01 Jun Cuffy’s Church – Enslaved Africans and The Old Dutch Church
Like other prominent families in early New York, the Philipses were major slaveholders, employing slaves in urban, rural, and maritime environments and in a variety of occupations as laborers in their city households and warehouses, as millers, craftsmen, and farmers at the rural farming centers; as boatman on their Hudson River sloops; and as translators and cooks on their Atlantic voyages.
Dennis J Maika, “Encounters: Slavery and the Philipse Family: 1860-1751 in Dutch New York: The Roots of Hudson Valley Culture
It’s not hard to discern the geographic origins of the first tenant farmers and their families who are buried in the shadow of the Old Dutch Church. The name of the church proclaims a connection with the Netherlands, but the family names carved on the headstones reveal a more cosmopolitan community.
Washington Irving has made us all familiar with the Van Tassel name – derived from Texel, an island that was a starting point for many Dutch West India Company ships. Van Weerts (Van Wart) could have roots in any city in the Netherlands called “Weert”. The Buckhouts may have come from the German city of Bucholte, located near the Dutch border. And even though her headstone is carved in Dutch, the name Sara Fochee, wife of John Enters, speaks to French origins, possibly a Huguenot who relocated to the Netherlands before immigrating to New Amsterdam. Abraham De Revier was most likely a Belgium Walloon who also sought refuge in Holland before ending up in Philipsburg. In the Church Register of 1715 the membership roll includes “Jan Hart from Switzerland”. Among the pastors buried here we have Rev. Thomas Smith – born in Scotland. All in all, the families that settled in Philipsburg may have spoken a common Dutch language, and shared a common Christianity based on Calvinist theology, but on closer look they are a surprisingly international mix from Holland, France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and Scotland. One can imagine a child’s grade school project that displays strings of yarn starting in Sleepy Hollow, reaching out across the Atlantic and pinned to points in these ancestral lands.
Descendants of these old families often make their way to the Old Dutch Church where burying ground maps, church registers, and the headstones themselves can be used to help trace their ancestors. But there is another line of immigration for which these resources can not be employed. One must look to old shipping records, bills of sale, and wills to trace the origins of these men, women and children whose labors greatly increased the wealth of the Philipse family starting with Frederick Philipse I and his she-merchant wife Margaret Hardenbroeck and continuing with his son and heir of the Upper Mills, Adolph Philipse. For these, the strings on our grade school map would have to reach to places like Soyo, on the Kongolese coast; Madagascar, off the east coast of Africa; and other West African ports by way of Barbardos. Whether purchased or stolen, all were brought here involuntarily. These are the enslaved Africans of Philipsburg Manor.
In 1680, Frederick Philipse was a man with a plan. He acquired the property surrounding the Pocantico River from the Weckquaesgeek peoples and quickly added another parcel to the north, purchased from the Sinck-Sinck Indians, rounding out a contiguous holding of some 55,000 acres whose borders were defined by Spuyten Duyvil Creek to the south, the Croton River to the north, the Bronx River to the east and the great North River [Hudson] to the west. The Pocantico property already possessed a grist mill. But he would upgrade the facilities, add buildings and living quarters, and fortify the mill pond, thus creating a center of trade that would greatly enhance his wealth and stature, so much so that by 1693 he would receive a royal charter that would make his estate Philipsburg Manor and confer upon him the title of “Lord”. In the meantime, he advertised for tenant farmers to come and clear land and plant wheat. Those who answered his call w