On the morning of September 30, 1909 tens of thousands of spectators from Yonkers, Mount Vernon, and New Rochelle crowded into Getty Square. They were eagerly awaiting the arrival of the Half Moon, the replica of Henry Hudson’s famed sailing ship that launched a society that would one day be New York. One hundred years later, along with the fireworks, proclamations, and parades we find ourselves, as they did, contemplating our collective and individual identities. Their "melting pot" myth of assimilation may have shifted to the modern allegory of a "mosaic," but throughout our history Americans have struggled with the fundamental question "who are we?"

Given the richness of Dutch life at home, few citizens were willing to leave the security of Holland for the uncertainty of the New World. It was 1624 before the Dutch West India Company—granted a monopoly—dispatched 30 families of emigrants. Early upriver towns, like Fort Orange (Albany), were stockades built for defense against the embattled Native peoples as much as for trade.

Seeking to expand settlement, the West India Company awarded trade rights first to patroons and by 1639, to private merchants in general. The lure of business increased population but also escalated land conflict with the Native Americans. As the highway for the movement of goods and people, the Hudson River was the pulse of a commercial society that dispersed Dutch customs and language throughout the Valley.

News of Hudson’s discovery of “divers sorts of good Furres” attracted competing Dutch merchants. Primary contacts with the Munsee and the Mahicans, who resided in palisaded villages, involved land negotiations and peace treaties, particularly to establish and control the fur trade, which introduced guns and alcohol as items of barter.

Pressure from the settlers for native lands led to bloody conflicts, which embittered both the Indians and the Dutch. In Kiefts’ War 1640-1645 500 natives were killed at Pound Ridge.

Before contact Native Americans, hunted the beaver for their own food and fur, but now the animals became a valued commodity that drew them into the Dutch economic world. Their way of life was threatened by the cash nexus and their very existence was in jeopardy from European diseases, for which they had no resistance.

Slavery did not exist in the Netherlands, but Dutch transatlantic commerce included slave traffic; and, beginning in 1626, African slaves were a major source of labor in New Netherland, where they were employed in agricultural work , house construction and forts in New Amsterdam and Fort Orange (Albany).

Although some private individuals purchased slaves, the Dutch West India Company was the largest owner and used the promise of slave labor to entice more settlers from the homeland.

By the mid 18th century, slavery was the principle source of labor. The number of Africans in New Netherland began to grow from one hundred 1639 to eight hundred in 1664 after the English conquest. The New York legislature ended slavery in the state in 1827.

In 1647 The Dutch West India Company sent Peter Stuyvesant (1592-1672) to replace New Netherland governor Willem Kieft. Stuyvesant created an advisory council of Nine as representatives of the colonists, but was beset by conflict between then, led by Andrian Van Der Donck, as well as by border disputes with England’s Colny to the northeast.

It was Stuyvesant, who was forced to peaceably surrender New Netherland when English ships arrived in 1664, to claim the colony for King Charles II and his brother, James II. Stuyvesant traveled to Amsterdam to submit a final report, but then returned to his Manhattan farm, where he spent the rest of his life.

The Dutch West India Company had established the patroonship system to encourage invested members to populate and manage vast tracts of land. By 1840, they loosed regulations to include other Dutchmen and smaller estates; and Adriaen Van Der Donck (1620-1655), who had initially come to New Netherland in the employ of upstate patroon Kiliean Van Rensselaer, applied for his own lands. Van der Donck had been a Renselaerwyck schout, a medieval Dutch position akin to a combination mayor, sheriff and attorney general.

In the mid-1640s, the Dutch West India Company granted Van der Donck the section of land bordering the Hudson River at a point called “Nepperhaen,” or “Rapid Waters,” by the Native Americans. He called his holdings “Colen Donck” or Donck’s colony, but the area was sometimes referred to as the “Jonkheers” or “Young Lord’s” land, from which derives the name Yonkers. 

After Van der Donck’s death, the estate remained in the possession of his widow and her second husband. In the early days of English rule, Frederick Philipse purchased a portion and built the Manor Hall, preserved in downtown Yonkers.

 

In 1664 Governor Peter Stuyvesant peacefully surrendered to English military forces and allowed them to take over the colony of New Netherland. This event, symbolic of practicality and self-preservation, was precipitated by the English promise to preserve many liberties, including continued freedom of trade and religion.

Dutch colonial families reacted to becoming newly-minted New Yorkers in different ways. Some, like Frederic Philipse, said to be the wealthiest man in New York, acknowledged the change by anglicizing Flipson in favor of Philipse. Others, such as the Dyckman and Van Cortlandt families kept their names, but gradually began marrying the arriving English, to preserve their own economic and political power. The cosmopolitan temperament of the Dutch and their day-to-day necessity of “doing business” accelerated assimilation in New York City, although in the Hudson Valley, Dutch customs persisted in architectural forms, food preparation, and clothing.

At the center of this persistence was the Dutch language, which was nurtured and sanctified by the Dutch Reformed Church until 1764. The American Revolution brought renewed pressure for Dutch descendants to forge a new American identity; but upstate, language was still a cultural marker: Abolitionist Sojourner Truth, born a slave in Ulster County, spoke nothing but Dutch until she was eleven years old in 1808, and in the 20th-century, President Theodore Roosevelt recalled his grandparents speaking Dutch at home.

In 1848, Frederick Van Cortlandt commissioned a house of native fieldstone and brick to be built on land just south of the modern Yonkers border. The symmetry and classical detailing of the mansion’s principal façade embodies the fashionable Georgian elegance so highly valued by colonial New York’s Anglo-Dutch elite. 

The home and property remained in the Van Cortlandt family until 1889, when it was sold to New York City, and in 1897, it was opened to the public under the auspices of the National Society of the Colonial Dames in the State of New York.

Grisaille-painted kasten appeared in America around the turn of the eighteen century.  The painted ornament emulated the carved patterns found on elaborately carved Netherlands-made kasten.

“The Dutchmen are extinct and there is not even one brick left upon another, to point out the scene of their past happiness and glory,” bemoaned an 1834 editorial in the New-York Mirror, as the last Dutch house in Manhattan was razed. In the years after the American Revolution, the physical landscape of 17th-century New Amsterdam had begun to disappear. This eradication of history was the result of a robust early 19th-century culture, in which citizens eagerly replaced the old with the new. As the new nation created a distinctively American identity, the Dutch were assigned to the quaint and distant past—to the world of memory.

Washington Irving turned this around with his 1809 Knickerbocker’s History of New York by reaching back into the past and retelling the half-forgotten stories of our Dutch ancestors. Here and in other works, America’s first professional writer populated his Hudson Valley landscape with ghosts of a picturesque, lazier era. Irving fixed the image of the corpulent and self-satisfied Dutchman in the popular imagination.

Although they exert less influence on the general public today, Irving’s works, particularly The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle, inspired painters, filmmakers, writers and even historians, who took his characters for true historical figures and treated his narrative as an historical chronicle. He was so successful that for over a century it was difficult to distinguish fact from fiction.

Leyendecker’s Easter Dutch Girl is the apotheoses of Dutch cliché. The child’s unrestrained sweetness in wooden clogs, traditional Dutch bonnet and tulip bouquet speak to the commonly understood shorthand for the Dutch that persisted in the American public’s imagination in the waning years after of Hollandmania after 1920.

Visitors to Holland in the late 19th and early 20th centuries tended to view traditional life through rose colored glasses, capturing the picturesque quaintness in photographs and postcards, while downplaying the inevitable hardships associated with an comparatively primitive mode of living. In Marken and other tourist heavy areas consciously preserved from modernization, tourists even attempted to purchase items of traditional garb off the resident’s bodies. s small-town This idealization and adaptation for the tourist trade inevitably led to a distorted picture of Dutch life

Between 1809 and 1909, the collective memory of the Dutch underwent a sea change, from the humorously negative, drunken caricatures of Washington Irving to the earnestly positive examples of the Dutch as models of personal cleanliness, thrift, and industry. The 1876 Centennial led to a nationwide interest in colonial history and a renaissance of specific interest in the Dutch Colonial period.

In New York, the dramatic rise of immigration from Eastern Europe and other parts of the world increasingly challenged the established social order of a cohesive, Protestant elite. These upper classes turned to their idealized vision of New York’s Dutch history as a model of correct behavior for America’s most recent citizens. Many found it easy to overlook the brutality of the Dutch colonial slave trade and treatment of the Native population, instead emphasizing the philosophical and financial contribution of the Dutch to the American Revolution, the notions of toleration that distinguished New Netherland and the antecedents for their own burgeoning middle-class society.

Interest in heritage affected the growth of overseas tourism. During the Victorian age, innovations in the speed and economy of transportation and its growing base of leisured consumers spawned the modern travel industry. Holland only gradually became an object of interest, but was something of a fad by 1900.

Motives that sent Americans to the Netherlands in droves included a desire to find Dutch ancestors, witness sites trodden by the Pilgrims before their voyage to New England, and seek out stereotypical scenes of tulips, windmills, and wooden shoes. American artists sought out old-fashioned scenes as well, contributing to Americans’ imagining that the more traditional locales in Holland, including their residents, must look like New Amsterdam had.

The colonial revival’s initial focus on the English had slighted not only many pedigreed old New York families but also New York State in general. Responding expressions of Dutch heritage ranged from using windmills to advertise flour to historical reappraisals of New Netherland’s contributions. In 1882, Yonkers celebrated the bicentennial of the Philipse Manor Hall, one of the oldest buildings in Westchester County with Dutch colonial connections. The ceremonial address was a detailed history of Yonkers written and delivered by Reverend David Cole of the local Dutch Reformed Church. Cole would become an early member of the Holland Society of New York, an association of men who traced their heritage to the Dutch colonial period.  

From its founding in 1885, the Holland Society concerned itself almost equally with scholarly and social pursuits and played a significant role in the recording and preservation of the historic documentation of early New York and New Jersey history.

They reached out to contemporary Holland and established connections that enabled them to play a large role in the planning for the 1909 Hudson-Fulton Celebration. In particular, the society arranged for the building and display of the replica of Henry Hudson’s Half Moon.

Public monuments to history and preservation are one of the most lasting signs of the 1909 Hudson Fulton Celebration.  There were statues and tablets honoring Fort Amsterdam, Verrazano, Hudson, Fulton, and Revolutionary War battle sites throughout the Hudson River Valley. In many ways, this craze for the preservation of historic memory was an elite reaction to urban change, loss of authority, and a perceived level of public ignorance.

Memorials continued to be erected for years after the festivities ended, as projects conceived at the time came to fruition. Just over a mile north of the Hudson River Museum stands one of these monuments, by Yonkers sculptor Isidore Konti. A Citizens Auxiliary committee headed by former Yonkers Mayor Nathan Warren erected the monument. This installation photo shows the the busts of Henry Hudson and Robert Fulton, missing since the 1970s. Though Konti’s masterpiece is in sad need of restoration, it may be Yonkers’ most graceful example of public sculpture.

At a closing dinner for the Hudson-Fulton Celebration, Commission president Stewart L. Woodford gave a wishful prediction “that when the people of New York 100 years hence celebrate the deeds of Hudson, the Half Moon may be a full moon of perfect memory…”

Yet, in many ways, the Theodore and Franklin Delano Roosevelt might be described as representing the final flowering of a great Anglo-Dutch family in the New York political power structure. This dated concept faded after World War II in the rush toward modernity and a rising tide of new, competitive voices. FDR had successfully transformed Dutch Hudson River values into broader American values. In 1959, New York State celebrated the 350th anniversary of Hudson’s landin as a comparatively subdued affair. The great cultural nationalism that distinguished the years before World War I had, by then, found other outlets.

In 2009 as we once again observe this milestone, we contemplate the cyclical nature of United States history. As a nation, we have vacillated between periods of high enthusiasm and relative neglect for the Dutch role in our story. We may locate the vestiges of Dutch culture in Santa Claus, the slope of a barn roof, or the name of a subway stop; or we can seek to understand their greater legacies of capitalism, ethnic tolerance and religious freedom. We can recognize their contribution to the core ideas of who we are as Americans.

Even before his presidency, Franklin Roosevelt was famous for his pride in his Dutch heritage and historic preservation and wrote the introduction to a book on early Hudson Valley architecture.

One of the sites pictured was the 1693 Jan Harmse house, called Odell's Tavern, after a later owner and use. The building was already recognized as historically significant in the 19th century. Fortunately, this recognition has ensured its preservation, though it is a private residence not open to the public.