ic winter of Valley Forge and just before the
British retreated from Philadelphia. An official body which could speak
of dues to the king at that time, after their country had been separated
from him for three years, surely represented a community in which the
great majority were Loyalists, and the disorderly and violent were
Tories.

But the non-resistant character of the neighborhood, perched between the
Connecticut Yankees, who took ardent interest in the Revolution, and the
aggressive settlements of Pawling, Fredericksburgh and Beekman, rendered
the Hill at times an asylum, strange to say, of the most adventurous
forces. Whenever in Colonial days an adventurer or soldier sought a
peaceful region in which to recruit his forces, he thought upon Quaker
Hill; and in four memorable instances used the Hill as a place of safe
refuge. There no one would by force resist his enjoyment of a time for
recruiting.

The first instance of this is the so-called "Anti-Rent War," which in
1766 excited the inhabitants of Dutchess and Columbia Counties. Its
sources were in the land grants made by the Crown, and in the
independent character of the settlers in this state. The series of
disturbances so caused continued until well into the years of the
nineteenth century. They concern the local history only in one year,
1766.

The Anti-Rent War of 1766 is a forgotten event. But in that time it
aroused the Indians and the white settlers to revolt. Bodies of armed
men assembled, British troopers marched from Poughkeepsie to Quaker
Hill, to seize a leader of rebellion; and at the time of his trial at
Poughkeepsie in August, 1766, a company of regulars with three
field-pieces was brought up from New York.[19]

The prime cause of this insurrection was the granting of the land in
great areas at the beginning of the century to favored proprietors, so
that the actual settlers could not become owners but only tenants.
Fragments of such great estates remain in the hands of certain families
till our time. The ownership of Hammersley Lake by the family of that
name is an example. The exercise of authority by these monopolists of
natural opportunities drove the actual tillers of the soil, who had
given it its value, to desperation. I have shown that in 1740 no land
owners were enrolled on Quaker Hill, and that the list of its most
representative citizens in 1755 contained few landowners.[20] A further
cause of this conflict may have been that, in t