T Is Sometimes Difficult to Remember That Fort Grange and Beverwijck
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t is sometimesdifficult to remember that Fort Grange second phase of planned town development during the and Beverwijck were two different establishmentsunder 1650sand 1660s.Qneof theearliest developmentsin this the Dutch West India Company. Fort Grange was the period was the construction of Fort Casimir and the town trading center built by the Company in 1624,and Bever- of New Amstel on the Delaware beginning in 1651 and wijck was the town laid out by the Company in 1652 1652. At Fort Grange, meanwhile, an illegal cluster of some distance to the north but within a cannon shot of houseshad grown up on the norehside of the fort that, by Fort Grange. As establishments of the West India 1652, was said to number about 100 structures. Unlike Company primarily intended to facilitate and control these illegal houses of Rensselaerswijck immediately trade, Fort Orange and Beverwijck were separatefrom outside the fort, other houseshad been built beginning in the Colonie of Rensselaerswijck which entirely 1647 inside Fort Grange by private traders with the surrounded them. permission of the Company and of Stuyvesant himself. Fort Grange became a crowded, enclosed, small Fort Orange in 1624 and Bevcrwijclc in 1652 belong community. Stuyvesant was determined to eradicatethe within two distinct phases of colonial settlement and illegal housesbuilt close to the fort outside, and in 1648 urban development that occurred before 1664. Predated his soldiers began to tear someof them down. Finally, in by the settlements of Jamestown in 1607 and by 1652, Stuyvesant laid out the town of Beverwijck, Plymouth in 1620 and located far inland on a tidal river, consisting of lots along two main streetswhich are today Fort Grange was a third isolated outpost of European Broadway and StateStreet in Albany, located at what he civilization in what later became the thirteen original considered a safe distance north of Fort Orange.” colonies. The construction by the Dutch of Fort Amster- dam on Manhattan in 1626 included the laying out of Other planned towns in New Netherland soon streets nearby which becameNew Amsterdam. In New followed Beverwijck. Nieuw Utrecht was laid out in England, other modem cities also survive today from 1657, and Nieuw Haerlem and Wiltwijck (Kingston) their beginnings as small compact,nucleated settlements followed in 1658. Still later, in 1662, Schenectadyand established and laid out in a remarkable per&l between Nieuw Dot-p (Hurley) were established. If and when 1630 and 1639. These include Cambridge, Boston, archeological remains of someof thesecommunities are Hartford, Providence, New Haven, and Newport, for excavatedand then carefully studied and if comparisons example. On ChesapeakeBay, however, compactsettle- with the evidence from Fort Orange and Beverwijck can ments such as Jamestown and St. Mary’s City (1634) be made, it may yet be possible to identify cultural survive today only as archeological sites. Fort Orange behavior patterns which are distinctly urban in character was abandoned in 1676 and also did not survive as an and to test the hypothetical classification of 17th century integral part of a modem city. While technically not a communities. The basic challenge for archaeologistsas compact, nucleated settlement of the same type as the well as historians in studying urban sites is to consider other examples,Fort Orange was directly acrossthe river the problem of defining the terms “urban” and “city,” or from a village of Rensselaerswijck tradesmen and “town.” As early as 1961 Eric Lampard called attention mechanics at Greenbush which Van Rensselaerordered to the problem of inadequatedefinitions of “urban” and to be established in 1639 and which began in the early “rural” as terms usedby historians who had not carefully 1630sas a farm, mill, and guard housein need of protec- considered the question. All too often non-urban tion from the f0rt.l communities had been lumped together arbitrarily as “rural,” while distinctly “urban” traits had been very Following this initial period of settlement planning loosely defined. Lampard observedthat and establishment before 1640, New Netherland under Scholars have been preoccupied with biographies of particular the directorship of Petrus Stuyvesant experienced a communities, with case studies in urban rivalry, or the general 327 328 SELECTED RENSSELAERSWIJCK SEMINAR PAPERS impact of the city on society, rather than the study of urbanization where deep filling occurred or where the later buildings as a societal process. We know little beyond a bare statistical have shallow cellars. But in a city, as the process of outline of the secular phenomenon of population concentration, demolition and new construction steadily continues and the multiplication of points of concentration, or of relations among concentrations of different size and density in various parts of the as the old utilities are replacedby new ones’,little by little country at different times in our history. the earliest archeological tracesdisappear until they, too, are gone entirely. Perhaps the archeological analysis and comparison of fauna1remains as dietary evidence, of ceramic types as Most of the archeological information about Fort evidence of statusand wealth or of acceptanceof change, Orangeand Beverwijck that survived was lost in the 19th of structural remains as evidence of construction and early 20th centuries in the absenceof archeologists permanence,or of other forms of cultural behavior from with modem methods of data retrieval. The still visible various “urban” and“rural” sites will help in determining remains of Fort Orange,however, cameto be appreciated (according to Lampard) as an historic site after the Revolutionary War, and . .what is generically ‘urban’ or otherwise in the experience of historical observanceswere held there.4But soon Albany particular communities . Phenomena that are found in cities are began to expand its boundaries southward.,and in 1790 not necessarily ‘urban’ per se, and yet this is precisely what many Simeon Dewitt, as surveyor of the new blocks of city scholars have implied. land, laid out Broadway to extend directly acrossthe east It is, of course, necessaryto continue the careful study of part of the visible Fort Orange site. Dewitt then land records and other documents to develop a better purchasedtwo lots of land in 1793 and 1794 on the west knowledge of early urban development. The Dutch side of Broadway. With Dewitt’s apparent sense of settlements on Long Island such as Midwout, history,it wasno coincidence that thesetwo lots included Amersfoort, and Breuckelyn, for example, should be much of the remainder of the Fort Orange site west of the carefully considered in terms of their origins and early street. Dewitt immediately commencedconstruction of growth as “village” communities. Many early towns, a large new house on the two lots, thereby destroying particularly in New England, began not as compact, much of the site.5 In 1848, this house wa,sburned in a concentrated village settlements but as groups of great fire which devastatedthis part of Albany, but the enclosed lands and relatively isolated farmsteads. area was soon rebuilt. One wonders, of course, what artifacts were recovered by Dewitt, or by the builders after 1848. It is quite possible that many Dutch yellow Early Archeological Evidence of 17th- clinker bricks appearedat the site, for which it may have Century Fort Orange and Beverwijck become known. A writer in Buffalo, New York, about The walled town of Beverwijck, which became 1847 reported that the modem yellow bridks then made Albany in 1664, continued to be enclosed by a wall for in Wisconsin were harder and better than any others he another century. The city experienced one major expan- had ever seen, “unless it be those little yellow bricks sion in the 175Os,when the stockadewall was movedand which are imported from Holland, by the Dutch of Fort enlarged (Figure #56). Fort Orange remained outside the Orange to build their houses with.“6 town, to the south and close to the river bank, until it was replaced in 1676 by a new fort at a different location, Many other discoveries, meanwhile, evidently which was on the hill at the head of State Street in occurred in Albany in the area that had been Beverwijck, Albany. Unfortunately, the above-ground structures but only a few records of these have survived. In from the 17th century have entirely disappearedfrom the September 1866, Patrick McCarty, a builder, presented modern city, but the 17th-century street plan has to the Albany Common Council some relics that he had survived as a tangible, visible reminder of Albany’s long found with remains of the stockade wall which he history. This historic street plan has remained relatively uncovered in a lot on Hudson Avenue belonging to Hose iiilaltered until only recently. Company No. 7. Early in the 1870s,anotherstockade line was uncovered during excavation of the basementfor a Someof the most important archeological deposits in building at the southwestcomer of North Pearl Streetand Albany still exist under these streets, despite the Sheridan Avenue. Joel Munsell recorded that “the numerous utility lines that have been installed under workmen uncovered a row of stumps of a stockade, them. Elsewhere, 19th and 2Otb century buildings have which ran comerwise across the lot, and a crowd of obliterated most remains from the’colonial period, except persons unacquainted with these ancient defenses was ARCHEOLOGY OF FORT ORANGE 329 Fig. 57. Dutch Reformed Church