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HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES.

A tax list made by order of the Assembly in 1693 names the following additional residents, viz.: Johannes Pettinger, John Van de Woestyne, and Paulus Kuster. Kuster, a Mennonite, came from Crefeld with his sons Arnold, Johannes, and Hermannus, and his wife Gertrude. She was a sister of Jan and Willem Streypers.

In 1662, twenty years before the landing of Penu, the city of Amsterdam sent a little colony of twenty-five Mennonites to New Netherlands under the leadership of Pieter Cornelisz Plockhoy, of Zierik Zee. They were to have power to make rules and laws for their own government, and were to be free from taxes and tenths for twenty years. Each man was loaned a hundred guilders to pay for his transportation. They settled at Horekill, on the Delaware, and there lived on peaceful terms with the Indians. The hand of fate, however, which so kindly sheltered Telner and Pastorius, fell heavily upon their forerunner Plockhoy. An evil day for this colony soon came. When Sir Robert Carr took possession of the Delaware on behalf of the English he sent a boat in 1664 to the Horekill, and his men utterly demolished the settlement, and destroyed and carried ofiPall of the property, " even to a naile." What became of the people has always been a mystery. History throws no light on the subject, and of contemporary documents there are none. In the year 1694 there came an old blind man and his wife to Germantown. His miserable condition awakened the tender sympathies of the Mennonites there. They gave him the citizenship free of charge. They set apart for him at the end street of the village by Peter Klever's corner a lot twelve rods long and one rod broad, whereon to build a little house and make a garden, which should be his as long as he and his wife should live. In front of it they planted a tree. Jan Doeden and Willem