A History of the City of Brooklyn and Kings County, Volume I.Ostrander, Stephen M.
History
A History of the City of Brooklyn and Kings County, Volume I.
Ostrander, Stephen M.
Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.) -- History; Kings County (N.Y.) -- History
In March of the following year "the Director-General visited the new
village, when the inhabitants requested His Honour to give the place a
name; whereupon he named the town Boswijck," the Town of the Woods. The
people of the new village then selected six of their men, from which the
governor chose three, to be magistrates, the town remaining subject to
the schout of Breuckelen, Amersfoort, and Midwout.
Thus when the first public school was opened in Bushwick, the hamlet
scarcely contained twenty houses, a fact which may illustrate the
attitude of the Dutch and French in this part of the country toward the
question of popular education. The first schoolmaster in Bushwick was
Boudwyn Manout, who took charge on December 28, 1662.
The setting up of the third school within the county was effected in a
new village called Bedford, lying southeast of the Wallabout and east of
Breuckelen. The settlement of this village dates from 1662, in which
year, in the month of March, Joris Jan. Rapalje, Teunis Gysbert
(Bogaert), Cornelis Jacobsen, Hendrick Sweers, Michael Hans (Bergen),
and Jan Hans (Bergen) asked the Director for a grant of unoccupied
woodland "situated in the rear of Joris Rapalje, next to the old Bay
Road." The Director made the grant, with the stipulation that the
petitioners should not make "a new hamlet."
The little settlement thus formed was adjacent on the south to another
known as Cripplebush[30] (variously spelt in the Dutch orthography of
the early days), and lay at the intersection of the Jamaica highway,
the Clove Road running to Flatbush, and the Cripplebush Road running to
Newtown.
The Bedford school-house was placed in the heart of the village, at the
cross-roads. This school, beginning in the year 1663, afterward,
according to the records of Teunis G. Bergen, became the present Public
School No. 3, and had an interesting history.
[Illustration: THE FERRY IN 1746]
Throughout the whole of Stuyvesant's directorship, the quarrels between
him and the people were of frequent occurrence, and gained rather than
diminished in violence. As we have seen, the tendency observable in the
colony was aristocratic, and Stuyvesant fostered such a tendency to the
utmost. At one time he sought to institute a division of the burghers
into two classes, major and minor, the rights of the major burghers to
be hereditary, and to include the sole right to hold office. He had an
honorable sense of justice; but his method of exercising justice was
eminently paternal. He regarded complaint against a magistrate as
nothing less than treason. With his Council, the "Nine Men," he had one
wrangle after another. Both the Nine Men and himself repeatedly sent
protests to Holland, and the West India Company chose to let the
pugnacious Director and his people fight the thing out among themselves.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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