Nothing now remains of the old manor-house which he erected at the mouth of

Roeleff Jansen's Kill, or Ancram Creek. Six thousand acres of Robert Livingston's land was bought the same year that the grant w^as dated by the government for the use of the unfortunate Palatines. Early in the eighteenth century, the tenants of the Livingston Manor w^ere allow^ed one representative, elected by the freeholders, in the colonial Legislature, and in 17 16 the lord of the Manor was chosen for that office. When the old proprietor died, he was succeeded by his son, Robert R., in the ownership of the lower part of the Manor. There he built a fine mansion, w^hich he named Clermont. This w^as Judge Livingston, the father of that Robert R. w4io was Chancellor of the State of New York. The latter was born

47^ The Hudson River

in old Clermont, but soon after his marriage built for himself a mansion a short distance to the south of his

father's house. Both of these dwellings were burned by the British under General Vaughan in 1777. The commodious dwelling that the Chancellor built upon the ruins of his former home is the one u]3on which has centred all the sacredness of family traditions, as it was here that he closed his busy career in 18 13. We have elsewhere referred to his connection with Robert Fulton in the production of the first successful steamboat. Fulton married a niece of Livingston's, whose own wife was the daughter of that John Stevens who owned most of the site of Hoboken, and sister of the second John Stevens, the builder of the first oceangoing steamer. The atmosphere in which he lived seems to have been surcharged with the spirit of invention. The origin of the fallacious tradition that the Clermont steamer was built near Tivoli may be found in a story mentioned by Lossing, to the effect that Nesbit, the Englishman whose experiments were encouraged by Livingston in 1797, did build an unsuccessful steamboat in De Koven's Bay, just below Upper Red Hook landing.