ose
of the Jeaunceys, Bayards, and Clarkes; and above, at Thirty-third
Street and Ninth Avenue, stood the ample and conspicuous residence of
John Morin Scott, one of the leading lawyers of the city, and a
powerful supporter of the American cause.

Across the East River, the "Sister City" of Brooklyn in 1776 was as
yet invisible from New York. A clump of low buildings at the old
ferry, and an occasional manor-seat, were the only signs of life
apparent on that side. Columbia Heights, whose modern blocks and row
of wharves and bonded stores suggest commercial activity alone, caught
the eye a century ago as "a noble bluff," crowned with fields and
woods, and meeting the water at its base with a shining beach. The
parish or village proper was the merest cluster of houses, nestled in
the vicinity of the old Dutch church, which stood in the middle of the
road a little below Bridge Street. The road was the King's highway,
and it ran from Fulton Ferry--where we have had a ferry for two
hundred and forty years at least--along the line of Fulton Street, and
on through Jamaica to the eastern end of Long Island. Besides the
settlements that had grown up at these two points--the church and the
ferry, which were nearly a mile and a half apart--a village centre was
to be found at Bedford, further up the highway, another in the
vicinity of the Wallabout, and still another, called Gowanus, along
the branch road skirting the bay. These all stood within the present
municipal limits of Brooklyn.

As it had been for more than a century before, the population on the
Long Island side was largely Dutch at the time of the Revolution. The
first-comers, in 1636 and after, introduced themselves to the soil and
the red man as the Van Schows, the Cornelissens, the Manjes, and the
like--good Walloon patronimics--and the Dutch heritage is still
preserved in the names of old families, and even more permanently in
the name of the place itself; for the word Brooklyn is but the English
corruption of Breukelen, the ancient Holland village[16] of which our
modern city appears to have been the namesake. Smyth, the English
traveler, makes the general statement towards the close of the
Revolution, that two thirds of the inhabitants of Long Island,
especially those on the west end, were of Dutch extraction, who
continued "to make use of their customs and language in preference to
English," which, however, they also understood. "The people of King's
County [Br