Across the East River, the "Sister City" of Brooklyn in 1776 was as yet invisible from New York. A clump of low buildings at the old ferry, and an occasional manor-seat, were the only signs of life apparent on that side. Columbia Heights, whose modern blocks and row of wharves and bonded stores suggest commercial activity alone, caught the eye a century ago as "a noble bluff," crowned with fields and woods, and meeting the water at its base with a shining beach. The parish or village proper was the merest cluster of houses, nestled in the vicinity of the old Dutch church, which stood in the middle of the road a little below Bridge Street. The road was the King's highway, and it ran from Fulton Ferry--where we have had a ferry for two hundred and forty years at least--along the line of Fulton Street, and on through Jamaica to the eastern end of Long Island. Besides the settlements that had grown up at these two points--the church and the ferry, which were nearly a mile and a half apart--a village centre was to be found at Bedford, further up the highway, another in the vicinity of the Wallabout, and still another, called Gowanus, along the branch road skirting the bay. These all stood within the present municipal limits of Brooklyn. As it had been for more than a century before, the population on the Long Island side was largely Dutch at the time of the Revolution. The first-comers, in 1636 and after, introduced themselves to the soil and the red man as the Van Schows, the Cornelissens, the Manjes, and the like--good Walloon patronimics--and the Dutch heritage is still preserved in the names of old families, and even more permanently in the name of the place itself; for the word Brooklyn is but the English corruption of Breukelen, the ancient Holland village[16] of which our modern city appears to have been the namesake. Smyth, the English traveler, makes the general statement towards the close of the Revolution, that two thirds of the inhabitants of Long Island, especially those on the west end, were of Dutch extraction, who continued "to make use of their customs and language in preference to English," which, however, they also understood. "The people of King's County [Brooklyn]," he says, "are almost entirely Dutch. In Queen's County, four fifths of the people are so likewise, but the other fifth, and all Suffolk County, are English as they call themselves, being from English ancestors, and using no other language." Major Baurmeister, one of the officers of the Hessian division which participated in the battle of Long Island, leaves us something more than statistics in the case. He appears to have noted every thing with lively appreciation. To a friend in Germany, for instance, we find him writing as follows: "The happiness of the inhabitants, whose ancestors were all Dutch, must have been great; genuine kindness and real abundance is everywhere; any thing worthless or going to ruin is nowhere to be perceived.