The Great Nine Partners' Record Book

The marked stone at the northeast corner of the New Paltz Patent, on the estate of Mrs. Alton Brooks Parker at Esopus, Ulster County, New York.

The plate was made from a photograph taken in 1913 by Clarence Elting of Highland, New York, and obtained through his courtesy.

Inasmuch as it is practically certain that this stone marks the northeast corner of the New Paltz tract, it should be stateed that the land was purchased from the Indians by the whites in 1677; that a survey of it was made in 1709 (see the diagram reproduced in Olde Ulster for 1910, volume 6, page 201) ; that an Indian would not have known how to cut letters of the alphabet; and that, if the letters and the human figure were in the same workmanship, the hand which made them must have been that of a white man. If cut by a white man, it is fair to guess that they were done either in 1677, when the land passed from the Indians into the possession of Europeans, or in 1709 when a more thorough survey was made of it. In the eyes of a layman it seems probable that the marks on this stone were equivalent to the words of a deed, written on paper or parchment. The human figure represented the grantor, the letters the grantee and, taken together, they bore witness to a sale and a purchase.

The marked rock on the east side of the Hudson in Dutchess County is about six miles north of the rock at Esopu§. It is at the tip of a small point that forms the north end of a cove on the river-front of the estate of Mrs. Suckley in the town of Rhinebeck. The site was a part of a tract that was sold by the Indians in 1686 to Gerrit Aertsen Van Wagenen and his partners and, when the tract was partitioned into lots, the rock was included in lot number-two and fell to the heirs of Gerrit Van Wagenen. Members of the Van Wagenen family contniued to own it until 1799, when John B. Van Wagenen sold one-hundred and sixty acres to the Reverend Freeborn Garretson and the rock was included in the conveyance. Mr. Garretson and his wife, Catharine (Livingston) Garretson, built a house on their property in 1799 and their estate has long borne the name: Wildercliff.

Knowledge of the marked rock was current at Rhinebeck in the nineteenth century. A volume, entitled: Biographies of Francis Lewis and Morgan Lewis, was published in 1877 by Mrs. Joseph Delafield ( Julia Livingston) , a great-niece of Mrs. Freeborn Garretson, in which mention is made (Part 2,

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pages 223-224) of a flat rock on the shore of the Garretson property, on which "fifty years ago" a cutting was visible of "two" Indian warriors but from which (the author said) some of the lines had by 1877 disappeared, their loss occasioned by the friction of natural forces.

Mrs. Delafield speaks of the rock in the town of R hinebeck as having been cut originally with two figures and the History of Rhinebeck, published in 1908 by Howard H. Morse, incorporates a similar statement but in 1930 the rock exhibited only one figure and that was incomplete, a portion of it having scaled off in late years. The one figure was complete within the personal recollection of Robert Bowne Suckley of Rhinebeck, who has lived near the rock all his life, and according to his observation of it the figure originally held a tomahawk in the left hand and a calumet or peace-pipe in the right. The tomahawk is now gone but the pipe can still be made out. In workmanship the marks on this rock are believed to differ from those on the stone in Ulster, having apparently been made by a tool used with a rotary motion, that gouged or chipped out the lines, whereas the effect of the cutting at Esopus is that of deep and straight incisions.

It is not known by whom or when or why the cuttings on the Rhinebeck rock were made. The site of the rock was on the west boundary-line of the land which the Indians sold to the whites in 1686 and later, when the tract was divided into lots, the location of the rock was on the west line of lot number-two. It was not one of the corners of the patent ( as was the rock in Ulster), nor was it the corner of a lot when the tract was divided and hence it is not probable that it was a boundary-monument. The only fact that (as yet) seems to throw any light on the history of the stone is that the estate of Mr. and Mrs. Freeborn Garretson was so long called Wildercliff and that the name is susceptible to interpretation and comparison.

In the valley of the Hudson many linguistic anomalies occur, caused by the interplay of Dutch and English phonetics in pronunciation and spelling. The name: Wildercliff is an

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The marked stone on the estate of Mrs. Robert Suckley in the town of Rhinebeck, Dutchess County, New York.

The plate reproduces a photograph made especially for this Year Book by Allen Frost of Poughkeepsie, New York.

instance of such confusion. The Dutch who lived along the Hudson in the seventeenth century called an Indian a wilt, that is: a wild man or a savage. The plural form of this noun was wilden, of which the final n was silent. In Dutch the letter w has a sound something like that of v in English. The word: wilden was therefore spoken by a Dutchman approximately as if spelled in English: vilda. The word: clif or cliff is old Dutch for rock. It is to be supposed that the Dutch people that lived in Rhinebeck near the stone spoke of it as: wilden cliff or "rock of the Indians" and Wildercliff would seem to be an evolved form of the two Dutch words.

An instance parallel to Wildercliff is found in the town of Red Hook, Dutchess County, where a stream that now is known as the White Clay Kill was called the wilden kill by the Dutch who first settled near it. The stream enters the Hudson River below Tivoli at North Bay and it is known that at one time some Indians lived in a group close by, so that for the Dutch to speak of the wilden kill (stream of the Indians) was literally descriptive. Use of the name: wilden kill died out in common speech as applied to the stream but it lingered until a few years ago as Wilderkill, applied to a country-seat near the stream. With this precedent in mind the evolution of wilden cliff into Wildercliff is seen to have been possible and the "rock of the Indians" at Rhinebeck stands out as a stone associated with the natives in some unknown way.

The photograph of the stone in the town of Rhinebeck was made for this Year Book in the summer of 1930 by Allen Frost of Poughkeepsie who surmounted real difficulty to secure the picture. To focus the camera Mr. Frost waded through water and muck, knee-deep, and stood in the same while making the negative. Supplementing the photograph there is also presented a rubbing of the marks now remaining on the rock which was made by Mr. Suckley and which emphasizes lines that are faint in the photograph. Mr. Suckley reached the stone by canoe and, like Mr. Frost, conquered obstacles to attain his object.

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