Craft Masonry in Westchester and Putnam Counties, New York

Richard Harison -DGM - Notes and References - 99 pages [16.37 MB]
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Richard Harison - DGM - Paper - 14 pages [1.22 MB]
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http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1974/6/1974_6_14.shtml
Stephen Van Rensselaer III had succeeded as lord of the manor upon his father’s death in 1769. As a youth Stephen III
revealed a romantic streak by eloping at eighteen. His impetuosity, however, did not extend to marrying a manor milkmaid.
The young patroon took for his bride Margaret, daughter of General Philip Schuyler. Her sister Elizabeth was married to
Alexander Hamilton.
Stephen III served both his state and his estate with equal energy. He was elected assemblyman, moved up to state
senator, then lieutenant governor, was twice defeated for governor by respectable margins, and capped his political career
as a three-term congressman. Stephen III won a footnote in Presidential history by casting the deciding vote for John Quincy
Adams when the 1824 election was thrown into the House. One story has it that Daniel Webster and Henry Clay buttonholed
Van Rensselaer and convinced him that Adams was the safest bet for the landholding class.
Rensselaerwyck was still lightly settled when Stephen III inherited the patroonship. To attract more tenants he became an
early exponent of the free introductory offer. Van Rensselaer offered patriots of the Revolution a hundred and twenty acres
of land rent-free for seven years. After that the tenant could sign a lease with the patroon and pay an annual rent figured in
so many bushels of wheat per year, four fat fowl, and a day’s labor with horse and team. This offer attracted thousands of
new tenants to Rensselaerwyck, especially as farmers fled rock-ridden New England for New York’s tillable and more fertile
acres.
The leases, drawn by Alexander Hamilton, Stephen III’s property-minded brother-in-law, were a work of legal artistry. They
skirted the state’s 1787 ban on feudal rents by making the deal not a rental but an “incomplete sale” that forever remained
incomplete.
All taxes on the land were to be paid by the tenant. The tenant could only farm the land. All rights to water, wood, and
minerals remained the landlord’s. If the tenant defaulted on his rent, the patroon’s word was enough to send off the sheriff to
seize and sell the delinquent’s crops and livestock for the amount due. If the tenant wanted to sell his lease, he was subject
to a “quarter sale”—one quarter of the sale price was to be paid to the landlord.
In short, a tenant farmer leased a tract of wilderness, cleared it, laid out his fields, and built his home and barns on the land.
Generations later his descendants would still be paying the patroon rent. If the tenant wanted to sell out, he had to pay 25
per cent of the sale price for a now-developed property—the land, home, barns, and any other improvements—to a landlord
who might never have seen the farm, tamed or wild.
Terms of the leases varied from manor to manor. Under the Van Rensselaers the lease was good as long as the tenant and
his descendants paid the rent. But most of the Livingston and Schuyler leases allowed the landland to boot out the tenants
after one, two, or even three generations. In the mid-1800’s the tightly knit manor families held 1.8 million acres with 260,000
persons living off them.
A clergyman passing through New York leasehold country early in the nineteenth century gave his view of the effects of
tenantry on the farmers:
The Americans never can flourish when on leased lands. They have too much enterprise to work for others or to remain
tenants, and where they are under the necessity of living on such lands, I find that they are greatly depressed in mind, and
are losing their animation.
Stephen Van Rensselaer in was a respected, gentle, and apparently benevolent landlord. His numerous good works and
amiable nature won Van Rensselaer the name the Good Patroon. But his most appealing quality to his tenants was his laxity
in collecting rents.
When Stephen III died, Rensselaerwyck was divided between his two eldest sons. The portion west of the Hudson, the West
Manor, went to Stephen IV. The East Manor, east of the Hudson, went to William. The old man also left approximately four
hundred thousand dollars in debts. By chance his uncollected back rents also totalled about four hundred thousand dollars.
The Good Patroon’s will stated that his debts were to be paid by collection of the back rents.
Word of the patroon’s will sent a shiver through the manor farms. Some back rents on farms in the rockbound Helderberg
Mountains, near Albany, had been accumulating for twenty years. Farmers in the hill towns knew that Van Rensselaer’s will,
if carried out, would destroy them.
http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/albany/bios/vr/svr3.html
Stephen Van Rensselaer III was born in New York City in 1764 - the first child of Stephen Van Rensselaer II and Catharina
Livingston. He grew up at the Van Rensselaer Manor House - home of the most advantaged family in the Upper Hudson
region. Losing his father at age five, he was looked after by his uncle, Abraham Ten Broeck - trustee or administrator the
Van Rensselaer estate. In 1775, his mother married Dominie Westerlo.
Raised to succeed to the title "Lord of the Manor," young Stephen was sent away to study. He graduated from Harvard in
1782.
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