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Cosyn Gerritsen van Putten:

   New Amsterdam’s Wheelwright

Posting of an article that appeared in

de Halve Maen (the Journal of The     Holland Society of New York),

Vol. LXXX (Summer 2007), 2:23-30.

 

              It is posted here courtesy of The Holland Society of New York and Firth Haring Fabend.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cosyn Gerritsen van Putten: New Amsterdam’s Wheelwright

                                                                                                     by  Firth Haring Fabend

Little is known about the craft of the wheelwright in New Netherland, either of the wheelwrighting process itself or of the wheelwright’s methods, tools, and challenges. This is partly because this trade, unlike the baking, brewing, tapping, and carting trades, among others, was not regulated by the government.  And it is partly because   very few wheelwrights are mentioned in the records of New Netherland. Only Cosyn Gerritsen van Putten is clearly observable on his bouwerie, no. 41 on the 1639 Manatus Map, along one of the few “roads” on Manhattan that year. The renowned chronicler of Manhattan, Isaac Newton Phelps-Stokes, says this road later was “without doubt the Bowery Lane, and formed part of the wagon road to Sapokanican.” The road as it passed by or through Bouwerie 41 was called “Cosyn Gerritsen’s Wagon Way” in the old records. After this, it turned west, passing the adjacent bouwerie of Wouter van Twiller, Director of the colony from 1633-1638, and ran to the Hudson River along today’s Gansevoort Street. Cosyn’s Wagon Way is where Astor Place and Eighth Street are today. Later it came to be referred to as the Sand Hills Road.1 (See Figures 1 and 2.)

 

 

 

 

 

In the seven volumes of Fernow’s Records of New Amsterdam covering the years 1653-1674 only two references to wheelwrights other than Cosyn are found, and both are in the 1660s when the population of the little community was growing at a fast rate. Janny Venema found four wheelwrights in Beverwyck in the period from 1652 to 1664, one of them a master. One is mentioned in the Esopus.2  

The area served by a wheelwright in early eighteenth-century England was five square miles, and this would correspond roughly with the settled area of New Amsterdam in 1650, so it seems probable that, up to the time of the population surge in the mid-to-late 1650s, no more than one wheelwright was needed, and that one was Cosyn. In 1676, Cosyn’s son-in-law Jan Pietersen Haring is identified in The Andros Papers as a wheelwright, and he may have worked with or for Cosyn from the time of his marriage to Grietje Cosyns in 1662, or even earlier, but there is only the 1676 reference so far.3

Why did Cosyn emigrate to New Netherland? My theory is that Wouter van Twiller, his exact contemporary from Nijkerk in Gelderland, a mile or two from the village of Putten, encouraged him to do so. Wouter, a nephew of Patroon Kiliaen van Rensselaer, became the director of the colony in 1633. Cosyn and Wouter must have known each other from childhood and perhaps had gone to school together, worshiped in the same church, played ball together in the fields, skated together on the ice ponds, fished and hunted in the same lakes and forests. They may even have had a family connection, although this is just a guess. Three families from this area of northern Gelderland known as the Veluwe who emigrated to New Netherland were interrelated: the Van Rensselaers, the Van Twillers, and the Van Curlers, and there is a slight hint that the Gerritsen family had some connection to them (see below).

In 1629, four years before arriving in New Amsterdam to take up the position of Director of the Colony in 1633, Wouter van Twiller had received a promise of land on Manhattan. His farm appears on the Manatus Map of 1639 as  #10, right next to the 68 acres that Cosyn received, probably in 1637,  #41. Wouter, planning to grow tobacco on his large property, would have needed a wheelwright to make his farm implements and keep them in repair, and I believe that Cosyn was his man. Networks of family and friends were of great importance in the seventeenth century, and most people expected to and did reap benefit from them.4

The wheelwright in seventeenth-century New Amsterdam was as important to the community as the housewright, the millwright, and the boatwright, and interestingly, according to the wheelwright at Colonial Williamsburg, whom I interviewed, the wrighting trades were not interchangeable, “any more than were the skills of a blacksmith and a silversmith.” The housewright did not know how to make a wheel and a wagon, and the millwright did not know how to build a ship, and vice versa.

Cartmen and porters needed the wheelwright. Farmers were dependent on him to make their dung carts, wagons, wheelbarrows, ploughs, and harrows—and to repair them. And not only the farmer, but every freeholder with a garden plot had a need for a cart and a wheelbarrow and for at least some of the others items for breaking ground and planting it. In other words, a man who could master the not-so-simple challenge of building a wheel had a captive customer base in New Amsterdam and could do well for himself. (Figure 3.)

Cosyn Gerritsen did well, indeed. His bouwerie on the Manatus Map consisted of 34 morgens of land, about 68 acres, in the area between today’s Astor Place and the New York University campus, and his grant for it included as well a lot for a house and garden on today’s Broadway. During his career he acquired three building lots on Broadway. (See Figure 4.) In 1661, he received from Director General Petrus Stuyvesant a ground brief for a five-acre parcel of land “neare Myn Heer Stuyvesants Bowery.” And to this piece,  “Before 1665,” he was able to add the house and ten acres of his (probable) boyhood friend, Director Wouter van Twiller, who had died in the Netherlands about ten years earlier.5

Van Twiller’s house on this land was built for him by Dutch West India Company carpenters in 1633 when he arrived to take up his post as Director of the colony. It must have been a crowning moment of pride for Cosyn to come into possession of this property of the former Director, although we can believe that there was some promise that he should come into it, made before Van Twiller died, for on 17 July 1664, Jeremias van Rensselaer wrote to Oloff Stevensz van Cortland, his father-in-law: “in my opinion it would not be bad if you could make a satisfactory agreement with Cosyn Gerretsz about the land of van Twiller.”6

The house stood at the corner of today’s 8th Street and Macdougal Street in Greenwich Village for 160 years. According to the renowned chronicler of Manhattan Isaac Newton Phelps-Stokes, it appears on both the Ratzer and the Bancker maps of 1766 and 1773, and it was last seen “on Taylor’s Map of Nov. 2, 1795.”7

Wheelmaking. Wheelmaking is an ancient craft. According to wheelmaker Don Peloubet, in correspondence, the earliest wheel was probably not much more than a length of log with some sort of axle. Over time, this developed into a solid wheel make of planks cut into a round shape and pinned together, the axle turning with the wheel. The further development was the spoked wheel, whose design today has changed little since ancient times.

The Assyrians had carts with wheels containing six spokes as early as 1680 B.C., according to Howard M. Dubois, a prominent nineteenth-century wheelmaker in Philadelphia. In 1878, DuBois wrote of ancient Thebes, “the wheel of that age compared favorably with the wheels used in some parts of Europe to-day.”8 This is because the ancients recognized the laws of mechanics and understood “that everything made in accordance with those laws can never change in principle, however varied the applications to suit the ever changing wants of mankind.” In other words, the sizes of the hubs, spokes, and rim of the wheel had to conform to certain mechanical and mathematical rules of proportion in order for the wheel to be functional.  It was understood that the first thing the apprentice wheelwright had to accomplish in order to learn his job was to master basic math, although the trial and error method was part of the early craft.

The complex art and skill of wheelmaking was passed down from fathers to sons, or master wheelwrights (or journeymen) to apprentices. In 1850 in America, again according to wheelmaker Don Peloubet, “the wheelwright was still working with hand tools, using methods that had been employed for centuries.” (Figure 5.) He adds that the nineteenth-century rural wheelwright shop was involved in making the entire vehicle, while the urban wheelwright worked in carriage factories.9 In New Amsterdam in the seventeenth century, we can be sure that Cosyn Gerritsen’s was a one-stop shop, he and his workers making the whole wagon, cart, barrow, harrow, plow, etc. In fact, a labor contract with an apprentice confirms this: “Albert Cornelissen hires hi[mself to Cosyn Gerritsen] to make wheels and wagons [and] whatever is connected therewith.” As late as 1884, the wheelwright George Sturt says of the occupation in England, “it was a ‘folk’ industry carried on in a ‘folk’ method” as it had been for generations. In 1884, in England, it was probably not much less folkish and primitive than it had been in Cosyn’s day in New Amsterdam.10  Don Peloubet has reinforced this, writing that the “methods of Colonial Williamsburg and George Sturt are closer to Cosyn’s” than the factory processes described in his book Wheelmaking, the latter being of the era of the carriage industry, which at its height was highly mechanized.

The Craft of the Wheelwright. To start from the beginning of the process, the choice of the proper timber was of first importance. A wagon or a plow had to last a long time, and this required using the right timber for the job, and properly seasoning it.  In New York and New Jersey, according to H. M. DuBois, the best timber for making wheels whose rim and spokes were no more than 1 7/8 inches in diameter was white shag-bark hickory, bitter nut hickory, and pig-nut hickory. But for the hub of the wheel the wood of the sour gum tree was “incomparable.” White rock elm was also excellent for hubs. The sour gum tree was found in the seacoast marshes of New Jersey, “where it reaches its greatest perfection.” If properly seasoned, it was highly durable and “impossible to split open with an axe.” For larger wheels, oak was superior. “About twenty accepted varieties of oak grow in the Atlantic and neighboring states.” If gum was not available, the “hard white birch, of New-York, the locust, the black walnut, or the white oak are satisfactory,” according to DuBois.11 

It mattered when the tree was felled.  Cosyn Gerritsen would have known that an oak cut down in the middle of winter dried well, the sap becoming almost as hard as the wood. A common practice was to fell a tree in winter, but leave it in the woods till spring, when the bark could be easily removed with a special tool called a bark spud and rolled and stacked in cords for sale to a tanner. The ever-frugal wheelwright sold the branches for cordwood and the boughs and twigs to bakers for their ovens and to potters for their kilns.12 (See Figure 5.)

 

After he identified a tree he wanted, the wheelwright had to arrange for it to be felled by woodcutters (if nature had not already felled it), then sawed into manageable lengths, hauled onto a timber carriage, and conveyed back to his shop. Loading the timber onto the carriage took a Herculean effort involving laying skids on the ground from carriage wheels to the tree pieces, chaining the pieces to the wheels, then rolling or sliding the cut logs down the skids onto the carriage with the help of levers and man power. Bailey explains how the sharp hooked ends of iron levers would be inserted into the pieces of the trunk and of large branches and poles inserted into the levers’ ringed ends to maneuver the timber about. (See Figure 6.) This work was best done in the summer when the ground was dry and hard and could support the weight of the timber-laden carriage, but winter, when the sap had dried, was the best time for sawing it into boards and usable pieces.13

 

In the case of a tree brought whole and uncut, green and sap-filled, to the shop, Sturt describes the moment when the sawyers came to his yard to open it: “The wheelwright was most eager to know how it looked, that heart of ash or oak or elm, of so many decades standing, which no eye had ever seen before. Lovely was the first glimpse of the white ash-grain, the close-knit oak, the pale-brown and butter-coloured elm.” Lovely, yet problematical: “Would it dry into hard tough timber? Was the grain as straight as had been hoped? And that knot—right through one plank, how far did it go into the next? Every fresh tree, as the sawyers cut out and turned over the planks, at last gave rise to questions like these.”14

The wheelwright next had to make decisions about how the timber should be sawn and the best lengths it should be sawn into. He was guided in this by the necessity of choosing the best wood, without knots or flaws, for the bottom framework of the wagon. The bottom then gave the dimensions of the planks to be sawn. For the special curved timbers suitable for specific parts of the wagon the master wheelwright ever kept out a sharp eye. If he noticed that a particular piece of ash, say, had the shape of a wagon shaft, he marked it off for the right length and then had the sawyers split it from end to end, so that there were two curved pieces, one on either side of the saw, both suitable for shafts.15

Seasoning the wood had to take place as soon as the boards were cut, before they could warp. DuBois wrote that timber must be piled for seasoning where air, free from dampness, could freely circulate around it, and it must never be stored anywhere near a horse stable, he cautioned, for the ammonia from the manure would “kill” even the most durable of timber.16

What sort of buildings, accoutrements, and tools might Cosyn Gerritsen have needed to conduct his wheelwrighting business at the end of “Cosyn Gerritsen’s Wagon Way”? He would have had a dwelling house, a workshop, a timber shed where the seasoning took place, perhaps a separate lathe house. In a photograph of the wheelwright’s shop at Colonial Williamsburg, we can see hanging on the walls the tools of the trade, and also the templates for cutting the curved segments of the wheels’ rims, known as felloes, pronounced fellies. (See Figure 7.)

 

 

In this shop, a huge wheel is set up against a rear wall. Its hand crank is used to power the lathe, the wheelmaker’s all-important tool for turning hubs and other cylindrical objects into the forms he needed. Even today, as Don Peloubet wrote to me, woodturning lathes are still operated the same way as Cosyn operated his lathe, by foot, with chisel-like woodturning tools held against a toolrest to provide control.

The “furniture” in the shop would have included worktables and benches (wheelhorses, hub cradles, and spokeholders). The hand tools Cosyn would have needed were adzes, augers, axes, boring tools for making the mortises, calipers, chisels, clamps, drawknives and spokeshaves for making spokes, files, mallets, mauls, levers, lever hooks for getting the spokes into the rims, planes, saws, a “Samson” for applying the iron strakes to the wheel, timber jacks, tree markers, and “spuds” for peeling bark from felled timber. For very large wheels, he needed a wheel pit made in the floor of the shop, as in Colonial Williamsburg. And he needed a sawpit, the kind where a nine-foot saw was manned by two sawyers, one on top, and one (the unlucky one who had to endure the rain of chips upon his head and other discomforts) down in the pit. The sawpit would have been out in a field, away from the shop, as it is at Colonial Williamsburg, away from the complaints and curses of the put-upon sawyers. (See Figure 8.)

It seems clear that the occupation of wheelwright required a considerable outlay of capital for tools and equipment. Moreover, since the wooden wheels had to be rimmed in iron, for protection from the terrain, Cosyn either had to have had a smithy operation on his premises, or to have gone nearby for this service. And since wagons and other conveyances made of wood had to be painted to preserve them, he would have to have had a painting operation. (Two coats of lead paint were recommended.) Again, this was a capital-intensive occupation, not the least of which was the opportunity cost of inventorying the seasoning timber. Some wood had to be seasoned for as long as ten years.

Cosyn’s Workers. Apprentices, after a year or two, might be equal to making and painting a wheelbarrow, but to learn the whole trade, according to Sturt, “seven years was thought not too long.” Sturt’s father and Sturt after him employed eight “skilled workmen or apprentices, eight friends of the family.” Aside from the reference cited above regarding Cosyn’s apprentice Albert Cornelisen, there are few clues in the records as to how many helpers he might have employed. In 1642, an employee took him to court to obtain past wages. It would have been normal for Cosyn’s first son-in-law, Herman Theuniszen van Zell in Munsterlt, the husband of his daughter Grietje Cosyns, to have worked for him. But if so, Herman did not last at wheelwrighting. He apparently chose to farm for Augustyne Heermanns rather than to persist at the exacting occupation of his father-in-law.17

Cosyn’s more capable and more ambitious second son-in-law, Jan Pietersen Haring from Hoorn, was a schepen or magistrate in the Out Ward in 1673 and 1674 and the leader of a group of families who in 1681 acquired 16,000 acres, the Tappan Patent, from the Tappaen Indians. As already mentioned, he is identified as a wheelmaker in the Andros Papers in 1676, and he may have worked for or with Cosyn in this capacity before or after marrying Grietje Cosyns in 1662. Whatever, in marrying the boss’s daughter, Haring came into an ownership position in the business.18

Other employees of Cosyn’s were Ryck Hendricksen, whom he went to court to force to honor a contract to saw timber for a wainscot, and Bastiaen de “Ramacker,” the Dutch term for wheelwright, whose land adjoined Cosyn’s property. Bastiaen may, on the other hand, have been a competitor. When Cosyn went to court to testify for his friend Sybout Claasen from Hoorn, a carpenter, in the matter of a disputed debt involving six planks and a half-barrel of beer, Cornelis Lambersen Cool taunted Sybout by saying he could get planks “from Harmen Bastiaensz. whenever I please.”19

Once the wood was seasoned, the next stage of the wheelmaker’s work began, cutting it into the shapes and forms he needed. “No needs,” according to Sturt, “can have been more exacting or diverse than the old-fashioned wheelwright’s.”20 From experience, a sense of proportion, and an understanding of the laws of mechanics and mathematics, Cosyn knew, for instance, that a hub, also called a nave, with a diameter of 4.5 inches had to be 7 inches in length. If the diameter was 7 inches, the length of the hub would have to be between 9 and 10 inches. Finally, iron bands or hoops were applied to the ends of the hub to strengthen it.  In the case of the 4.5-inch diameter hub, a popular style, the diameter of the front band would be 3 and 1/8 inches, and the diameter of the back band would be 3.75 inches. Bands made smaller than this formed a “very weak foundation upon which to build,” because they exposed too much of the end grain and together with the leverage of the spokes, would crack when subjected to straining or thumping on a rough roadway.21 

Next the hub had to be mortised to accept the spokes. According to DuBois, there were few more difficult things to do mechanically than the proper mortising of a hub, which required deciding the number of mortises needed, their relative size compared with the hub’s diameter, the manner in which the wheel was to be driven as regards ‘dish,’ and the amount of “brace” (dodge or stagger) the spokes are to have (one-half inch is recommended for best results. More puts a strain upon the tenon in the rim).22 The Oxford English Dictionary explains dish: “The spokes are inserted not at right angles, but with an inclination toward the axis” of the hub, so that the wheel appears to have a dish-like concavity on one side. The purpose of dishing the wheels was to reduce the stress and strain on them caused by the swaying gait of the horses or oxen.

Bailey has described the complicated process from hub to axle: “First, the chunk of well-seasoned elm chosen for the nave [hub] is turned on the lathe. Then the blacksmith will apply the iron nave hoops that bind the nave for strength and safety. Next, the mortises to take the spokes are cut into the nave. Now the spokes can be shaped and the tenons cut for the inner ends to fit into the nave. The spokes are all driven into the nave before the shoulders for the tongues on the outer ends of the spokes are marked off. Then the tongues are shaped to fit into the felloes. . . .Two holes are cut into the concave side to take two spokes for each felloe, and another hole at each end of the separate felloes to take a wooden dowel to make the joints that will form the felloes into a circle. Assembly of these wooden parts will show how much a wheelwright sets store on absolute tightness of joints. One further job is to bore a hole through the nave center to take the iron ‘box,’” the box being the sleeve through which will pass the axle, which in the seventeenth century was made of wood, with a leather sleeve or iron banding for wear resistance.23

Every wheelmaker, according to DuBois, knew that the fewer mortises the stronger his wheel. Wheels 4 feet 8 inches high and 5 feet high would have between 14 and 16 mortises with spokes of 7/8 inches to 1 and ½ inches. Wheels of 3 feet and 3 feet 8 inches would have between 10 and 12 mortises, with spokes of 1 and 5/8 inches to 2 and 3/8 inches. Using fewer mortises allowed more strength in the hub, less danger of the hub cracking, tenons more in proportion with the width of the spoke, and more surface to hold the tenon before meeting at the center. “To secure these requires that the size of the mortise relative to the diameter of the hub be thoroughly understood.” A nineteenth-century mortising gauge, like the simple wooden gauge used for centuries to measure spokes, is reproduced in Figure 9 showing the greatest amount that can safely be taken from the hub by mortising.

The spoke of a wheel has a tenon, shoulders, a face, a back, a throat, a body, and a point, and all of these parts must be in proportion to each other so that the wagon will bear its required load. Again, this is why, undergirding the wheelmaker’s art, had to lie a foundation of mathematical mechanics to enable him to understand the importance of the proportions.24

          In addition to the technical aspects of wheelmaking, the artisan had to take into consideration his customers’ particular needs, which depended on the nature of their soil, the grade of their land, the weather in their area, the power of their horses, their own “lifting power” and that of their workers, and, the particular ruts in their lanes.  In fact, ruts ruled. The wheelmaker had to get the rear wheels of a wagon to “follow” or track the front wheels, that is, to travel in the same ruts. “One inch of variation was allowed, no more,” for a particular lane could not be traversed if the wheels were too wide or too narrow to fall into the lane’s long-established ruts, which were often so deep as to come up to the hub and higher.25

          Once the spokes were inserted into the hub of the wheel, the wheelmaker turned to the rim or felloe. In the early wheelwright shops, according to Peloubet, the felloe or rim sections were cut “from rough planks with a felloe saw, a type of frame saw with a narrow center blade that cut on a curve. A felloe pattern was used to mark the planks for each size and type of wheel with each section covering two spokes. After cutting, the inside surface of the felloes were smoothed with a compass plane and the edges rounded or chamfered with a spokeshave. When the wheel spider (hub with spokes installed) was completed, the distance between spokes was determined by transferring measurements directly from the spider . . . or by the trial and error method of walking the wheel circumference with dividers. As advances in standardization were made, tables were developed that gave these spoke distances for various size wheels.”26 In the seventeenth century, there were no such handy tables, and Cosyn would have had to use his common sense and his experience, as well as his simple wooden gauge, to judge the sizes he needed.

          Finally, the finished wheel was fitted with an iron tire. Cosyn’s technique was to nail strips of iron, called strakes, onto the rim, as he would not have been familiar with a technique developed later that involved dropping a red-hot prefabricated iron hoop on to the wheel with the help of iron dogs. The hot wheel was then doused with water to shrink the iron tightly to the wood. (See Figure 10.)

 

          All said, it seems clear that wheelmaking was not for the frivolous or the faint of heart.

Who was Cosyn Gerritsen van Putten? Cosyn deposed as to his age in several documents. Thus it can be estimated that he was born in about 1606, in the small village of Putten in northern Gelderland, in the Veluwe, the hilly wooded region in the central Netherlands. Near Putten are the villages of Nykerk and Barnevelt and the estates of the Van Rensselaer family. From this neighborhood to New Netherland, besides the Van Rensselaers, Van Twiller, and Jacob van Curler, who were related to each other by blood and marriage, came Wolfert Gerritsz (van Kouwenhoven) and more than fifty other less well-known emigrants.  Wouter van Twiller, Director of the Colony from 1633-1638 and the nephew of Patroon Kiliaen van Rensselaer, was, as mentioned above, an exact contemporary of Cosyn, both being born about 1606.27 In such a small community they almost certainly knew each other from boyhood. I suggested above, too, that Wouter may have encouraged Cosyn to emigrate because he needed a wheelwright conveniently in his Manhattan neighborhood. The family/friends network was strategic to survival and success not only at home, but very much so in the New World, too, and it must be no coincidence that Cosyn was granted land in the 1630s right next to Director Van Twiller’s large farm, where he grew tobacco.

Baptismal sponsors also give clues to the importance of family and friends. On 20 May 1640, Cosyn invited (among others) Aert Theunis van Putten to witness the baptism of his first-born son. Judging by his first name, place of origin, and the honor done him of sponsoring the first born, Aert may have been a cousin, also from Putten. (Cosyn had a brother named Aert.) The next year, Jacob van Curler from the Putten neighborhood was among the witnesses to the baptism of Margrietje, Cosyn’s first daughter on 5 May 1641.

Aert Theunis van Putten was murdered by Indians in 1643. His widow, Susannah Schunenburgh, then married Cosyn’s friend, the carpenter from Hoorn, Sybout Claasen, illustrating again the power and attraction of the network of family and friends. On 20 January 1647 Cosyn invited Sybout Claasen and Susannah to witness the baptism of a second son, Hendrick.  A further link, in Hoorn, Sybout Claasen may have been related to Jan Pietersen Haring’s sister-in-law there, Ariaantje Claase.28 It is all very complicated, but in the seventeenth century baptismal sponsors were not chosen for nothing, any more than they are today.

Exactly when Cosyn Gerritsen from Putten in Gelderland came to New Netherland is not known. James B. Cozine, a descendant, has written this: “In 1633 Cosyn signed to come to New Netherland with the Dutch West India Company on April 9, at Utrecht, according to a manuscript written by J. D. Robinson in 1980.” Unfortunately, despite the specificity of this detail, and its ring of truth, neither Mr. Cozine nor I, through the assistance of Dr. P. Nouwt, archive researcher in The Netherlands, has been able to locate J. D. Robinson's finding in order to corroborate it. Dr. Nouwt checked the protocols of all sixteen notaries who were in office on 9 April 1633, in Utrecht, Gelderland, but he was unable to find the contract referred to. For future reference, though, he notes that in his previous research he saw several of such contracts of emigrants, but these were drawn up by notaries in Amsterdam. They were all contracts to work for the Dutch West India Company.29

However, because Cosyn’s bouwerie appears on the Manatus Map of 1639, we can assume that he was in New Amsterdam to receive it before that date. Indeed, it was the policy of the Dutch West India Company to allow the colonists to hold and occupy their land without paying anything for it for ten years, calculating these years from the time they “first sowed or mowed” it. Since Cosyn Gerritsen’s formal patent dates from 1647, he probably had first sowed or mowed his bouwerie as early as 1637 and had erected by at least that time the combination house-barn structure that appeared on the Manatus map two years later.30

James Cozine has suggested that Cosyn as a young man was likely conscripted to serve in the Dutch Army under the local lords during the years of war with Spain that were fought on Gelderland soil or nearby. “We know that the Van Rensselaers in the previous generation,” he writes, “were called upon to muster a company of 100 soldiers, in the practice of the day for noble families to form military units.” He goes on: “The Spanish were on the offensive between 1621-1625, then in March 1626 the Dutch increased their troop strength to 55,000, and in 1627 cleared the Spanish from the Acherhoek region of Gelderland. But it was not until late in 1629 that the Dutch were able to compel the Spanish and Imperialist troops to withdraw from Utrecht and Gelderland. The number of men under arms for the Dutch at this time was reportedly 128,000 men in April 1629. This was 12 percent of the total population of the country of 1 million and would mean that almost every man between 15 and 34 years of age would have been under arms.” He conjectures that Cosyn was a soldier off and on for at least four years, from 1626 to 1629 (aged 18-22).31 Again, in my opinion, these inferences sound quite likely, but hard evidence for them is lacking.

Dr. Nouwt found the marriage banns of a Cosijn Gerrits, “son of the late Gerrit Jansen, and Maeryken Evertsen, daughter of the late Evert Reyersen, both of Putten,” recorded in the City Hall of Putten on 2 January 1631. Assuming this is the same man as our wheelwright, then Maeryken died, for Cosyn Gerritsen van Putten in New Amsterdam had a wife named Vroutje Gerrits, sometimes called Vroutje or Vroutjen Cosyns. As Dr. Nouwt could find no death record of Maeryken Evertsen in Putten, he believes it likely that this couple emigrated to New Netherland together. On 20 May 1640, when Gerrit, the first child of Cosyn and Vroutje was baptized, one of the sponsors was a Trynije Everts, who may have been a relative of Cosyn’s first wife.32

Another intriguing connection: On 18 March 1640, Cosyn gave a power of attorney to his brother Aert Gerritsen to collect in his name from the administrators of the estate left by his aunt Susanna, “in her lifetime residing at Hoorn, the sum of one hundred Carolus guilders Holland currency, belonging to him, the principal, as a legacy bequeathed by his aforesaid aunt.” One Carolus guilder equaled at this time thirty stuivers, ten more than a regular guilder, so this was not a legacy to be sniffed at. The Indians received sixty guilders worth of trade goods for the whole island of Manhattan in 1628. In 1639 the wages paid a maidservant in New Amsterdam was 40 guilders per year and her food and lodging. That same year, a couple was paid the “considerable sum of 200 guilders per year” for overseeing Van Twiller’s farm after he returned to the Netherlands. It appears, though, that brother Aert failed to collect the legacy—perhaps he died, or perhaps the administrators held up the settling of the estate—because nine years later, on 12 August 1649, Cosyn gave another power of attorney to his old friend from Hoorn, Sybout Claasen, to receive a legacy left him by a woman who appears to be this same aunt, Susanna “Elefersen” or “Elefersz” of Hoorn.33

Next, Dr. Nouwt discovered the marriage banns of Aert Gerritsen, son of Gerrit Jansen, and Geertyen Ellertsen, daughter of Ellert Toenissen, both of Putten, on 25 July 1624. (Cosyn, recall, had a brother named Aert Gerritsen.) Dr. Nouwt considers it possible that Aunt Susannah Elefersen or Elfersz of Hoorn could be related to Aert Gerritsen’s wife Geertyen Ellertsen, as the spellings and sounds of these names are very similar.

Grietje Cosyns’ second husband, Jan Pietersen Haring, also came from Hoorn, and it is interesting to speculate that the Gerritsen and Pietersen (later Haring) families were acquainted there through this woman. The name Susanna occurs in the Van Rensselaer family, and it is also interesting to speculate that there was a familial relationship between the Van Rensselaers and the Gerritsens.

 In sum on this point, certain last names drawn from the records of New Amsterdam and the Reformed Dutch Church in New York, as well as from the records of Putten and Hoorn, are connected to Cosyn Gerritsen van Putten of New Amsterdam: Claase, Claasen, Elefersen, Elefersz, Ellertsen, Evertsen, Haring, Reyersen, Reynier, Toenissen, and Teunissen among them. Further examination may shed light on an even more coherent and durable family network than one suspects--and lead to further insights into the importance of family and friends to a sustainable existence in New Netherland. 

Cosyn is heard from no more in the records of New Amsterdam after 1686, the year he and Vroutje appear on Domine Selyns’ list of Reformed Dutch Church members. He may have moved to the Tappan Patent with his daughter Grietje in 1687, when he would have been about 81 years of age, and died there, in which case he was probably buried on the grounds of what is today called the De Clark-De Wint House, built in 1700 by Grietje’s third husband, Daniel de Clark.34 This house, on Oak Tree Road in Tappan, NY, is owned by the Masons and is open to the public daily.

 

                                                          Notes

  1. Detail of Manatus Map from John A. Kouwenhoven, The Columbia Historical Portrait of New York (New York, 1953), p. 36; and I. N. Phelps-Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498-1909. 6 vols. (New York, 1915-1928), vol. 2, pp. 186, 190; vol. 6, p. 129, and see note 5 below. Hereafter Iconography. “Patent to Cosyn Gerritsz,” GG 185 and GG 186, 13 March 1647, is in Charles Gehring, ed., New York Historical Manuscripts Dutch, vol. 7, p. 52. For land policy of the WIC at this time, see Article 22, N.Y. Colonial Mss., Holland Documents, 4 vols., trans. and ed. A. J. F.  Van Laer (Baltimore 1974), vol. 1, pp. 1603-1656. The original of the Patent granted to Cosyn for this land is in the De Lancey Papers, New York State Library, Access # A-FM-200-C.
  2.  Berthold Fernow, ed., The Records of New Amsterdam from 1653 to 1674. 7 vols. (New York, 1897), vol. 4, pp. 207-208, and p. 115. Hereafter RNA. Janny Venema, Beverwijck: A Dutch Village on the American Frontier, 1652-1664 (Albany, 2003); Dingman Versteeg, New York Historical Manuscripts: Dutch, Kingston Papers, 2 vols. (Baltimore, 1976), vol. 2.
  3. George Sturt, The Wheelwright’s Shop (Cambridge, U.K., 1993), p. 17. Hereafter Sturt. Florence A. Christoph and Peter R. Christoph, eds., The Andros Papers. 3 vols. Vol. I: 1674-1676; Vol. II: 1677-1678; Vol. III: 1679-1680 (Baltimore, 1980, 1982), Vol. I, p. 349. Hereafter Andros Papers. An article summarizing all that is known about Jan Pietersen Haring, Cosyn’s wheelwright son-in-law, including facts not previously uncovered, such as his acquisition of land on Manhattan in 1676, will appear in South of the Mountains, the quarterly of the Historical Society of Rockland County, in the Fall 2007 issue.

4. References to Van Twiller’s land in Phelps-Stokes, Iconography, are in vol. 6, pp. 104, 114, 129, 157, 161-162, 164, 187, 190-191. In addition to this farm, he acquired over his short stay in New Amsterdam four islands (Roosevelt, Wards, Randalls, and Governors), as well as land on Long Island and on the upper east side of Manhattan. Phelps-Stokes describes Bouwerie #10 as of 250 acres. The deed says it was 200 acres. See Jaap Jacobs, “A Troubled Man: Director Wouter van Twiller and the Affairs of New Netherland in 1635,” New York History (Summer 2004), pp. 213-232.

  1. Phelps-Stokes, Iconography, vol. 6. For Cosyn, pp. 114, 129, 157, 187, 161-162, 164, 203, 238, 369-370; for Van Twiller, pp. 104, 114, 129, 157, 161-162, 164, 187, 190-191. Cosyn’s eldest son Gerrit later owned this iconic house and 15-acre property. In the 1690s, he sold it to Adriaen Cornelissen van Schaick, and he sold it to Gerard Douwes. In 1704, Madam Sarah Kemble Knight called upon “Old Madame Dowes [who] gave us a handsome Entertainment of five or six Dishes and choice Beer and methelglin, Cyder, etc. all which she said was the produce of her farm.” Iconography, vol. 6, p. 129; and The Journal of Madam Knight (New York, 1825), pp. 41-42.
  2. A. J. F. Van Laer, trans. and ed., The Correspondence of Jeremias van Rensselaer, 1651-1674 (Albany, 1932), p. 355.
  3. Iconography, vol. 6, pp. 157, 162.

8.                  Howard M. DuBois, “Applied Mechanics in Wheelmaking,” in Don Peloubet, ed., Wheelmaking (Mendham, NJ, 1996), p. 5. Hereafter DuBois.

9.                  Don Peloubet, ed., Wheelmaking: Wooden Wheel Design and Construction (Mendham, NJ, 1996), “Introduction,” n.p. The publisher of Wheelmaking, Astragal Press in Mendham, NJ, is an excellent resource for those interested in early trades and crafts, antique tools, and the carriage industry. See www.astragalpress.com.

10.              A. J. F. van Laer, New York Historical Manuscripts: Dutch, Vol. II [61n], p. 139; hereafter, NYHM Dutch. Sturt, p. 17.

11.              DuBois, pp. 5, 6-7, 26

12.              Jocelyn Bailey, The Village Wheelwright and Carpenter (Aylesbury, Bucks, U.K., 1975), p. 10. Hereafter Bailey.

13.              DuBois, p. 28; Bailey, p. 10.

14.              Sturt, p. 29.

15.              Sturt, pp. 30-31.

16.              DuBois, p. 5.

17.              Sturt, pp. 17, 19. RNA, vol. 3, p. 43, refers to Augustyn Heermans’ “farmer Harmen Teunissen,” September 9, 1659. Harmen and Grietje had a daughter baptized in the New York Reformed Dutch Church on February 24, 1658. The child does not appear to have survived, and neither did Harman. In 1662, Grietje remarried.

  1. For schepen, RNA, vol. 6, p. 401; vol. 7, p. 127; for Tappan, East Jersey Patents (Trenton, NJ), liber 4, pp. 17 and 18, July 11, 1682. For wheelmaker reference, Andros Papers, Vol. I (1674-1676), p. 349. A Jan Pietersen received two groundbriefs in December 1661, six months before he married Cosyn’s 20-year-old already-widowed daughter, Grietje, and I believe this was Jan Pietersen Haring. (See above-cited article on JPH in South of the Mountains, Fall 2007.) The land he received is Lot 7 in Block B of the Costello Plan, at Wall Street. It is mapped in Iconography, vol. 2, “The Dutch Grants,” Plates 87 and 82e. Combined with the land that Grietje had obtained from her father, probably at her first marriage in 1654 (in 1655 she went to court over her “buckwheat fields”), at her second marriage in 1662, as well as other land presumably inherited from him at his death, this couple’s real estate became the core of the 200-acre farm of their grandson, Elbert Herring. Grietje, RNA, vol. 1, pp. 352-353. For Jan Pietersen Haring’s land, see Phelps-Stokes, Iconography, vol. 2, p. 366, and vol. 6, pp. 104-105, 129. For the Elbert Herring farm, see Phelps-Stokes, Iconography, vol. 6, p. 104-105, and Firth Haring Fabend, A Dutch Family in the Middle Colonies, 1660-1800 (New Brunswick and London, 1991; reprt. 1999), pp. 94-99. Haring and Grietje together may have owned 160 acres, because evidence can be found for Elbert’s purchase of only 40 acres. Iconography, vol. 6, p. 105.

19. .A. J. F. van Laer, NYHM Dutch, vol. II, p. 219; and NYHM Dutch, vol. IV, p. 156.

20. Sturt, pp. 30, 19-20.

  1. DuBois, p. 7.

 22. Ibid.

  1. Bailey, p. 17. In correspondence, Don Peloubet supplied the detail about the leather sleeve or iron banding, from Peloubet, ed., Carriage and Wagon Axles (Mendham, NJ, 2002), p. 170.
  2. DuBois, pp. 8, 10.
  3. Sturt, p. 23.
  4. Peloubet, Wheelmaking, p. 108.
  5. Jaap Jacobs, New Netherland: A Dutch Colony in Seventeenth-Century America (Leiden and Boston, 2005), p. 78, hereafter New Netherland; and David William Voorhees, American National Biography, Van Twiller entry, pp. 252-253.
  6. For Ariaantje Claase, correspondence with Piet Boon, at the Archiefdienst Westfries, Hoorn, October 26 and November 7, 2005.
  7. Report of Dr. P. Nouwt, April 2007. I can supply the names of the sixteen notaries upon request.
  8. James B. Cozine, “Finding Our Wooden Shoes,” unpaginated ms., 2006, and e-mail correspondence with him, January 2007. This manuscript contains much background information (and some speculation) about the ancient origins of the name Cosyn in this part of Gelderland. The name appears as early as 1368. It was used by the Oldenbarnevelt family, whose most prominent member was Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, beheaded in 1619 on a fabricated charge of treason. It was used as well by the Van der Helle family, whose four brothers, the “knights of the Veluwe,” are recorded in 1468 as Jan, Gerrit, Cosyn, and Hendrick.  Cosyn Gerritsen named his two sons Gerrit and Hendrick in that order. Whether Cosyn’s family were descendants of one or more of the four knights, or whether this is wishful thinking on the part of their twentieth-century descendants, is for others to decide. Mr. Cozine has deposited his manuscript with The Holland Society of New York and the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society.
  9.  Ibid.
  10. Baptisms from 1639 to 1730 in the Reformed Dutch Church in New Amsterdam and New York (New York, 1901).
  11. NYHM Dutch, Vol. I [197], p. 273; NYHM Dutch, Vol. III [50a], p. 132.  For wages, Jacobs, New Netherland, pp. 80, 82.
  12. Domine Henry Selyns, “A Catalogue of the Members of the Dutch Church, With the Names of the Streets in the City of New York, A.D. 1686,” Collections of the New-York Historical Society, Second Series, Vol. 1 (New York, 1841), 389-399.