The Nicholas Gesner Diary

The nicholas gesner Diary Volume 1 1829-1834 Transcribed and edited by Alice Gerard © Alice Gerard, 2015 PO Box 225 Palisades NY 10964 ISBN 978-0-9743865-1-5 forewOrd This book is dedicated to my mother Alice Haagensen, with many thanks to everyone who helped with her gargantuan effort to transcribe theNicholas Gesner Diary. The publication of the book was made possible by the work done between 1958 and 2000 by Alice Haagensen and the many friends and relatives she per- suaded to help her decipher Nicholas Gesner’s crabbed handwriting. They had actually transcribed the first 400 pages, some typed and more handwritten, although none of it was on the computer. Among them were Caroline Tapley, Tina Kister, Mildred Rippey, Judy Friedlander, and myself; there may have been others. Other people helped. Piermont Librarian Grace Mitchell assisted me in researching the history of Pier- mont. Marianne Leese of the Rockland County Historical Society provided me with maps. I relied heavily on the publications of Winthrop Gilman and Reginald McMahon for information about the people who lived in Nicholas’s neighborhood during the time he kept the diary. Herb Kellogg, who lived in the dwelling that Nicholas built in 1793, showed me over the house so I could get an idea about the living spaces. Formatting the diary was a complicated process. Alice Haagensen had hoped to publish it with a graphic of each one of Nicholas’s pages opposite each transcription. This would have required a series of 8 volumes, 400 pages each, so I abandoned the idea. Next I had to decide what to do about the abbreviations, which contribute to the diffculty of reading the text. I decided to leave the abbreviations in the sidebars and to write out each abbreviation on the actual page, if I knew what it was short for. I have left the abbreviations for North, East, South West, and a few measurements, for example pounds and yards. I added notes at the bottom of some pages, explaining words or events mentioned on the page. In some cases I was unable to find a meaning for a word, even in the Oxford English Dictionary; readers will have to make a guess at the meaning. Nicholas was an inconsistent speller, capitalizer and user of punctuation; I have left his text as he wrote it but have added commas in some places to make the meaning clearer. Occasionally I was unable to decipher what he wrote and I have indicated these places with a question mark. I have incorporated a few of his drawings and have provided pictures from other sources to illustrate some of the events he refers to. The books also include pictures of some of his neighbors and of their houses. At the beginning of the book there is a list of the names of the people mentioned in the diary with some identifying information. There is no index; too many people are mentioned too often to make it practical. However, upon request I will provide anyone who buys a copy of the book with a searchable pdf file. I have incorporated sections from Alice Haagensen’s article on the Gesner Dairy, published in the April- June 1990 issue of South of the Mountain, into the introduction to this book. I have not always given credit. The complete article is included at the end of Volume IV, as well as what Carl Nordstom wrote about Nicholas in his book, Frontier Elements in a Hudson River Village. Both sources are listed in the bibliography I have enjoyed following Nicholas through the 21 years he kept the diary. I think of him as an old friend. I hope that the readers of this book will come to feel the same way about him. Alice Gerard May, 2015 table of contents Page Introduction to the Gesner Diary I The World of Nicholas Gesner III Names in the Diary XVII Genealogies XX April 29, 1829 1 January 5, 1830 9 March 19, 1831 35 January 9, 1832 72 January 1 1833 148 June 23, 1934 276 Interesting Events 370 Illustrations A page from the Gesner diary I Replica of the Clermont VII Map of the Gesner neighborhood XII Houses on Closter Road XIII Rockland in 1836 XIV 1900 picture of Gesner house 30 Steamboat Nyack (Orange) 46 Garret Onderdonck house 60 Abraham Post 63 Drawing of the early Big House 70 Joseph Dubois 71 Phebe Concklin Van Wickle 74 Jonathan Lawrence 75 Slote Schoolhouse 77 Pettiauger 90 Jeremiah Smith’s house 91 John “Boss” Sneden’s house in Piermont 116 Captain Larry Sneden house 148 Albert Cooper house 154 David Mann 160 Mann Family genealogy 161 Herbert Lawrence 163 David Tallman 175 Jesse Trenchard 185 Nagle Grist Mill in 1900 195 George Lawrence 206 Obb Cooper 280 William Sneden house 363 introduction to the nicholas Gesner diaries A Page from the Diary The World of Nicholas Gesner Introducing Nicholas Gesner and his milieu The first permanent European settlers to North America, those who came in the 17th and early 18th century, found themselves living in a new and very different society from the cultures they had left behind. Most had come from densely populated countries where everyone’s place was established at birth, and freedom, both religious and political, was limited. In this country, many settled in places where they felt the equals of their neighbors, who often lived a good distance away. The newcomers had to learn to solve their own problems. They had more responsibility, and they also had the freedom to practice and to become specialists in many professions which they could never have aspired to in their old countries. New kinds of people appeared as the result of living in this frontier environment: self-sufficient small farmers, who grew their own food, built their own houses, and were able to invent their own lives. Farmers had lived in this same way for tens of thousands of years, but somehow the freedom in most of North America allowed them to try new things and to live better lives. One of these people was Nicholas Gesner, born 250 years ago in Rockleigh, New Jersey, a world so far removed from us that it is almost impossible to imagine. The next-to-youngest of nine children, he entered the world in 1765 as a resident of the territory of New Jersey, an overseas possession of Great Britain. The area he lived in had been settled by Europeans for less than 75 years and was still in many ways a frontier community. Tappan, New York, where his father was born, was unusual because its first settlers, who were given possession of the land in 1685, had been ordinary farmers from New Amsterdam and included two free black families. Property owners in nearby Palisades, New York, Nicholas’s later home, were also small farmers and included several immigrant families from Germany. This was very different from Westchester, across the Hudson, where there were a number of large estates owned by wealthy men from Holland. The Gesner family In his book on the Gesner family Anthon T. Gesner, a descendant of one of Nicholas’s brothers, provides information about the first Gesners in North America. The first of the name of Gesner in this country … was Johan Hendrick Gesner, who, in the twenty-ninth year of his age, accompanied by his wife Anna Elizabeth and infant daughter Margaret, left the Palatinate of the Rhine, with many others who in that oppressed region had suffered through war and misrule, and came to London; from whence he sailed by ship Lyon for America, arriving in New York, June 10-12, 1710. … The winter of 1710 was spent in New York. … Within a short while, however, he is found residing in the vicinity of Tappan, Rockland Co., New York. He was a miller by profession … [and] a man of pious life, brought up in, and adhering to, the Lutheran faith. (The Gesner Family, page 7) Johan Gesner became a prosperous man, operating a mill located on the Hackensack River. His son John Henry Gesner, Nicholas’s father, chose to follow his father’s career, also becoming a miller. When he was twenty years old, in 1744, John Henry married Famiche Brower. His first child, Elizabeth, was born in 1745 and his son John Henry Jr. in 1749. That same year John Henry Gesner bought land and built a house on Rockleigh Road in New Jersey. Although the house has disappeared, we know that it was built of wood because of a statement, referring to a frame house built in 1835 by Joseph DuBois, that “Portions of this structure were built from materials scavenged from the old homestead of John Henry Gesner.” We can also conjecture that, like most of the houses in the neighborhood at that time, the house had a center hallway, with rooms on each side, and a garret above reached by a staircase located in the hall. Cooking was done in a large open fireplace located in one of the ground floor rooms. The other room also had a fireplace and may have been used for sleeping, as was the garret. There was probably a barn and an outhouse on the property. Water came from a well and the house was lighted by whale-oil lamps and candles. In this house John Henry and Famiche raised nine children, all of whom survived childhood. They were: Elizabeth (1745-1825) m. Jacob Conklin Jr. John Henry Jr (1749-~1846), Jacob (23 Dec 1751-?), Isaac (1754-?), Hendrick (1756-?) and his twin Abraham (1756 - 1851), Cornelius (1761-1790), Nicholas (1765-1858), Femmetje (Famiche) (1768-1821) John Henry Gesner also owned slaves.

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