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History of Westchester County, New York — Passage 83 (part 8)

Frederic Shonnard & W.W. Spooner (1900) 239 words View original →

[Frederic Shonnard & W.W. Spooner (1900)] To him was conveyed also a tract owned by " Hew MacGregor, Gentleman, of the City of Xew York," lying above Verplanck's Point. Thus Stephanus Van Cortlandt became the proprietor of nearly the whole of Westchester County along the Hudson from Croton Bay to the Highlands. In the interior his bounds, both at the north and the south, ran due east twenty miles to the Connecticut border (which border was, by the interprovincial agreement between Con-necticut and New York, considered to be at a distance of twenty miles from the Hudson). But there were two strips of land above Verplanck's Point of which neither Van Cortlandt nor his heirs ever obtained the ownership. One was the so-called Ryke's patent, a tract called by the Indians Sachus or Sackhoes, embracing about THE PHILIPSES AND VAN CORTLANDTS 167 eighteen hundred acres between Verplanck-s and Peekskill Creek, whereon a large portion of the village of Peekskill has been built. This tract was bought from the Indians, April 21, 1GS5, by Ei chard Abramsen, Jacob Abramsen, Tennis Dekey (or DeKay), Seba, Jacob, and John Harxse, and soon afterward was patented to them for a quit-rent of " ten bushels of good winter merchantable wheat year-ly." The name of Ryke's patent is Dutch for Richard's patent, so called after Richard Abramsen, the principal patentee, who later assumed the English name of Lent. Substantially the whole tract passed to Hercules Leut, Richard's son, about 1730.