1. NEW AMSTERDAM COLONY
FAMILY HISTORY
As the 'family elder", I want to begin by passing on to you what the last 'family elder' shared with me. Her name was Elmira Lenora Bailey and she was from Binghamton, New York. The first to arrive in the colonies was her great-great-grandmother, Anneke Jans.
Here's a quote from a much longer article I found on the internet. It matches exactly with what my great-grandmother told me:
For the little 62 acre farm in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, Anneke, with her husband sought to tame from its native wilderness has produced a crop of skyscrapers, stores, and tenements which makes the denied inheritance of Prince Wolfert a joke. In the passing of 300 years or more, the desolate farm of the immigrant bride has become an estate whose settlement has formed one the of the greatest legal disputes of all times. Its value is so great that it can scarcely be appraised. The Trinity Church corporation now owns the land which once comprised Anneka's farm and the farm of her neighbor, Peter Wikoff. Some of the buildings that stand on this property are the Woolworth building, the highest in the worlds" the Standard Oil offices, 26 Broadway; the Singer building, Wall Street; the Morgan office, the United States subtreasury and historic Trinity church. The ground alone is estimated to have a value of not less than $1,000,000,000.
Does the ghost of Anneka Jans, "a little woman with merry eyes beneath her Dutch cap and a fondness for bright clothing," according to her biographers, walk historic Duane street, once a lane through her farm, dreaming of the joke that she has played upon her wrathful father and his seventh generation will? For the seventh generation of Anneka's descendants has arrived and some of them are seeking to prove their right to an estate of unestimated value while Prince Wolfert's will is only vaguely remembered as the threat of an angry old man. It is believed by 80 descendants of Anneka Jens and Peter Wikoff, banded together in "The Descendants' Association" that the climax of the romantic story of the runaway princess and her 62-acre farm is about to be written.
The article goes on to say that there are hundreds of descendants, four that are known in Minneapolis and several in the Northwest (and this doesn't even include us!) There was a convention in Indianapolis, IN for the Descendant's Association. Also, a description of the farm also called the King's Farm, the Duke's Farm and the Queen's Farm, reads as such: "...it extended from Warren street along Christopher street. The Hudson river forming the base of a kind of unequal triangle. Wouter Van Twiller, the Dutch governor of New Amsterdam, granted this tract in 1636 to Roelef Jans, five years after his arrival in America." To read the entire thing: http://www.rootie.org/anneke.php
SEARCHING FOR BETTER FARMLAND:
Eight generations later, Elmira's family members were farmers, a mix of English and Dutch, who had moved to Binghamton, New York from New York City after their farm in New York City had been leased to the Trinity Church on a 99-year lease. I am not sure about the time between the lease of the farm and their departure to Binghamton. Grandma seemed to think that one of the descendants, Aquila Lane, had received the land in upstate New York as a result of his actions in the American Revolution. Perhaps our cousin, Lane Patton, can shed some more light on this for us.
After leaving the island of Manhattan, the family discovered that upstate New York was not the best place for farming. After struggling for more than a hundred years with rocky ground, bitterly cold winters, and failed crops they looked for a better place to settle. In "How the West Was Settled" by Greg Bradsher noted: "At the nation’s beginning, the land was seen primarily as a source of revenue to reduce the national debt, and most land laws adopted before the Civil War provided for the sale of public lands, after 1820, at $1.25 an acre. From the 1820s through the 1840s, westerners pushed for more liberal land laws, calling for “free homesteads” or “donations” for those who would settle on the land"
TO THE FRONTIER:
According to the Kansas Historical Society, "In 1854 the newly created territory of Kansas was opened for white settlement. It was not until after the Civil War, however, that Kansas experienced a significant increase in population. Free and cheap land provided by the Homestead Act and the railroads attracted many settlers. More than 70 percent of the immigrants arriving in these first two decades were engaged in agricultural pursuits. Agriculture remained the principal occupation for Kansans until the 1920s."
Elmira Lenora was born in 1862. Her family headed for St. Louis to join a wagon train to the area in Kansas where they wanted to start a new farm. She told me that her very first memory in her life was 'falling out of the back of the covered wagon in the middle of the plains and not being missed'. Although she was only 3 years old and the grass on the plains was higher than her head, she trudged along following the tracks made by the wagon until, nearing nightfall, she saw the camp they had set up ahead. Fearing a spanking, she was happy to learn that they didn't even know she was gone, so she joined the rest of the family by the campfire and ate the hard tack and beans without saying a word about her adventure.
Elmira was my great-grandmother, the mother of Fern Miller Patton, my grandmother, whose children included Lela May, George, and Paul Patton, my mother and my two uncles. Lela May became the mother of myself and Dorothy. We are descended from a line of very strong matriarchs who survived the American frontier, dating back to the original settlement of Nieuw Amsterdam by our ancestress, Anneke Jens, the one who started the farm at the tip of Manhattan Island.
OUT OF THE FRYING PAN
Meanwhile, the Bailey family arrived in Lawrence, Kansas just as the Civil War was winding down. Unfortunately, as 'Yankees" they were viewed as 'jayhawkers' (abolitionists) in an area that was still strongly divided between supporters of the Confederacy and Union sympathizers. No sooner had they built their first farmhouse than a splinter group of Quantrill's Raiders came in the night and burned them out. They tried to rebuild, but as soon as it was evident that they had not been driven away, the Raiders returned and burned them out again.
They pulled up stakes and moved on to an area later known as Muscotah, Kansas where they dug into the side of a hill and built out from that a simple farmhouse large enough for parents and 12 children. I know Elmira's two younger brothers, Earnest and Noble, farmed that land long after the others had drifted away. They came to visit us in San Antonio in the early 1950s. Great Grandma and her brothers told us all about what it was like being there after the Civil War when "Bleeding Kansas" was still a recent memory in that area.
They showed me an old daguerreotype photo of their mother holding a rifle, standing next to a cornfield where the corn towered over her head. The caption stated that she was an expert shot able to shot the eye out of a bird on the wing.
THE VERBAL HISTORY HANDED ON
I had recently been taken in by my grandmother to live with her after Paul and Fay found that coping with a pre-teen girl was more than they had bargained for. My Great-Grandma, Elmira, was recently widowed from her beloved husband, Robert Linklater. They had married late in life after he retired from his life as an engineer on the MKT Railroad (the famous "Katy"). For a honeymoon, he took his new wife to Monterrey, Mexico on the Katy and her house was filled with souvenirs from that trip.
Grandma was busy running her apartment rental business and selling her cocker spaniel puppies so I was left with Great Grandma who was eager to share stories and teach frontier survival skills that were rapidly being lost in our modern era of industrialization.
As soon as she finished high school in Kansas, Elmira had left the farm and sought employment as a lady's maid. She still had a packet of the reference letters written for her by her former employers, all of whom recommended her highly. A photo of her in her early 20's shows a diminutive woman, with dark hair and eyes, dressed in the fashion of the day, and with a pleasant but rather plain face.
She met a handsome rascal named James Miller who courted her and convinced her to marry him. He was red-haired, short, stocky, and blue-eyed. He was a dreamer always pursuing one scheme after another in his efforts to get ahead. The idea of steady employment was anathema to him. Finally, after one failed venture after another, he left Elmira and their two daughters, Fern and May, and ran off to the Alaska gold fields, certain that he would strike it rich and send for them to join him.
She stayed faithful to him all the years that followed. He returned briefly when Fern was 16 and May was 18 and entering college as a freshman. Yes, my great aunt May was the first person in the family to work her way through college and graduate with a degree in Home Economics. As Grandma used to say, "May got herself a Bachelors Degree and a bachelor!" because May married her college sweetheart, and became May Montgomery, living in a lovely home in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Glenn Montgomery was a highly successful civil engineer who built the bridge across the Mississippi there in Minnesota along with other projects which gave them a very comfortable living.
THE RASCAL RETURNS
So Miller returned with a gold nugget he claimed to have found on his claim in Alaska and had it made into a Victorian Loveknot ring which he gave to Elmira to show that he would always love her and that as soon as that claim began to really pay off, he would send for her. A few years later, she received a letter from Sarah Miller, his sister who was living in Seattle at that time, stating that he had died of pleurisy and pneumonia with no estate of any kind that she could inherit.
Great Grandma still had that ring and she gave it to me. I wore it for years afterward until the gold (which was pure 24 karat gold) was so soft that the strands holding it together wore through. I had a jeweler in Hawaii copy it for me - but in much stronger 14 karat gold, and gave it to my present husband, Mario, as his wedding ring.
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