More Views of the Hudson River-Part One

The Hudson River was named after English explorer Henry Hudson (ca. 1565-1611 or after), who sailed upriver in 1609 while in the employ of the Dutch East India Company. He was the first European to make that journey. Hudson made it as far as a place later called Stuyvesant Landing. East of there and away from the river is Kinderhook, birthplace of our eighth president and our first Dutch president, Martin Van Buren (1782-1862). Van Buren was friends with Washington Irving (1783-1859), as well as with a schoolmaster named Jesse Merwin (1783-1852). Van Buren asserted that Merwin was the pattern or original of Ichabod Crane in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," although there is one other candidate for Ichabod's original, Samuel Youngs (1760-1839). Youngs was of Tarrytown, New York, and lies buried at Sleepy Hollow.

There is a historical site called the Ichabod Crane Schoolhouse in Kinderhook. It's located about a mile north of Martin Van Buren's home of Lindenwald. It was at that house, owned by William Peter Van Ness (1778-1826), that Irving composed most of A History of New York, From the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty (1809) and The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819, 1820). Among the contents of The Sketch Book is "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." Lindenwald was named for its trees, what we in America call basswood. The word trees in relation to a house will come up again before the end of this entry. Consider the context and possible meaning.

Now for some trivia, because we here like trivia, including about our presidents.

• Martin Van Burn had a nickname, "Old Kinderhook." Some people believe that his nickname is the source of our expression OK or okay. (Raymond Chandler spelled it okeh.) I think it more likely of African origin, but that's okay. OK or okay is supposed to be the most commonly spoken word the world over. I don't know about you, but I picture Baltus Van Tassel as looking like Martin Van Buren in late portraits and photographs of the president.

• I wrote some time ago that the Baltimore Ravens are the only professional sports team that I know of named after a literary work. However, I overlooked the New York Knicks, or Knickerbockers, named after Washington Irving's pseudonym, Diedrich Knickerbocker, who is also a fictional character and something of a literary hoax in Irving's writing and publication of The History of New York. Like Henry Hudson, Diedrich Knickerbocker disappeared without a trace.

• William Peter Van Ness was Aaron Burr's second in Burr's duel with Alexander Hamilton. Burr was infamous for his alleged plot against the United States. One of his co-conspirators was Harman Blennerhassett, who owned a large house on an island in the Ohio River, a little downriver of what is now Parkersburg, West Virginia. Author P. Schuyler Miller (1912-1974), of New York Dutch descent, died on Blennerhassett Island while attending a meeting of the West Virginia State Archaeological Society. He was stricken by a heart attack while viewing excavations on the island. 

• Aaron Burr served during the Revolutionary War, including at West Point along the Hudson River. After his acquittals and after having lived in Europe, Burr returned to New York City, where, like Ichabod Crane might have done, he practiced law. By the way, Aaron Burr's daughter, Theodosia Burr Alston (1783-1813), was, like Henry Hudson, lost at sea.

• Finally, I'm writing this in a place named after Martin Van Buren and settled in part by Dutch immigrants from New York.

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Washington Irving mentioned Henry Hudson in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," giving him instead a Dutch Christian name:

     From the listless repose of the place, and the peculiar character of its inhabitants, who are descendants from the original Dutch settlers, this sequestered glen has long been known by the name of SLEEPY HOLLOW, and its rustic lads are called the Sleepy Hollow Boys throughout all the neighboring country. A drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over the land, and to pervade the very atmosphere. Some say that the place was bewitched by a High German doctor, during the early days of the settlement; others, that an old Indian chief, the prophet or wizard of his tribe, held his powwows there before the country was discovered by Master Hendrick Hudson. 

There is an oblique reference to Hudson and his men, or men like them, in The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925):

     Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes--a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

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The first quote above brings up another bit of trivia. This one relates to an episode of Seinfeld in which the characters encounter a gang called "the Van Buren Boys." I wonder: who would win if the Sleepy Hollow Boys were to go up against the Van Buren Boys?

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley