localities of special interest to those who love the mild anticjuities of our brand-new country -- the Academy, founded in 1774, in which De Witt Clinton and Thomas De Witt, Edward Livingston, Stephen Van Rensselaer, and Abram Van Vechten received their early education; the stone Court House, built in 1S18 upon the site of a much older one; and the First Dutch Church, organised August, 1659, by Rev.