grants had petitioned the great man to be allowed to settle "on the maize land behind Communipaw," and after several refusals Stuyvesant consented, provided they would plant their village in a defensible spot and fortify it, precautions which were very necessary "to prevent and in future put a stop, as much as possible, to massacres, murders, and burnings at the separate dwellings" of the outlying farmers. Streets diverged "quadrivious," as Charles Reade has it, from the central square, and another street surrounded the four outer squares, making thirty-two building-plots, which were taken up within a few months by the farmers, and a stout stockade enclosed the whole, making a defensible place into which the bouwers, or, as they are called in South Africa, the Boers, might withdraw their flocks and herds in time of trouble, collecting them on the central square, in the middle of which a well was dug for watering the cattle. The Schout and Schepens, "having reflected and duly considered" (in 1662) that cattle were subject to thirst, and that it might be dangerous to drive them outside the palisades to water, ordered the well to be dug, and it was dug accordingly, and became the heart of old Bergen. The well continued in use, Mr. Winfield tells us, until within this century, when its site was marked by a liberty-pole. It was not until 1870, something more than two centuries after the well was dug, that, with that eagerness to efface visible memorials of the past that is so characteristic of us, the square was paved and the well became merely a tradition. It seems that there ought to be enough public spirit in Bergen to reopen the old well and protect it with some durable memorial, since its population does not lack intelligent local antiquaries. And there are also, considering the position of Jersey City Heights as one of the nearest suburbs of New York, a surprising number left among its population of the representatives of its first settlers. The names which are decipherable on the oldest stones in the old grave-yard and appear in the earliest records of the town greet us also from sign-boards, and Sip and Van Byper and Van Winkle connect the modern suburb with the ancient dorp, and pleasantly testify to the Netherlandish talent for resting and being thankful.
We do not quite lack more tangible memorials. The tablet on the front of the Dutch church in Bergen Avenue, a commonplace box of the type of meeting-house in vogue 1840-50, sets forth that the church was founded in 1680. A plot for a church was piously reserved in the first plan of the village,—although in 1660, and for twenty years after, the worshippers met in a log school-house. In 1680, Bergen felt itself equal to a "stated supply," and built a little church, which stood until 1764, when it was replaced by the edifice crowned with "Bergen steeple," which Irving could see from the Battery, though for forty years it has not been visible. The early church imported the dominie, as well as the bricks, from Holland,—continuing, indeed, to import the dominie until after 1800, that it might be sure of the latest improvements upon the doctrine of the Synod of Dort, upon which the great rebellion in England was nourished, and of avoiding the home-bred Dutch heresies of Arminius.
The streets of Bergen, too, though more or less modified, retain the primitive arrangement of a palisaded village, and here and there along them are architectural relics of the Dutch dynasty. The most remarkable and interesting of these is the Sip house, which has an interest unique in this country, to the best of the present writer's knowledge and belief, in being now the residence of the descendants, in the seventh generation, of its builders, by whose family it has been continuously occupied. A suspicion that this is a case like that of the legendary boy's "same old jack-knife"—"a permanent body composed of transitory parts"—may haunt the ingenuous reader; and in fact the present Sip house is not in all respects the identical fabric that Claas Arianse Sip reared in 1666. But it comprises that structure, and the ex-
