THE COLONIAL DAMES OF DUTCHESS Henry Noble MacCracker
The Colonial Dames, like the Daughters of the Revolution, are in their true image separafed by an entire culture from their image in the public mind of today. My dear sister-in-law, Mrs. John Henry MacCracken, used to invite me to meetings of the New York Colonial Dames. She was an English Constable, and on her mother's side of Dutch descent; with her sister the very head and center of Knickerbocker New York. Cool, composed and quiet, her companions did not differ by an eyelash from the earliest editions that hung upon the walls in the best Knickerbocker residences. The name "Knickerbocker", as everyone knows, was stolen from old Dutchess and pre-empted by its coiner, Washington Irving, in his famous, but devastatingly spoofing mockery, Knickerbocker's History of New York. The true Knickerbockers still reside in the villages of northern Dutchess, honored with the rest of the simple and solid founders of its first commonwealth. Their namesakes in New York City were very indignant to be thus labelled for generations with their upstate counterparts. Washington Irving showed great discretion in masquerading behind the guise of anonymity. The true Knickerbockers and their true sisters of old Dutchess are the very opposite of both images, neither of aristocrats in silken gowns and of the ignorant and blowzy viragoes. Dutchess records, both in their portraits and in their writings, present the very antithesis of these false images. Meanwhile, their name adorns clubs, villages, theatres and hotels. As I pushed my way through the wilderness of manuscript and early printing in the county records, and found these remarkable women on every page, I vowed at the time that some day I would lay my own little wreath of tribute, of respect and of affection on their overgrown churchyard of memory. We begin, of course, with the remarkable Catheryna Brett, daugter of Francois Rombout, once mayor of New York City. The family stemmed from old Mechlin in Flanders, where the cathedral still bears the ded:cation to St. Rombout. We have Catheryna's letters as our proof that she must have looked more like a Valkyrie than a frowzy frau of Flanders. Picture her for yourself riding astride at the gallop through the untrodden wilderness along the Indian trails of the great patent owned jointly by Francois Rombout, Gulian Verplanck, and Stephanus Van Cortlandt, her leather breeches homemade, tanned no doubt with the local hemlock, and modeled upon her late husband's hunting habit. Roger Brett, a young naval lieutenant and visitor of the British lord, governor of New York, must have been a frequenter of the first race track of New York on Long Island, where free foxes *Dr. MacCracken, President Emeritus of Vassar College, former President of the Historical Society, has contributed many valuable articles to the Year Books.
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