Canada -- Description and travel; United States -- Description and travel
The loyal Jerseyman will never forgive New York for having captured
Staten Island. After the English came to New York in 1664, under the
grant of King Charles II. to the Duke of York of all the country from
Canada down to Virginia, the Duke granted to Berkeley and Carteret the
portion lying between the Hudson and Delaware Rivers. This grant
grieved the New Yorkers, for they said it gave away the best lands
around their harbor, so they tried to get it all back, and managed to
capture Staten Island. Some sharp fellow invented the fiction, on
which they resolutely insisted, that the Arthur Kill was really the
Hudson River; and, taking possession, they never gave it up. A legal
contest was fought for over one hundred and fifty years, and it was
not until 1833 that a treaty between the two States declared the
Kills to be their boundary. Staten Island is about sixteen miles long,
and from its eastern slopes has a noble outlook over the Lower New
York Bay towards the ocean. Fine beaches line these coasts, which rise
sharply into hills inland, and most of the eligible sites are crowned
with villas. It was at Stapleton, on Staten Island, that Commodore
Cornelius Vanderbilt, the head of the great family, was born in 1794,
and he laid the foundation of his great fortune, at the age of sixteen
years, by sailing a ferryboat to New York, six miles away. Upon a
plateau in the centre of the island is the village of New Dorp, the
original settlement of the Vanderbilts, a farm of about four hundred
acres. Here the Commodore came in his youth, and here his son, William
H. Vanderbilt, was born and lived for many years, an agricultural
laborer for his father. Here also is a little Moravian church they
attended, and upon a terraced hill behind it, the highest part of the
island, is the spacious gray granite mausoleum, within which rest the
two great millionaires, father and son, with some of their children.
In the old churchyard are the graves of many other Vanderbilts and
their collaterals. At Port Richmond, over on the Kill, the most
considerable town on the island, and formerly the county-seat, is the
house, now a hotel, in which Aaron Burr died in 1836.
SOME NEW JERSEY TOWNS.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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