Roeliff Jansen: The Man, the Myth, and the Missus

Mrs. Roeliff Jansen

Our little corner of Columbia County is often referred to as the “Roe Jan Region,” and local folks know that “Roe Jan” is a shortening of Roeliff Jansen (multiple spellings of the name turn up in the historic record: Roeloff Jansz, Roeloff Janz, Rolf Jansen, Roeloff Jans). A number of local institutions are named in honor of Jansen: the Roeliff Jansen Community Library, the Roeliff Jansen Historical Society, even the now-decaying Roeliff Jansen Central School on Route 22. The abbreviated name is also popular among local businesses, as seen in the Roe Jan Auto Center, Roe Jan Lockworks and The Roe Jan Brewing Company. Even the annual Harlem Valley Rail Trail bicycle ride fundraiser is called the Roe Jan Ramble. And of course, the 56.2 mile long Roeliff Jansen Kill — the traditional boundary between the Native American Mahican and Wappinger tribes– crisscrosses the area.

But who was Roeliff Jansen and why do we continue to commemorate him some 400 years after his death? And what role did he play in the early development of the Roe Jan regions’s five towns (Ancram, Copake, Gallatin, Hillsdale and Taghkanic)?

For answers, we first turned to a book published in 1976 by the Roeliff Jansen Historical Society.  A History of the Roeliff Jansen Area contains a well-researched essay about Roeliff Jansen by Jim Polk, co-owner of A New Leaf, a charming used bookstore in Pine Plains, NY.

Until fairly recently, Jansen was thought to be a Dutchman because he arrived in New Amsterdam on May 24, 1630 on de Eendracht, a ship of the Dutch West India Company that sailed from the Dutch port of Texel. In fact, as Mr. Polk points out, Roeliff Jansen was born on the island of Marstrand in 1602. Although Marstrand is part of Sweden today, it belonged to Norway until 1658, so Jansen would have considered himself a Norwegian.

Marstrand today

Marstrand was famed for its herring fishing industry, which evidently held no appeal for young Jansen. Before he turned 20 he left to find fame and fortune in Amsterdam.

Polk’s narrative notes that after ten years in Amsterdam, Jansen had found neither. He did, however, marry a popular 18-year-old Norwegian woman named Annetje (or Anneke) Jans (1605-1663) when he was 21. With future prospects in the Netherlands not promising, Jansen took a major step in 1630. Armed with a three-year contract from Kiliaen Van Rensselaer, the Amsterdam diamond and pearl merchant who was a founder and director of the Dutch West India Company, Jansen, Anneke, their two daughters, and Anneke’s mother made the five-week journey by sea to New Netherland, the first Dutch colony in the New World established in 1614.

Patroon Kiliaen Van Rensselaer

New Netherland extended from Fort Orange (today’s Albany) and eastern New York to parts of Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware.

The Dutch Colony of New Netherland (in yellow)

Arriving in New Amsterdam (today’s New York City), the seat of New Netherland’s colonial government, the Jansen family and two Norwegians who had also crossed on de Eendracht boarded a small jacht (from which we get the word yacht) and sailed up the Hudson River to Fort Orange. There, the party disembarked and set out to undertake their mission: clear several acres of virgin forest and start a farm on Rensselaerwyck, Van Rensselaer’s vast patent that extended from the Hudson River all the way to what today is the Massachusetts border. There are reports that they worked a parcel known as de Laet’s Burgh (today’s Greenbush), where Van Rensselaer first sought to concentrate his colonists, across the river from the West India Company’s Fort Orange. Jansen’s salary was $72 a year.

On July 1, 1632, after two years of farming, Roeliff Jansen was appointed “schepen,” or alderman, a role where he became the middleman between Van Rensselaer and his tenant farmers in the area. The oath of the schepens, administered by a “schout,” a local official vested in the Dutch colonies of America with local judicial function, was as follows:

“This you swear, that you will be good schepens, that you will be loyal and feal to my gracious lord and support and strengthen him in his affairs as much as is in your power; that you will pass honest judgment between the lord and the farmer, the farmer and the lord, and in the proceedings between two farmers, and that you will not fail to do this on any consideration whatsoever. So help you God.”

As schepen, Roeliff Jansen got a “black hat, with silver bands.”

In a monograph written by former Albany Times Union reporter Paul Grondahl, we learned that neither Roeliff nor Anneke could read or write. They “signed” their names with special marks, which may account for the many different spellings of their names in a variety of sources. (Grondahl himself spells Jansen’s given name “Roelof.”)

Grondahl writes, “The family interacted daily with local Native Americans with whom they traded. Their daughter, Sara, later became the translator of New Netherland director-general Peter Stuyvesant in negotiations with the [natives].”

Kiliaen Van Rensselaer had certain standards for his distant employee and as a manager, Jansen did not meet them. The Patroon complained in a  July 20, 1632 letter to Wolfert Gerritz, a founder of the New Netherland colony, that it was “bad management that Roeloff Jansen could not get any winter seed. I hope that he has sown the more summer seed.”

Likewise in a letter of April 23, 1634, to New Amsterdam Director-General Wouter van Twiller, the Patroon said: “I see that Roeloff Janssen has grossly run up my account in drawing the provisions, yes, practically the full allowance [even] when there was [enough in] stock. I think that his wife, mother, and sister and others must have given things away, which can not be allowed. He complains that your honor has dismissed him from the farm, and your honor writes me that he wanted to leave it.”

In 1634, after fulfilling their contract to Van Rensselaer, the Jansen family decamped from Rensselaerwyck to New Amsterdam and worked on a Dutch West India Company bouwerie (the Dutch word for farm). New Amsterdam comprised what we think of today as Lower Manhattan, or the Financial District. Its northern border was Wall Street.

 

A 1660 map of New Amsterdam (the top right corner is roughly north). The fort gave The Battery (in present-day Manhattan) its name, the large street going from the fort past the wall became Broadway, and the city wall (right) gave Wall Street its name.

In 1636, the Dutch West India Company granted Jansen 62 acres of what is today’s Greenwich Village, SoHo and Tribeca. Jansen built a modest home near today’s World Trade Center. The first public park in New York City, Duane Park, is the last remnant of open space of their farm; the couple is remembered on a plaque to this day.

Duane Park

It was not great farmland; indeed, much of it was swampland. In any case, before Jansen could sow the first seed, he died in 1636, leaving Anneke a widow with five children. At his death, Jansen was owed 217 guilders (approximately US$12,000 in today’s money) by the Dutch West India Company, but Anneke was having trouble collecting. The family was struggling (land-rich but cash-poor) and Anneke’s mother, Trijn, had taken a position as the official midwife of the city of New Amsterdam.

Anneke Jans Bogardus and Rev. Everadus Bogardus

That wasn’t the end of the story, however.  As it turns out,  Anneke had a remarkable second act of her own. Dutch women had more property rights than other female colonists in the New World. Prenuptial agreements were common in New Amsterdam, and they enabled women with money and/or property to keep their wealth after they married. Jansen’s death left Anneke for a time, at least on paper, one of the wealthiest women (if not the wealthiest woman) in the New World. In 1638, she married the Rev. Everardus Bogardus (1607-1647) after securing a prenuptial agreement.

Bogardus had arrived in New Amsterdam in 1633 as the dominie, or pastor, of the colony and the second minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, the oldest established church in present-day New York. They lived at what is now 23 Whitehall Street near the old fort in New Amsterdam, renting out their bouwerie farmhouse. In addition to the 62 acres of land Anneke owned, Bogardus owned another 84-acre farm on the Long Island shore near the Hellgate, bordering on the East River. Anneke’s farm became popularly known as “Dominie’s Bouwerie,” and the 84-acre-parcel was known as “Dominie’s Hook.” (The Dominie’s Bouwerie section of Manhattan is still  known as The Bowery.”)

Bogardus was frequently combative with the Directors of New Netherland and their management of the colony, going up against the often-drunk Director-General Wouter van Twiller. On one occasion he verbally attacked Van Twiller at a wedding feast, giving his reason (as the event was later reported) “that he called your wife a whore.” Bogardus reserved special ire for Willem Kieft, the Director who followed Van Twiller in 1638.

By 1647, Bogardus and William Kieft were at war with each other. Dominie Bogardus was castigating Kieft from the pulpit every Sunday. He stepped up his denouncements when Kieft tried to place a tax on beer. (Bogardus liked his beer). Kieft, in turn, chose Sunday mornings to have his troops drill outside the church with drums beating, trumpets blaring and cannons firing.

Kieft’s directive from the Dutch West India Company was to increase profits from the port at Pavonia (today’s Jersey City) and his solution was to attempt to extort tribute from the Indians with claims that the money would buy them protection from rival groups. When his demands were ignored, he ordered attacks on Pavonia and Corlears Hook, a Lenape Indian encampment on today’s Lower East Side, on February 25, 1643, which erupted into a horrific massacre (129 Dutch soldiers killed 120 Indians, including women and children). The Dutch local citizen advisory group had been specifically against such a raid, and were aghast when they heard the details. This was followed by retaliations resulting in what would become known as Kieft’s War (1643–1645). The war took a huge toll on both sides, and the Dutch West India Company Board of Directors fired Kieft in 1647, replacing him with Peter Stuyvesant.

Anneke was reputed to have an abrasive personality which, along with her husband’s fulminations against the colony’s Directors and her attempts to be repaid by the Dutch West India Company, led to a few lawsuits. In one she was accused of “mooning” a group of burghers after an exchange of sarcastic and possibly ribald remarks. Her defense was that she merely lifted her skirts to keep them out of the filth in the street. This defense was accepted.

Meanwhile, Kieft’s position as Director-General and Bogardus’ position as Dominie made them the two most powerful people in the colony. Neither had any real control over the other and the situation was getting out of control. Both were flooding the authorities back in Amsterdam with complaints about the other even after Kieft was no longer Director, and eventually they were summoned to Amsterdam to answer for their quarrel.

Bogardus and Kieft, their fates tied, climbed the gangway of the Princess Amelia to return to the Netherlands. As the ship passed to the north of England on September 27, it hit a violent storm in the Bristol Channel and sank. Both men were drowned. The people of New Amsterdam mourned for their minister, but there was little sorrow felt for the former Director who had plunged the colony into war by his obstinate and cruel temper.

After the English took possession of New Amsterdam in 1664, all property holders were required to obtain new titles for their lands. Anneke’s heirs secured a new patent for the farm from Governor Nicolls on March 27, 1667.

After Bogardus’s death, Anneke moved back to Beverwyck, the former name of Albany. She lived at what is today the intersection of State and James streets. A plaque is on the wall of the bank that occupies that corner today.

She died in 1663 and in her will, she divided the Manhattan farm among her seven surviving children, who sold the land thinking it was worthless. On March 9, 1671, the farm was sold to Francis Lovelace (c. 1621–1675), the second governor of New York colony. All of Anneke’s heirs signed the deed of transfer, except the wife and child of Cornelius Bogardus, Anneke’s son who had died in 1666. And that omission caused an epic legal battle that lasted well into the 20th century. By the time Anneke’s heirs figured out they were wrong about the value of the land, it had been seized by Queen Anne and eventually presented to the founders of Trinity Church.

In 1896, the Oshkosh (WI) Daily Northwestern estimated the value of the land to be between $400 and $500 million (about $50 billion in 2023 dollars). Descendants of Roeliff and Anneke alleged that the property was still theirs, based on the lack of a signature from Cornelius Bogardus. Litigation ensued and continued for more than 250 years, through generation after generation of descendants, until in 1909, Trinity Church prevailed. Efforts to re-litigate the case continued well into the 20^th century. It ranks as one of the most prolonged litigations in American history.

Despite the prominence of Roeliff Jansen as a place name on our land, Anneke seems to have left the more enduring historic record. Her status as a woman of importance in the early Dutch colony has endeared her to enthusiastic amateur genealogists claiming to be  her descendants by either Roeliff or Bogardus. Just Google “Descendants of Anneke Jans.” At some point the romantic and certainly false rumor was spread that she was the granddaughter of William the Silent, Prince of Orange, by a secret marriage. Some family trees list Louisa May Alcott, Montgomery Clift, David Crosby, Michael Douglas, Henry Fonda, and Herman Melville among her descendants. A detailed genealogy of Anneke’s descendants can be found in Dear Cousin: A Charted Genealogy of the Descendants of Anneke Jans Bogardus (1605-1663) to the 5th Generation by William Brower Bogardus.

Oddly enough, there is a restaurant in Kittery, Maine called “Anneke Jans” in her honor.

Neither Jim Polk nor we have unearthed any evidence that Roeliff Jansen ever set foot in this part of the county, and why would he have? In the 1630s, there was nothing here but virgin forest and some Mohican settlements. By the time Robert Noble established Nobletown (the forerunner of Hillsdale) in 1750, Roeliff Jansen had been in the ground for 114 years.

The earliest print reference to the Roeliff Jansen Kill we found was a real estate ad in the January 5^th, 1852 edition of the Albany Evening Journal, but there may be reason to think that the kill was named much earlier than that. How much earlier?

Advertisment in an 1852 edition of the Albany Evening Journal

Now we venture, with Mr. Polk’s help, into speculation and lore. Supposedly, in 1633, Roeliff and a group of prospective settlers were making their way up the Hudson in late winter or early spring after a visit to New Amsterdam. As the yacht neared today’s Linlithgo, the waters froze and the boat became stuck. Fortunately, the ice became solid enough for the passengers to walk ashore and they soon came upon a “friendly encampment” of local Indians, as well as the mouth of a large stream. The freeze lasted for three weeks. When the ice thawed and the passengers prepared to sail the rest of the way to Fort Orange, supposedly the party wanted to commemorate their adventure and the means to do this was to name the stream in honor the alderman accompanying them. Hence we refer to that stream as the Roeliff Jansen Kill. (Kill, or Kil, is the Dutch word for “riverbed” or “water channel.”)

Fact or Fiction? We’ll never know.

An operetta, “Roeloff’s Dream,” written by a Mr. and Mrs. Alexander Bloch, was performed at dedication of the new the Roeliff Jansen Central School in 1933. It depicted the history of the area as revealed to a sleeping Roeliff Jansen in the 17th century, and sounds like it might owe something to the Washington Irving short story, Rip Van Winkle.

The cast of “Roeloff’s Dream.”

We heartily recommend the Roeliff Jansen Historical Society’s book, A History of the Roe Jan Area, which you can order online here.

Sources:

Polk, James, The Roeliff Jansen Historical Society, A History of the Roeliff Jansen Area, 1976, Pp.4-9 “The Life of Roeliff Jansen.”

Nash, Stephen Paine, Anneke Jans Bogardus: Her Farm and How It Became the Property of Trinity Church, New York; An Historic Inquiry (2015,  Forgotten Books). This is a reprinting of a text originally published by Nash in 1896.

https://hoxsie.org/2014/01/27/the_mysterious_anneke_jans/

The Daily Northwestern, Oshkosh, WI, January 31, 1896, Page 2, “Are After Millions” This is a long article about the continuing litigation of Anneke Jans’ descendants to regain ownership of property then deemed to be worth as much as $500,000,000.

Sioux City (IA) Journal, March 15, 1896. “The Anneke Jans ‘Heirs’” A very skeptical article re-printed from the New York Sun questioning the validity of claims against the Jans property.

Albany (NY) Evening Journal, Classified Advertisement, Jan. 5, 1852, Page 3

Parry, William J., The Heirs of Anneke Jans Bogardus versus Trinity Church: A Chronicle of New York’s Most Prolonged Legal Dispute, William J. Parry (1914, New York Genealogical and Biographical Society)

Grondahl, Paul, Biography of Anneke Jans, https://www.geni.com/people/Anneke-Jans/6000000003621790186, 2023

https://www.nysm.nysed.gov/fort-orange-educational-guide

 

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© 2024 Chris Atkins and Lauren Letellier