MY FATHER'S PEOPLE

By Grandfather

Miami, Florida

June 13, 1953

My Dear Grandchildren:

            It seemed appropriate, that on this my 90th birthday, I should send you this letter. It is not in regard to myself. In your coming years, you may be able to judge better of my own career than I can. One of my own Grandfathers died during my childhood. In this booklet is told from reliable records what little is known of his life and environment.

            MY FATHER'S PEOPLE is written with a view of helping you to understand those plain country folk who, during the last three preceding centuries witnessed the spinning of the yarn for the web and woof of our present development and had their humble part in the task.

            The outline of a second smaller booklet - MY MOTHER'S PEOPLE - is still in the process of making. It will be available to you in few months, if eyesight and T I M E permit.

            Note that in these lines you are addressed as though you are teenagers. I can't help that. It is a sort of hangover due to my years as a pedagogue.

            The place of my first efforts to produce anything literary was in a genealogical publisher's office. The well known English author, Thomas Hughes, was compiling a sort of glossary of American families who came in prior to the Revolution and settled the Colonies. When he advertised for a person who could read Dutch script, I applied. I could read it then, and having but lately quit the University by reason of fundlessness with a jobless outlook ahead, the opportunity was a godsend, I would have read Sanscript, or tried to.

            But I must get on with the Osterhoudt story. The first families seems to have come about 1645, when all the Hudson valley was New Netherland. Had the Holland Government been wisely directed, it might have remained so. For tales of settlers coming and clearing their land, while never owning a foot of it, you must dig into the biased and many times false history of the period.

            The place where Hendrick Osterhoudt settled, was on the bank of the Hudson about a hundred miles from New Amsterdam. Conditions in a new country are always hard. I have had a taste of pioneer life myself, and realize that fact. Families were large, with correspondingly large death rate. In settlements as a general thing, the immigrant might be able to read and write, but his children and grandchildren, and those who came after them, grew up scarcely knowing what a book looked like. In reading Dutch family records, I would find the newcomers writing their family records in good Dutch, free from mistakes. When the old bible had passed into the hands of a new generation - forest bred as we say, scarcely able to read or write, spelling their words as they sounded, and scrawling them down in a hand that shoed clearly that writing was becoming a lost art. Then for three generations, there might be a break, no records kept. Then if the old bible survived, a new hand would be writing in an attempt at English. One man, a Heinrich Oosterhoudt, writing in 1703, used both English and Dutch words intermingled in a manner that showed his generation to be in a state of transition from their old tongue to a new one.

            From the records of another related family, we learn that the Osterhoudts lived in Albany as early as 1705. At that date, they seem to have been river men, some of them owning schooners and sloops.

            My greatgrandfather, Yerry (George) was born in 1772. From old letters, his father was a militiaman under General Stark, after Stark had been tranferred to Albany in 1778. His list of troops I cannot find. The ignorance of the period, as I have explained, rubbed out many records. Don't blame them, their was hard.

            Yerry's family lived in Knox township, Albany county. His people were farmers. When he grew up, he married a girl named Magdalin Bronk. That was in 1793. Old women and men have told me she was beautiful. I have heard her grandchildren rave about her and her good grandmotherly qualities. She and Yerry married young - 21 and 16 according to her grand-daughter, an old lady in Albany (1937). My friend and third cousin, Bill Osterhoudt, janitor of the Farmers and Merchant Bank in Albany, sais she was a saint as well as a good cook.

            Yerry was a renter. He lived on the Van Rensselaer Manor. There were thousands of renters there at that period, working like peasants of Europe. Their father of grandfathers had cleared the land and had built their own buildings, but they did not own anything. They paid annual rentage to the Lord of the Manor - same as the peasants of Europe did - but they did not pay with money. Each farmer had a curious old deed to his land as long as rent was paid. Those I saw had a clause something like this: "On payment of these or equivalent products, this aforenamed land shall be yours or yours heirs, while the rivers run and the grass groweth green."  As to the 'products', an old 19th century poet summed them up thus:

                        "Four fat fowels and a beefrib good.

                         Bring me a load of your choicest wood.

                         Measure me grain in your baskets three.

                         Two days service is due me.

                         One swine fattened or two swine lean.

                         While streams doth run and the grass grow green."

            I think this is about as near to the facts as one can come at this late date. Of course, Yerry had to pay the taxes, a matter that had to be threshed out during the Whiskey Rebellian, taking at the very time we are looking onto, but that does not concern us.

            Yerry got up at three and drove to Albany. Hundreds of other farmers did the same. All day they sawed wood. The great manor home had at least 25 fireplaces, great and small - in the kitchen, ballroom, banquet hall, and guests rooms. There was no steam heat then and no coal. Everybody ate a big free-to-all dinner. Then Yerry and the rest drove home under the stars, less scared of Indians than they would have been a generation earlier.

            Yerry's family was big and growing up. One boy, especially, took to the new school like a duck to water. He mastered English and High German at fifteen. That gave him a sizeable talking area, and he knew how to use it. England began to treat us as though she had forgotten all about Yorktown. War broke out. That boy was a tall athletic fellow. Like all farm boys, he could ride and shoot well. (The handsomest figure on horseback we ever saw, a very old lady once told me). He took to the new school well. Soon he could read and write English. High German he could soon talk as glibly as his native Dutch. Perhaps that was because he was courting a German girl. At 17 he enlisted. The officers soon discovered his line of ability. Hundreds of New England boys were in the ranks besides Dutch and German. He understood all three tongues, and after becoming versed in the Manual of Arms, he drilled any squad of raw recruits. At 18 he was a Major.

            The British invaded from Canada, following the same route as they had in the Revolution a few years before, but they did'nt get far. Lake Champlain became a long red hot bit of water. After failing to take Plattsburg, they sailed to the South. The next year, the war was over. His cousin was moving to the west and sold his farm he was leaving (under Manor regulations), in Bern township a few miles from Yerr's farm in Knox. It was a beautiful old place. In the East, the rolling hills went up and up. Looking North, one could see Mount Marsy in the Adirondacks and the sun rose over the Presidential Range in New Hampshire - each of the mountains standing out like a great monument. While on the western side, the land sank down to a deep little valley with a brook running through it. Great sugar maples everywhere along the farm line. If you had boiled their sap into syrup on a warm February day with a very pretty girl cousin to help you - you'd remember the place.

            This brilliant young officer was Col. Nicholas Osterhoudt, my Grandfather, your Great Great Grandfather. By his German wife, he had a large family. Then she died. The times were hard on woman. She had to cook over the kitchen fireplace. Clothing had to be made by hand. Even the thread had to be spun out. The big wheel for wool and the little one for flax hummed daily. A hard life.

            What was he to do with children of all sizes? But his luck hadn't entirely deserted him.

            An elderly New Englander bought the farm next to his. The Manor of Lords were beginning to sell their land. The old tenants were refusing to pay rent. The new neighbor's name was Jones. He was a properous man, good family of the old Welsh stock which migrated to the colonies early. His son Lathan was a prominent physician, or perhaps just a Doctor, in New Jersey. Nice people, especially his daughter Catherine, a young school teacher still youthful and good looking. (Young and youthful must mean extraordinary). Now, Nicholas could talk just as well in English as Dutch or German, just as persuasively. You had better learn two or three extra languages. There's no telling when you may need one. I like to think of Nicholas climbing over or through the line fence. He must have done it. Catharine was apparently not displeased to see him. Hw was a hard-pressed renter; his had been due since 1790 at least. His cousin had moved off without paying, and Nicholas had never paid a dollar of a day's wood sawing, he wouldn't. I have always wondered whether or not Catherine a thrifty New England girl, such as I know she was, ever inquired into his financial standing.

            I don't think she did inquire. Woman school teachers seldom do. She took him for granted and fell to mothering his brood. She made a splendid stepmother, one was never loved better, and all went well. The family began to increase in number again. Catherine's first baby was named Lathan, after her brother, the doctor. The second wife's family was nearly as large in number as that of the first wife. I think the total of both was 17, but 5 died in infancy. I may be off one either way. The old records will show. Only two names count with you now - two great grandfathers. Jake, the eldest boy in the first family, the father of your Grandmother Osterhoudt, and Lathan, who became my father. You see, I married Uncle Jake's daughter. She could hardly be called my first cousin, for our fathers were only half brothers.

            All the while, the affairs of the Great manor were going badly. Folks were beginning to complain that Manor or Patroon system, was a feudal barbarism brought from Europe early in the days of old PEG LEGGED PETER, and did not belong in a free country. They claimed that the soldiers should be given the land that their grandfathers had cleared. The cry "We will pay no more rent" began to be heard. Finally, an almost war broke out. The Patroons appealed to the government to evict the unruly tenants, and the troops were called out to aid the sheriff. They came marching out from Albany and started to climb the Helderburg Mountains, behind which most of the rebellious tenants lived. That was about 1845. At a narrow pass on one of the few roads which had been worked down to let the hill people get to the Hudson Valley and to Albany. The hill farmers, armed with their old flintlocks, hayforks, and the heavy handles off their threshing-flails, met the troops, the Home guards. The troops stopped. Afraid, no. You see, in both contending forces, uphill and down, were cousins and uncles, fathers and sons, fathers brandishing pitchforks from uphill and sons lugging rifles standing on the downhill side. Over half the militia thought the farmers were right. I think that morally they were right, butt - -, I'll tell you later.

            Among that uphill crowd who were brandishing old flintlocks and pitchforks, and yelling; DOWN WITH THE RENT!! (that was their battle cry), were two men - one quite old and the other quite young. Your Great Great Grandfather Nicholas and his son, your Great Grandfather Jake, both angry like the rest. Nicholas was an avowed Anti-Renter. He had reason to be bitter. Long ago when he was young, he had gotten that farm from his cousin Henry Osterhoudt, who had moved to another part of the state. This cousin had refused to pay any rent, believing that the debt had been wiped out by the blood of the Revolutionary War, as their orators used to spout out every 4th of July. In the meantime, cay between 1780 and 1845, those unpaid Four fat fowls and other farm products had been increasing at compound interest rates for nearly a century. The Patroons were angry at the militia, whom they called cowards, and still more angry at the renters, and vowed vengenance.

            Then something sad happened. It had been a pleasant Autum. Suddenly came a change. Fierce winter weather came almost without warning. The militia, some of them city clerks and other indoor workers, fell ill. Some died. The Governor ordered them home.

            Then the patroons tried another method. The Sheriff was given scores of tough duties. The Patroons saw to it that they were paid well. Now they took the farms one by one in surprize raids. Some claimed that proper notices were not given. Whether this was true I cannot say. The furniture would be thrown out on the roadside. The stock turned loose, and a new occupant, generally a stranger, would be installed. I am only telling what old people have told me. Oh what fights they used to tell about! Men overpowered by force, woman flinging boiling hot water, but all in vain. The Manor people, the Patroons, conquered or course. They had the law on their side. You see, there had been a very inconspicious little passage slipped into the constitution that few ever thought to read or understand, and the Constitution is the Supreme law of the land.

            I blame Grandpa Yerry. He was much older than you are now. I suppose he was busy courting Grandma Magdaline. It is just too bad! You keep your eyes wide open - laws are sometimes tricky yet. The substance of that passage was in effect:

CONTRACTS MADE BEFORE THE RATIFICATION OF THIS CONSTITUTION SHALL NOT BE INVALIDATED BY IT.

The Patroons' land grant was given them by the Netherland Government and later ratified by the King of England. An unbreakable contract. This is a sad warning to us all: LOOK TO YOUR LAWS. NOT EVEN THE FROZEN FEET OF VALLEY FORGE ARE SACRED ENOUGH TO TRAMPLE ON THEM, EVEN THO' THEY FIT US ILL THEY MUST BE OBEYED.

            Farm after farm was cleared of its former holder. Only one re-mained. Some old tenants grew angry at the injustice of it, for that one farm remained unmolested, while they had been evicted and were day laborers or were with difficulty seeking new homes.

            They growled: "Did not Nick ride with us to the pass? Did he not yell: Down with the rent! just as loudly as we? This is not fair." It was not. For a time, Grandfather was as astonished as the rest. I doubt if ever information came to him from any legal channel as to why he was allowed to remain unharried by the law while years became decades and decades followed each other back to Time's great waste-basket of things that were. I think a well disposed agent slipped his word that he had nothing to fear from the law, for when I was yet quite young all the family seemed to know.

            Some years later, in 1887 to be exact, while I, an assistant editor on that old publication The American Ancestry, my first attempt at literature, was pouring over old documents and gleaning data for the book inside the State Library and out, an old Albany lawyer told me this. Whether from good source or not, I never asked:

            The time must have been about 1850, when an agent who planned those evictions for the old Patroons, came to his employer, the Manor's Head, with this request: Could a strong force of deputies be furnished us tomorrow? The next farmer on our eviction list is old Colonel Nick. The most poison of all the renters he is, and the sassiest. There may be merry hell tomorrow at his place. Besides, public opinion is in his favor. You see, his second wife is a Yankee girl with book learning. The New Englanders settled here are sour by nature on the Manor folks. They call us agents nasty names. One hates to bear the name of rogue because he enforces the law."

            "Mind them not, the hangman has always been counted half brother to the rogue," answered old Killian, who, as a whig, had clashed with Jackson, holding that all democrats were devils. You know how the Yankees hated Hamilton as much as the renters did, because he slipped, under the very nose of then all, that little clause into the Constitution guaranteeing our time honored right to Manor land and privilage. Calling e'en his mother vile name for quitting her Nevis Island planter and eloping with Alexander's father. Mind how, while in Washington's cabinet, John Adams called him, to his back of course, "That Scotch Peddler's Bastard". Bastard he was, perhaps, but he outsmarted them.

            "Now as to Colonel Nick, I bear no malice, I mind me well the time when the Old Enemy came down from Canada and set the Long Lake boiling. He was my best officer. Let them both while they live be unmolested in their home because he was once a good soldier, so let him go, tied now to the apron strings of his yankee wife."

            The continual rows and contentions had results. The thrifty minded cleared out seeking less troubled surroundings. The new tenants were for the most part a shiftless lot, with none of the stability the old one had. They were evicted in their turn and other came. Our family were about the last of the old renter stock.

            Grandfather Nicholas died at the age of seventy-six. I was seven then. We lived some distance in another part of the state. The news was long in coming. Grandmother lived on. Years passed and I became a man. In 1885, a few days after my graduation from Prep. school, I visited her. A recent stroke had deprived her of her understanding. She did not know me. I think her age was 87 when she died the next summer. She had been a well loved stepmother. Uncle Jake, who had taken over the place after Grandfather Nicholas died, treated her as well as any mother could have been treated. I never met in all my life, a man so thoughtful of others, so full of human kindness, as he was.

            He had taken over the farm when his father's health failed, and handled it better then any other farmer in its history. I feel much at outs with the law which at that late date, 1886, took the old place from him. There was no record of an eviction notice being served on either his father or himself, and 1850 was long past. However, Grandmother had but drawn her last breath, when notice came to settle for those annual four fat chickens and all those unsawed wood loads, ect., at interest annually compounded for close to a century, or get out.

            My Father, Lathen Osterhoudt, was the eldest of the second family of Nicholas. He was born in 1830. He was apprenticed at the age of fifteen, but his lot was a happy one, for it was to his eldest half sister's husband, living scarecely a mile from his parents home. His new home was at Warner's Lake, a lovely little sheet of water lying on the farm of his brother-in-law, Abram J. Warner. According to contract as a bound boy, he was entitled to three months schooling during winter, and at the age of twenty-one, he received the stipulated two tailor-made suits of clothing (fabric duly specified), two outfits of undergarments, two pairs of calfskin shoes made to his exact foot measure, (you should read one of those old Dutch contracts to understand their careful methodicalness) and the sum of One Hundred Dollars in Gold, or its lawful equivalent. When he became of age, all of this duly bestowed on him, together with the extra present of a new leather bag for his apparel and a new wallet for his coin.

            He had a schoolday sweetheart, who, with her father, had already moved some hundred and fifty miles west to a new locality where land could be had for much less than in the older sections of the State. "Goodland lies to the west. Follow the sunset and find It" was the song of all the East.

            With bulging bag and wallet, he hurriedly departed. Time is precious in youth. The forest cart track knew neither bus nor train, but what traveler would refuse a stout young man's company? What lonely settler who had not seen a white face in a month, but would be only too delighted with a guest. In much less than a week he had reached his destination.

            In 1853, he was married and housed in a small clearing and a good payment mad on his land. Also, he had a yoke of oxen and the necessary implements. Of course, he was considerable in debt with a family on the way.

            Now 1853, like 1953, was cursed with the threat of war. Your school history explains all about their political mess. In 2053 it will explain ours; not much sooner than that I think. The pattern was the same. Some were trembling, for they knew the beast. Others were bayling for it or covertly egging it on. And it was not Foreign, but Civil War they feared - the kind most deadly. Civilizations have crumbled in its claws. Everywhere, in log churches and schoolhouse, men and women flocked shouting discordant views. Shady groves were chosen in summertime.

            That was why Father Lathan put his wife and firstborn on board his ox cart one June day in 1853, bound for a pleasant grove with hundreds of neighbors, friends, enemies, and neutrals, to air the subject till the air was at white heat, and Father was to be BOY ORATOR. He did well, and every Abolitionist and all the Foreigners from that log settlement back a ways among the hills, cheered themselves speechless. You should read the next Wednesday's weekly paper.

            But that fine speech had a troubled beginning, for my little half sister got displeased at something, I cannot tell you what, for on that date I was still a NOY YET, more than a decade away, and her loud yells completely drowned out father's oratory.

            I don't know what Father would have done to save his speech from the mockery of his political opponents, had not one of this little foreign girls who lived in that group of log shanties up in the hills, come running up with a wonderful plaything - a big bunch of those little gourds she had raised in her garden, small hard things no bigger than a plum. You remember what a cute, tiny handle they have at the stem end. She had worked a string through each handle and tied about a dozen to the end of a short stout stick. Their color and clatter so delighted my baby sister, that she forgot what she was crying about and quit.

            "Please Ma'am" she said, "an (if) ee wad hear th great mon, let me mind the bairn so it'll no fash (molest) ee mair", and with that she wisked the child away still clutching at the pretty, rattling gourd which some child lugged from home that morning. (A pioneer's childs toy).

            Father was so thankful, that later he found the child and thanked her, "The Greet Kon kissed me oou (out) of pure gratitude", she told her brother that night.

            All of this is one of our family oft-told tales, and for good reasons. This foregoing part you need not credit if you so mind.

            While the young man and the little girl were standing together, a strange thing happened, seen only to an old foreign dame whose eyes were fitted to such sights. She said a band of Fairies, slightly bigger than dragonflies, came sailing doon (down) with a long shining rope she alone could see. Round and round the two they went fly-ing, binding them together. Just an auld wife tale.

            But some years later when Father's wife died and left him with a family of four - all less than ten years old, the little foreign born girl had grown up into a lovely young woman, she came to him again and rescued him from a worse plight than an interrupted speech. So much for the Dame's vision that the Scottish people of the old generation, at least a few of them, still called "The Second Sight'.

                                                Goodby, Dear Grandchildren. I must rest my eyes.

NOTE:  My Father, Lathan Osterhoudt, was born at East Bern, Albany County, N.Y. in 1830, and died at Binghamton, N.Y. in 1905.

NOTE: The baby: My eldest half sister, Inez. Later Mrs. Emery Hicks of Rochester, N.Y. a fine woman with a fine family. She was born in 1852 and died 1939 as far as I have discovered, for our life paths were flung far apart.

NOTE: The little foreign girl with the gourds: Mrs. Lathan Osterhoudt, Father's second wife. One of the best of all wives and mothers. I was her first child. She was born in the Island of Arran on the west coast of Scotland, or more correctly speaking, in the Firth of Clyde, in the month of May 1840 and died in the month May, 1928. I am blind to records, some else may give correct dates.

NOTE:  I was born in Binghamton, N.Y. June 13, 1863, just about ten Years to a day after the political picnic I have just described with all the accuracy one could expect from an absentee, but one who has heard the story of it many times.

                                                                        With love and well wishes

                                                                                    Your Grandfather,

                                                                                                William L. Osterhoudt