CHAPTER III 

 NEW ROCHELLE, THE HUGUENOT SETTLEMENT 



I 



N tlie year 1689 the lord of Pelham Mauor, Mr. John V^^ ?«•■ ^^^"d 



' Bought i68g 



Pell, deeded 6,000 acres of laud to Jacob Leisler, a 



promiueut Dutch merchant of New York. Leisler, 

 who had the misfortune to be hung a couple of years after 

 this transactiou, on a charge of high treason, made the 

 purchase on behalf of a band of refugees from La Rochelle, 

 and the 6,000 acres of land which he took over form the 

 present township of New Rochelle, in Westchester County. 



Some of the Huguenots who joined in the settlement 

 had lived in New York for some years previously, while 

 others came from the West Indies, where they had hastily 

 sought refuge ; but the greater part of the colonists came 

 from England, as tradition has it, in one of the King's 

 ships. They were Rochellese who left their city four 

 years before the Revocation, fled to the neighbouring Isle 

 of Rhe, and thence on British ships to hospitable Eng- 

 land. The exact date of their landing in America is not 

 known, but it must have been during the year 1689 ; local 

 tradition points out their landing place as Bonnefoy's . 

 Point, on what is now known as Davenport's Neck. The 

 Rochelle colonists were not the first Huguenots to settle 

 within the limits of the Pell Grant, for in 1686 w^e find 

 Maria Graton, widow of William Cothouneau, conveying 

 a tract of land to Alexander Allaire in what is now New 

 Rochelle, and Allaire himself sold a piece of land to 

 Theophilus Forestier one year later. 



During the year following the arrival of the refugees Early 

 there was much suffering in the settlement, as the follow- "*'''^^*'*p^ 



231 



