THE REED FAMILY OF AMENIA From Data Gathered by Its Descendants Edited by Henry Noble MacCracken and Mabel V. Lawson
The Reeds in Amenia Human migration has often been compared to the flow of a river, or the wave of a lake. There were also in the early days of the Province of New York little ripples that traversed the fringes of the colony until they flattened out along the shore in no man's land. The first of such ripples was caused by the shock of the Palatine settlement in the second decade of the eighteenth century. Robert Livingston, the proprietor of Clermont, had secured by contract his plantation of German refugees for the purpose of making tar from the pine trees of the waterside. His overseer and first instructor in tar boiling was Richard Sackett, a New Englander from New Haven, who had been in New York. Tar boiling was a failure from many causes, the only favorable result being the ripple of emigration that sped from the tar settlement at Germantown to cover the northern part of Dutchess County from Rhinebeck east into the woods. The boundary line was then still in dispute. Early settlers from the German Palatine group rippled eastward beyond what is now the Connecticut boundary, and crossed over into the western lands of Litchfield County where Lakeville, Salisbury, and Sharon lie today. It was not long before the counter-shock of the Palatine settlement flowed back again into New York. With it most of the early Palatines returned from New England into New York territory. Kindly and peaceable men, they seem to have been, for they brought back their friends with them. They left behind in their earliest dwellings of northwest Connecticut little houses in the Dutch style. Of these the Rowe and the Winegar families seem to have been the most prominent, as they were apparently the most numerous. It was in the happy valley known as Amenia that these poor Palatines and their friends met another oncoming wave of migration, this time from the south, which swept up the Oblong, the strip of boundary awarded to New York as compensation for New York lands that had already been preempted by Connecticut.
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