The island of Manhattan, which is now tightly packed with the office-buildings and houses of New York, was in 1661 the home of a small number of families who had come across the Atlantic Ocean from the Netherlands to settle this part of the new world for the Dutch West India Company. There was a fort at the southern end of the island, sometimes known as the Battery, and two roads led from it toward the north. One of these roads followed the line of the street now called Broadway, running north to a great open field, or common, and, skirting that, leading on to the settlement of Harlaem. In time this road came to be known as the Old Post Road to Boston. Another road ran to the east, and in its neighborhood were the farms of many of the richer Dutch settlers. Near where Third Avenue and Thirteenth Street now meet was the bouwery, as the Dutchmen called a farm, of Peter Stuyvesant, the governor of the colony of New Netherland. It was a large, prosperous bouwery, with a good-sized house for the governor and his family. This Dutch governor, sturdy, impetuous, obstinate, had lost a leg while leading an attack on the Portuguese island of Saint Martin, in 1644, and now used a wooden stump, which caused him to be nicknamed "Wooden-Legged Peter." He was a much better governor than the others who had been sent out by the West India Company to rule New Netherland. He had plenty of courage, but he had also a very determined will of his own, which often made him seem a tyrant to the other settlers. Now there were two distinct classes of people in New Netherland: the peasants who worked the land, and the landowners, called patroons, who had bought vast tracts from the West India Company, and lived on them like European nobles. It was the patroons who brought the peasants over, paying for their passage, and the peasants worked for them until they could repay the amount of their passage money, and then took up small farms on their patroon's estate, paying the rental in crops, as tenants did to the feudal lords of Europe. The great manors stretched north from the little town of New Amsterdam at the point of Manhattan Island. Above Peter Stuyvesant's bouwery was the manor of the Kip family, called Kip's Bay. In the middle of the island lived the Patroon De Lancey. Opposite, on Long Island, was the estate of the Laurences. And along the Hudson were the homes of the powerful families of Van Courtland and of Phillipse, of Van Rensselaer and of Schuyler. In spite of constant danger from Indians and their great distance from Europe the patroons lived in a certain magnificence, and grew in power down to the time of the Revolution. Farming and fur-trading were the chief sources of profit of the colony. There were a few storekeepers and mechanics, but they lived close to the fort and stockade at the Battery. The trades that had done so much to make the Netherlands in Europe rich played small part in the life of this New Netherland.