[CHAPTER III.]
FIRST SETTLEMENTS AND SETTLERS.
There is a tradition, supported by some evidence, that the first settlement of Orange County was in the old Minisink territory along the Delaware River. Although the supposed settlement was mostly in Pennsylvania, the reported excavations, roads and other work of the settlers were mostly in Orange County. The story of the tradition, and evidence that it has a basis of fact, are given in a letter by Samuel Preston, Esq., dated Stockport, June 6, 1828, which is published in Samuel W. Eager's county history of 1846-7, and reproduced in Charles E. Stickney's history of the Minisink region of 1867. Eager says the letter "will throw light upon the point of early settlement in the Minisink country," and Stickney assumes that its second-hand statements are substantially true. But Ruttenber and Clark's more complete history of the county, published in 1881, discredits them. The essential parts of Preston's letter are here condensed.
He was deputed by John Lukens, surveyor general, to go into Northampton County on his first surveying tour, and received from him, by way of instruction, a narrative respecting the settlements of Minisink on the Delaware above the Kittany and Blue Mountain. This stated that John Lukens and Nicholas Scull—the latter a famous surveyor, and the former his apprentice—were sent to the Minisink region in 1730 for the government of Philadelphia; that the Minisink flats were then all settled by Hollanders; that they found there a grove of apple trees much larger than any near Philadelphia, and that they came to the conclusion that the first settlement of Hollanders in Minisink was many years older than William Penn's charter. Samuel Depuis, who was living there, told them that there was a good road to Esopus, near Kingston, about a hundred miles from the Mine holes, which was called the Mine road. Preston was charged by Lukens to learn more particulars about this Mine road, and obtained some from Nicholas Depuis, son of Samuel, who was living in great affluence in a spacious stone house. He had known the Mine road well, and before a boat channel was opened to Foul Rift, used to drive on it several times every winter with loads of wheat and cider to buy salt and other necessaries, as did also his neighbors. He repeated stories without dates that he had heard from older people. They said that in some former age a company of miners came there from Holland; that they worked two mines, and were very rich; that they built the Mine road with great labor, and hauled their ore over it; that they bought the improvements of the native Indians, the most of whom moved to the Susquehanna.
In 1789 Preston began to build a house in the Minisink and obtained more evidence from Gen. James Clinton, the father of Gov. Dewitt Clinton, and Christopher Tappan, Recorder of Ulster County, who came there on a surveying expedition. They both knew the Mine holes and the Mine road, and were of the opinion that they were worked while New York belonged to Holland, which was previous to 1664. Preston did not learn what kind of ore the mines produced, but concluded that it was silver. He went to the Paaquarry Mine holes, and found the mouths caved full and overgrown with bushes, but giving evidence of a great deal of labor done there in some former time.
Ruttenber and Clark's history, as stated, discredit the tradition regarding the early settlement of the Minisink by Hollanders, as accepted by Clinton, Tappan, Depuis, Preston and others. It represents the Mine road to be simply an enlargement of an old Indian trail, and the mines to have been of copper and located in what is now the town of Warren, Sussex County, N. J. It says that the Dutch at Esopus during the war of 1660-63 had little knowledge of the country, even east of the Shawangunk, and that if the Minisink was penetrated at a much earlier period it was by way of the Delaware River. The historian discusses the subject further, and concludes that the first settler of the Minisink was William Tietsort, a blacksmith from Schenectady, who barely escaped the slaughter at that place in 1689, and went to the Minisink country from Esopus, by invitation of friendly Indians, and purchased lands of them in October, 1689. "There is little doubt that he was the first settler on the western border," says the history.
But Stickney, after recapitulating the traditions and evidence of the early settlement of the region, says: "Here generations lived the fleeting span of life in blissful ignorance of any outer or happier world beside, and were alike unknown outside the boundaries of their own domain until some wanderer chanced to come across their settlement, and went on his way, thereafter to remember with gratitude and envy the affluence and comfort that marked their rough but happy homes."
If Tietsort was the first white settler of the Minisink, Arent Schuyler was probably the second, as he settled there in 1697, having been granted a patent of 1,000 acres of its lands by Governor Fletcher. The governor had sent him there three years before to ascertain whether the French in Canada had been trying to bribe the Indians to engage in a war of extermination against the New Yorkers from their fastnesses in the Shawangunk Mountains.
The earliest land transfers and titles were so thoroughly investigated by Ruttenber and Clark that we cannot do better, perhaps, than condense mostly from their history.