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NYACK HISTORY

(The following was obtained from the book "Old Nyack", an illustrated historical sketch of Nyack-on-the-Hudson.  It was published in 1928 to commemorate the Golden Anniversary of the Founding, in 1878, of the Nyack National Bank.  Mr. George Budke and Mr. J.Elmer Christie are acknowledged for supplying the historical matter and many of the illustrations).

(Image of Nyack from guide book by William Wade, engraver, 1846)

     When Hendrik Hudson first sailed up the noble stream that now bears his name, the level stretch of ground extending along the river from South Nyack to Upper Nyack was in the possession of the Tappan and Hackensack tribe of Indians.  When, a little later, the white man came in contact with this tribe, they made a distinction between the Tappans and the Hackensacks; naming them according to the place in which they dwelt, but all the natives who inhabited what is now Bergen County, N.J. and the southern part of Rockland County, N.Y., were, in fact, fellow-tribesmen who held their lands in common, acted as a unit in making of war and of peace, and, at times, acknowledged the authority of a single over-ruling sachem.

    The northern limit of the Tappans and Hackensacks, as near as can be determined, now, was marked by the Narachonk brook, flowing through Nanuet, the southern side of the Nyack swamp, and the mountain summits back of the Nyack line sweeping around to the river at the Hook.  The Haverstraw, or Highland warriors came south as far as this boundary.

    This partition arrangement was eminently fair to both tribes because it gave the Haverstraws the river shore from the Long Cove to the Dunderberg, while the Tappans and Hackensacks,-who were debarred from the river by the rampart of the Palisades-had access to tidal water from Piermont to the Hook Mountain.

(painting of Nyack by Basilio Q. Castaneda, 1947)

    The section of country lying between the river and the mountains, in the earliest intercourse between the white and red men, was called the "North End of Tappan," and no specific name was applied thereto until long afterward.  The four or five miles of waterfront hedged in by the hills was the only place north of Fort Lee where the waters of the Hudson could easily be reached. It, therefore, naturally became a favorite spot for the encampment of the natives. Here, in early spring, they came from their retreats in the interior of the country, pinched and sometimes starved, by the rigors of winter.  Here they gathered, as to a feast, when the Hudson had cast from her bosom her mantel of ice, and here, they found, in her  waters, an abundance of the fish and oysters upon which they largely subsisted.  And when the shad-bush, first of the spring-flowering shrubs, burst into snowy bloom, they knew that deprivation, for the year, was past, that the winter was over and gone, and that the shad, in inexhaustible numbers were running again.

    The forest clad alcove in the hills at the "North End of Tappan," to which the Indians resorted every spring for the river fishing, attracted the notice of the Dutch farmers of New Amsterdam long before it would have been safe for any of them to live so far away from Manhattan Island.  One Claus Jansen van Purmarent (whose descendants assumed the family name of Cooper), who had thrived in the cultivation of his plantation at Ahasymus on the New Jersey shore opposite New Amsterdam, was so taken with the advantageous location of these Indian lands, that he applied to Governor Phillip Carteret of New Jersey for a grant of the same, no doubt, having first bought the aborigines' rights, although no record of the purchase from the native owners has survived.

    On April 16, 1671, two hundred and forty acres were patented to him, and November 20th, of the same year, four hundred acres adjoining the first parcel were, in like manner, conveyed to him by Governor Carteret.  For the six hundred and forty acres bestowed upon him, Claus Jansen agreed to pay, annually, six bushels of merchantable winter wheat, as a quit rent to the government of East Jersey.

    Claus Jansen sold one-fourth of the last mentioned four hundred acres of a Dutch neighbor by the name of Dowe Harmensen Tallman, who lived at Bergen (now Bergen Square on Jersey City Heights), and Tallman seems to have been the first to brave the wilderness and the redskins and take up his habitation on the heavily wooded slope overlooking the Tappan Zee.  Tallman came, apparently, either in 1684, when his tract of land was laid out by the surveyors, or in the year following.  In 1686, he was appointed the first Sheriff of Orange County.  He built a mill on the stream that now flows beside Main Street, which then was called the Mil Brook.

    Claus Jansen (Cooper) died at Ahasymus and was buried, November 30, 1688 from the Bergen Dutch Church.  His eldest son, Cornelius Claussen Cooper, inherited his lands in Orange County and immediately settled what is now Upper Nyack.  During the next few years, Cornelius Cooper, first by purchase of one hundred and fifty acres from Tunis Van Houten, to whom these acres had been patented, and secondly, by direct grant from government, acquired all the rest of the Nyack lands and thus became proprietor of all the river frontage from the Bight to the Hook, except the farm his father had sold to Dowe Tallman.

    The name "Nyack" is of Indian origin and first appears in the Colonial records as the designation of a subtribe whose homelands were in that part of Brooklyn now known as Fort Hamilton.  The Nyacks sold their lands to the Dutch and removed to Staten Island, but when, in 1670, Staten Island also passed out of Indian possession through the purchase, by Governor Frances Lovelace, of all the native rights, the Nyacks, together with all the other Staten Island savages, were compelled to seek fresh camping grounds west of the Hudson river.

    Perhaps the Nyack braves with their families found a temporary abiding place on the flat land under the Hook Mountain (which in 1670 was still part of the public domain), and in that way, transferred their tribal appellation from Long Island to Nyack-on-the-Hudson.  This explanation of the origin of the word Nyack as applied to the "North End of Tappan" is to be found in the registration of the marriage of Dirckie Tallman and Abraham Haring in the Tappan Dutch Church, June 25th, 1707.  Following the entry of the bride's name in the marriage register, the clerk noted the fact that she had been "born at Nayack."

    In 1793, Abraham H. Tallman sold a small plot of ground on the river side near the foot of the present Burd Street to a relative of the same name.  Here the purchaser of his successors maintained a dock, which was Nyack's first public shipping point.  Abraham H. Tallman held the remainder of the land he had inherited from his father until 1799 and then sold the entire tract, excepting only a lot of two and one-half acres surrounding the mill at the foot of the Main Street hill (near Franklin Street).  Abraham Lydecker was the purchaser and he paid ($2,000) for the tract.  Even his conveyance did not take the land entirely out of the family, for Lydecker had married Rebecca Tallman, a daughter of Abraham H. Tallman's brother.

Click here, then type Nyack in search box to view Nyack in the early 1800's

This plaque was created in 1938 by the Rockland County Society. It can be viewed on the side of the HSBC bank in Nyack.

 LET'S NOT FORGET THE REAL HISTORY OF NYACK