On December 14, 1801, Major Williams, a grand-nephew of Benjamin Franklin, took charge of the school as superintendent. Cadet John Lillie, writing of his life there from 1801 to 1805, said: "All order and regulation, either moral or religious, gave way to idleness, dissipation and irreligion. No control over the conduct of the officers and cadets was exercised."
As already stated the academy was legally instituted March 16, 1802, and the school went into full operation on the 4th of the following July. But its ancient history really dates from 1776. The act of 1812 established its present form, the main features of which have been practically adhered to to this day. Washington is still regarded as its founder, while Knox first proposed and strongly advocated a military school of this very type, and Hamilton outlined the well-considered plan of military education that was finally adopted and has been pursued ever since.
[CHAPTER XX.]
TOWN OF MINISINK.
By Charles E. Stickney.
DERIVATION OF THE NAME.
The derivation of the name Minisink is undoubtedly from the Delaware valley, which was the "Minisink" country of its Indian owners. They had a large village and castle on the Jersey side of the Delaware River, opposite a large island in the river, both that and the village being known to them and to the early white settlers by the name "Minisink." They were a sub-division of the Lenni-Lenape tribe that somehow became known later by the name of Delaware, from an English lord, who visited the mouth of the river about five minutes once, and left his unmerited name to the river and its valley as well as to the tribe of Indians about it. In truth a most foolish freak upon the part of the white people, who had far more deserving names to give, if they wished to observe and reward more daring explorers. Foolish, too, because the Indian names were just as beautiful, even more so than that of the old lord.
This sub-division of the Lenni-Lenape Indians was called the Minsi (wolf), and they were easily recognized from other tribes by the white people. In 1663 when Wiltwyck (now Esopus or Rondout) was attacked, its white settlers declared that they saw the Munsey (Minsi) Indians among their assailants.
In front of their village on the river flats south of the island lay their great national cemetery covering acres of ground, where many generations of their nation lay entombed. Some of them were buried so close to the river that the sweep of its current often washed away the dirt and exposed their bones as the writer saw them. The early white people in the valley, all German, at first assumed that the name Minsi, pronounced by them "munsey," was derived from the fact that the water had at some time been drained by the Water Gap from the lands in the valley and that the name was derived from "the water is gone." We have never found any corroboration of that theory. The village was the source of the name, but what is meant in the Lenni-Lenape language we probably shall never know. From their village the white settlers applied it to the whole valley.
William Tietsort, whom they induced to settle among them near present Port Jervis, and do their blacksmithing, in 1690, found the name there. Arent Schuyler, who has left on record his diary of the visit he made there to find whether the French spies had been there from Canada, said of it: "1694 ye 6th, Tuesday, I continued my journey to Maghackemeck (Indian name for the neighborhood of the junction of the Neversink with the Delaware) and from thence to within half-a-day's journey of the Minisink." A half-day's journey would about represent the distance to the village and castle of the tribe mentioned, and where he was bound.