Chapter 1 - Geology, Prehistory and Historical Background

Since Hartwick College purchased what is now Pine Lake (see Chapter 13), professors and students have conducted a number of archeological digs on the grounds.  Traces of possible hunting parties were found in a cliff cave above the pond.  Also revealed were numerous fire pits, animal bones, stone tools, broken flint arrowheads, and camp refuse.  The dates range from perhaps 10,000 BC to as recently as 400-900 AD, with a few artifacts from even later.  Interestingly, “only a few sites in the upper Susquehanna Valley have yielded evidence of Iroquoian occupation dating between 1300-1675 A.D.”[18]  (“Adequentaga” is a possible exception.)  The explanation seems to have been constant warfare during that period between two warring Indian tribes.  (See sidebar.)

From Henry Hudson to the French and Indian wars.   World trade, a driving force for nations since before the era of Marco Polo, expanded with the strengthening of the silk route across Asia and the long sea routes among the continents. The sea powers of Europe saw trade as an opportunity for economic gain from spices, naval supplies and other goods.  The Dutch East India Company joined the search for new avenues of trade and a shorter route to the choice markets of the East. On September 12, 1609, English explorer-navigator Henry Hudson, sailing under Dutch colors happened upon the harbor at New Netherlands and the navigable river later named for him.  (New Netherlands later became “New-York” under English rule.[19])  In this fashion, contacts first began with the bountiful natural resources of Indian land.

Hudson’s expedition set up a trading station on the East River, later to become New Amsterdam.  There was no intention of establishing a permanent settlement until 1623 when 30 families under the auspices of the Dutch West India Company arrived.[20]

Peter Minuet was the first Dutch governor of the new territory.  It was Minuet who supposedly bartered with the Indians for the purchase of Manhattan Island for the equivalent of $24.  The whole purpose of the New Amsterdam community was to further the Dutch interest in world trade.

An uneasy population quarreled among themselves in the new Dutch Colony, and Peter Minuet was ultimately relieved of his duties.  Peter Stuyvesant was sent to replace him on May 11, 1647.  But political strife continued in New Amsterdam.  Externally, the French and the Indians of the Five Nations Confederacy[21] were continually hostile.  The Indians carried on constant skirmishes, raids and scalpings. 

King Charles II of England in a Royal Grant of July 1664 bestowed upon his brother James, Duke of York, (later James II) “the whole country from Maine to the Delaware Bay (including Nantucket and Cape Cod).”  Obviously, it was essential for the English to have possession of the intervening Dutch territory, New Amsterdam, its harbor, and the navigable Hudson River.  Richard Nicolls was appointed governor of the newly-claimed territory by the duke of York.  Peter Stuyvesant surrendered New Amsterdam, weakened by internal strife, to the Nicolls and his followers without a skirmish in 1664.

After a brief reoccupation by the Dutch (1673-74) during a subsequent war, Major Edmund Andros became the new English Governor.  His first priority was to open a waterway to the interior.  Instructions to the governor were to take possession from the Dutch as agreed in the 1674 Treaty of Peace and satisfy the inhabitants and the natives.  The new Governor was “not to molest or vex any person” and to take care that “a strict discipline” be kept among the soldiers and officers, “severely punishing any disorderly or debauched proceedings among them…”[22] The intention was not to disturb the inhabitants’ possessions, trade or religion.  Rents were to continue at the rates paid to the Dutch.

From the south, William Penn was actively trying to acquire New York for its natural harbor and rich natural resources.   Reflecting the struggles elsewhere in the world between the two nations, the English in New York and the French in Canada began sparring, often through their Indian allies.  The French about 1687 conducted skirmishes against the Iroquois.

In a 1687 “Proposition to the Five Nations,” Robert Livingston, writing on behalf of New York’s Governor Dongan, advised the chiefs as follows.

 

Berethren:

I am very gladd to see you all here in this house, and am heartily gladd also that you have sustained no greater losse by the French, tho’ I believe there intention was to destroy you all, if they could have surprised you in your Castles…  I would willingly know whether the Brethren have given the Govr  of Canada  any provocation or not…  This business may cause a warr between the King of England and the French King, both in Europe and here, and there fore I must know the truth…Now since there is a warr begun upon you by the Govr of Canada, I hope without any provocation by you given…my advice is, that as many prisoners of the French as you take, that you draw not there blood, butt bring them home and keepe them to exchange for the people of yours, which they have prisoners already, or may take hereafter.  (Brodhead, 1853, 438-9.)

 

King William’s War between the French and English began shortly thereafter, in 1689.

Europe was emerging from the system of families bonded to feudal lords to whom they owed allegiance.  There was no hope of escape from their social status or to have a better life.  Landowners in the New World were beginning to see the commercial advantages of attracting settlers, and the more affluent were outfitting emigrants in exchange for sea passage and two to five years of subsequent bondage. 

European countries had large maritime interests to maintain.  After centuries of shipbuilding, their material resources were depleting.  The English, German, French and Spanish searched the world over for sources of pine tar and other naval stores.  The English queen, Anne, distributed posters all over the German Palatinate[23] prior to 1710 offering “Free Passage to America and Free Land in the Shorie [now Schoharie] Valley” to anyone who would work in the pine camps for a number of years.  Robert Livingston contracted with the Crown to run the camps and to provide food for the Palatines who signed on. The immigrants arrived to find the work, the housing, and the food deplorable.  Worse, when they claimed the land they had been promised, they ran into legal problems of establishing ownership.

By and large the English had compatible trading agreements and only occasional boundary disputes with the Indians of the Five Nations.  France was continuing to encroach into adjoining Indian Territory from its foothold in Canada, and this escalated in time into the French and Indian Wars (1755-1763).

Arrival of the Palatine Germans.  The Palatine Germans came in large numbers in 1709-1710 when they accepted Queen Anne’s appeal.  They went first to Livingston’s pine tar, pitch, and turpentine camps on the Hudson River and then later to the Schoharie Valley. When they tried to claim their promised land, they learned that they were expected to purchase it.  Some did.  Others moved into the Mohawk Valley, and some migrated up the Schoharie River, down the Charlotte to the Susquehanna and thence south to Bucks County, Pennsylvania.  Others settled over the years in what was to become Davenport (Swart, Pross, Vroman, and John Shaver).

The early Palatines had friendly relations with the Mohawk Indians who shared with them locations for nut gathering, maple groves that supplied both maple syrup and sugar, and a location on the Charlotte River that was well situated for building the larger canoes desired for river transport to Pennsylvania.  The location of this “canoe place” (a name mentioned in many old deeds and documents) was about a mile or so downstream of the meeting of Middle Brook with the Charlotte River, probably in the vicinity of Davenport’s later Mill Road.  The spot provided a protected area near a productive “sugar bush” as well as a place for constructing canoes for the stronger waters of the Susquehanna River.

The Palatine Germans and others who chose to stay in what later became the Charlotte River, Kortright and Franklin Patents, were especially attracted by the land’s ample supply of water for powering sawmills, gristmills, and shingle mills.  In what became Davenport, they favored, at least in later years, the western part of the town along the lower reaches of the Charlotte River where the river, its volume increased by the Middle Brook and Kortright Creek, provided ample power for mills.

Non-Indians thus resided at least temporarily in the vicinity of Davenport many years before Sir William Johnson’s Charlotte River Patent of 1770.  Dutch incursion began with the “High Germans” searching for furs and minerals.  The so-called Mine Patent in what was later Davenport Center was issued, probably for lead mine exploration, in 1743.[24]  From 1748 until the American Revolution, missionaries were sent into Indian villages. They stayed with the Indians from a few weeks up to eight years.  Rev. Gideon Hawley, further down the Susquehanna, tried to Christianize the Indians from 1753 until driven out after three years by the French and Indian War.  The last of a number of missionaries in the large, Susquehanna Indian town of Onaquaga (also Oghwaga, Oquaga) was the Rev. Aaron Crosby, 1774-1777.   James Dean, an interpreter who played an important role in later land settlements, spent much of his youth in that Indian village.[25] [26]

Sir William Johnson, Joseph Brant, and the Adaquitingues.  At about age 23 in late 1737 or early 1738, William Johnson, later a British baronet, emigrated from Ireland to become a land agent in the Mohawk Valley for his mother’s brother, Peter Warren.[27] [28]   Early on the young Scotch-Irishman developed great rapport with the Mohawk Indians, much to the pleasure of the Crown.  In order to obtain amicable relationships with the confederacy known by now as the Six Nations, the English eventually appointed Johnson Commissioner of Indian Affairs.

After acting as his uncle’s trader and land developer for a few years, Johnson moved across the Mohawk to land he had purchased on his own.  His new abode, “Mount Johnson” (and later his somewhat more distant mansion, “Johnson Hall,” which was to become eventually the site of the town of Johnstown) was open to the Indians at all times.  They would be inside or outside of his home day and night.  He had an Indian wife, Mollie, the “major passion” of his life.[29]  Her younger brother was the famous (and notorious) Joseph Brant.[30]  Sir William Johnson had taken an interest in young Brant and sent him to Rev. Wheelock’s School in Lebanon, Connecticut.[31]   Brant was a brilliant student but decided to return to Indian life.[32]  He served as an interpreter for the English and later as Sir William’s liaison between the English and the Indians.  After Sir William’s death Brant traveled to England twice (in 1776 and 1786) on business with the Crown.

Perhaps encouraged by Brant’s experience and influence, Indian villages took on some English customs.  Some began using squared logs in their long houses.  Many had fruit trees and cleared land.  Brant himself owned outright and farmed 80 acres in Canajoharie and owned even more land across the Mohawk.[33]  The Patriot colonel, William Butler, reported on his 1778 destruction of Onaquaga, an important Indian village near the present town of Windsor and “second home” of Joseph Brant.  He wrote:  “It was the finest Indian Town I ever saw: on both sides the river; there was about 40 good houses, Square logs, Shingles and stone chimneys, good floors, glass windows, &c, &c.”[34]

In the future town of Davenport, the Iroquois of the Five/Six Nations occupied a site near Mickle Bridge (off Route 23 in West Davenport).  The Adaquitingues (called such after the Indian name for Charlotte River, renamed by William Johnson in honor of the English queen, wife of George III) resided to the east as far as Stamford.  Toward Otego were the Ahtiqua Indian settlements.  The Tuscaroras moved into the hunting territory beyond these settlements.  In general the Indians were friendly to the increasing number of white settlers and visitors.

 

 The Indians had initially a different concept of land possession from that of the Europeans.  To them the land could not be owned.  It belonged to all for producing the bounty to sustain all.  They believed the land itself belonged to the Great Spirit.  To the English, in contrast, land could be owned by individuals and provided an opportunity to accumulate personal wealth as well as natural resources.

Parceling out the Indians’ land.  On April 19, 1708, the Hardenburgh Patent was granted in the name of Queen Anne to Johannes Hardenburgh of Kingston in Ulster County.  The huge grant was south and east of the West Branch of the Delaware River.[35]  It carried the proviso that the Indian claims be “extinguished.”  In 1740 the Colonial governor granted the Arent Bradt Patent of 10,000 acres that included Hobart and South Kortright.  This was followed in 1743, as noted above, by the Mine Patent in Davenport Center.  These early patents were either not surveyed at all or were not adequately surveyed before 1769.

Much of the land covered by these patents was not officially within the boundaries claimed by the Province of New York.  The patents thus extended the implicit provincial boundaries westward into unsurveyed Indian lands with whose occupants no acquisition arrangements had been made.  Claims made on unsurveyed land carried little weight, as did any land “purchased” directly from the Indians.

In an attempt to regularize a confusing situation and to be responsive to westward pressures from European settlers, Sir William Johnson in 1768 negotiated the purchase for the Crown of a huge tract of land extending to the Allegheny, Ohio, and even the Tennessee rivers.  The demarcating line between the Indian land and the British Government holdings, the so-called “Line of Property,” followed the Ohio River northeast and then cut across Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley (a tributary to the Susquehanna).  It then followed the east side of the Susquehanna to “Oswegy” (Owego, N.Y.), near the northern boundary of Pennsylvania.  The line then ran “east to Delaware river and up that river to opposite where Tinaderha [also Tionadhera; the Unadilla River] falls into Susquehanna; thence to Tinaderha and up the east branch to the head thereof; and then by a direct line to Canada Creek where it empties into the Wood creek, at the west of the carrying place beyond Fort Stanwix.”[36] The line thus ended near the eastern end of Oneida Lake, about seven miles west of the present Rome, N.Y.[37]

King George III felt that the payment of 13,156 pounds sterling[38] (about $50,000) was too great a price for the land.  However, Sir William convinced the King that sales of the land to settlers or land speculators would readily return the investment to the Crown.  With this assurance King George approved the treaty, and it was formally accepted by the Indians at Fort Stanwix (now in Rome, N.Y.) on July 21, 1770.  The new territory, in addition to the new lands for settlement in New York and Pennsylvania, included a “corner of Alabama, most of West Virginia, much of Tennessee, and all of Kentucky.”[39]

Prior to the Fort Stanwix treaty Sir William himself had compounded the messy land situation in 1751 by acquiring from the Indians 100,000 acres bordering the Charlotte River and extending down the Susquehanna to the Pennsylvania border.  In anticipation of the Fort Stanwix treaty other “land speculators rushed in to deal directly with the Indians and secure large tracts cheaper than they could be got from the Crown.”[40] In 1768, John Harper, Sr., and others purchased from five Indians 250,000 acres lying south of the Sir William Johnson lands.  Purchases of these types were considered illegal, since only the Crown was to have full authority to sell land.  In 1769, the Earl of Hillsborough wrote that no private agreements with the Indians would be honored.  However, in deference to those patents made much earlier (1708, 1740 and 1743), some deeds were registered and sealed.

Goldsborough Banyar, an ambitious and clever young man, had emigrated to the new provinces from England about the same time as William Johnson and “had soon risen to prominence.”[41] By 1746 “Goldsbrow” (he preferred this contraction of his first name) had become deputy to George Clarke, Secretary of the Colony of New York.  Shrewdly, he expanded his functions as Deputy Secretary and Deputy Clerk until virtually every land transaction had to pass through his hands.  He could and did either interfere with or expedite the application of the state seal and fees according to his personal interest in the property itself. 

Banyar also cultivated the acquaintance of William Johnson, by this time a man of some repute and in 1748 a colonel of the Indian services of the New York militia:

 

As perpetual Undersecretary of New York, Goldsbrow Banyar was manipulating the routine services of government to give himself a nice fortune and inconspicuous power.  Banyar foresaw a new war with France.  The best way for a fat little functionary to stay strong in wartime was to attach himself to a hero.  The huge Indian colonel [Johnson] looked like such a hero, and certainly needed guidance through the China shop of colonial politics.  Pointing out that it was illegal to grant more than 1000 acres to one individual, Banyar urged Johnson “to follow the custom” by suppressing his own name in all land petitions in favor of “the names of friends,” one for each 1,000 acres, who could be relied on to convey the land to him after it had been patented.  (Flexner, 1979, 113.)

Sir William Johnson had been systematically acquiring official patents for land he had less formally acquired.  When he sought the patent for the Charlotte and Susquehanna land, his “advisor” Banyar decided it was too large and should be split between them.  Banyar’s share was the 30,000-acre section running down the Susquehanna and patented in the name of John Rapelje and others, called “straw men.”  Johnson’s share, a tract of 26,000 acres lying on both sides of the Charlotte River, was patented in 1770.

Meanwhile the 250,000 acres that John Harper and others had purchased in 1768 was cut down to size, again with the help of Goldsbrow Banyar.  Only 22,000 acres finally remained in the hands of the Harpers.   A 22,000-acre portion immediately next to the Harper patent of 1769 was sold to and patented in 1770 by Lawrence Kortright and others.  Next to the Kortright property came that of Alexander McKee and others, consisting of 18,000 acres also patented in 1770.  The McKee Patent was more generally known as the Banyar Patent and sometimes, the Goldsborough Patent.  Adjoining the McKee land to the west came the Tudor Patent (also dating from 1770).  This was apparently subdivided in 1786 with the western half becoming the Lynott Patent.  The 30,000-acre Meredith Patent, more often known as the Franklin or Wharton Patent, followed this to the west.  All of these patents were bounded to the north by Johnson’s Charlotte River Patent.[42] In addition, the northern boundary of the Franklin Patent partially abutted the Wallace Patent, a continuation of the Charlotte River Patent, running along both sides of the Susquehanna down to the Unadilla River.  All but the Harper Patent included lands later incorporated into the Town of Davenport.

In the future Delaware County, following the formal acquisition by the Crown of Indian lands under the treaty of Fort Stanwix, at least fifteen patents were granted in 1770 alone.[43] The town of Harpersfield, the first in the area to be organized (1788) after the Revolution, at first included much of the original Harper purchase.  “It embraced within its limits parts of the towns of [what later became] Delhi, Davenport, Franklin, Hamden, Kortright, Meredith, Masonville, Sidney, Tompkins and Walton, in Delaware county, and parts of Afton and Bainbridge, in Chenango county.”[44] From this large territory the towns of Franklin and Kortright were formally split off in 1792 and 1793.  Kortright at its formation encompassed four entire patents (Kortright, Goldsborough, Bradish, and Meredith[45]), including a part of Stamford as well as much of what later became Davenport.[46]

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