"Capt. Evans's great grant of 40 miles one way and 30 another, has but one house on it, or rather a hut, where a poor man lives, built by Patrick Mac Gregorie, a Scotchman, who was killed at the time of the Revolution here, and his widow compelled to sell her house and land to Capt. Evans for 30 or 35 pounds." The foregoing was not only a concise history of the first settlement in this county, but it was in reality the first census, and shows that then, 1701, there was not a single person in the limits of our three towns as a permanent settler. It may be said in apparent contradiction that a census taken by Bellomont in 1698 showed this county to have in it 29 men, 31 women, 140 children and 19 Negroes. They were all located along the Hudson River, in what is now Rockland County. Yet there was at that time a blacksmith, William Tietsort (Titsworth), in Minisink, near where Port Jervis now stands, who had settled there in 1698 at the request of the Indians to work at his trade for them. In 1703, the county had 268 people in it; in 1712, 439. The Gumaer patent was settled on in the Neversink valley by this time, but there is no record of any settler in our three towns at that time. In 1723 the census showed 1,097 white and 147 colored people in the county. The owners of the big patents used great inducements to get settlers to locate on their land, and it is probable that some were in our territory but not of record. In 1737 there were 2,840; and in 1746, 3,268 people in the county. Inman Walling was a settler, probably 1725-1730, by the Wallkill, east of present Westtown, and John Whitaker died in 1742 near where Unionville now is, and had been a resident there, no one knows how long. His will on record in the surrogate's office in Goshen, liber A. page 221, mentions his wife Eve, sons Richard, Peter and John, and daughters Jean and Elizabeth. Their descendants are yet residents of the town and of Sussex County adjoining. Those two families were probably the first permanent ones in this town of Minisink. There were others in the limits of what is now Wawayanda at or about the same time. There were two Smith families early in the precinct of Minisink. One of them, Benjamin, settled near the present Slate Hill village, and the other on the farm now owned by J. Cadigan near Johnsons, where he kept an inn, the place being known as Smith's Village for at least seventy-five years. Other settlers came in rapidly. William Stenard in 1749; Captain John Wisner from Warwick in 1776; George Kimber in 1750; Caleb Clark in 1800; William Lane in 1760. In an assessment roll made for Goshen precinct in 1775 Godfrey Lutes, Peter Middagh, Daniel Rosencrans, Inman Walling, Peter Walling, Increase Mather, John Whitaker, Jr., and Ebenezer Beers were shown to reside in this town besides the other first settlers mentioned.