90 THE BOROUGH OF THE BRONX 



not because he was a magistrate and a large land owner, or be- 

 cause he sprang from an ancient and illustrious English family; 

 but, because he was a brave, daring, upright man, full of restless 

 energy, and the recognized champion of the colonists. Among 

 his neighbors, he was popularly known as Goodman Jessup, and 

 in 1665, he was one of Westchester's two delegates sent to the 

 Convention of Towns held in Hempstead, Long Island — the first 

 representative and deliberative body that assembled in the Colony. 



In that convention Jessup boldly advocated the right of the 

 people to elect their own magistrates, instead of having those 

 officers selected and appointed by the King. 



This convention is referred to by historians as the precursor 

 of the elective judiciary system of our State — a system which has 

 been aptly described as "the growth of the soil." 



Edward Jessup was the progenitor of a family who became 

 distinguished in the annals of our country, and among whom was 

 Major General Thomas Sidney Jessup, a hero of the War of 1812, 

 and of the Mexican War, and who was prominently mentioned as 

 a Democratic candidate for the Presidency of the United States. 



Edward Jessup, on his death in 1666, devised his interest in 

 the patent to Elizabeth Jessup, his widow. She married one 

 Robert Meacham in 1668, and they in the same year conveyed the 

 Jessup interest in the patent to her son-in-law, Thomas Hunt, Jr., 

 who married Elizabeth Jessup, the daughter of Edward Jessup. 

 It was after this Thomas Hunt, the son of Thomas Hunt of the 

 Grove Farm Patent, that Hunt's Point received its name. 



In 1669 Hunt sold his home lot on which he then resided, 

 and built on a parcel of land at the north end of what is now 

 Barretto's Point, near the old Landing Road. Around this section 

 we find the early houses were erected. 



Later, Richardson or Leggett, Richardson's son-in-law, erected 

 a house west of the old Hunt's Point Road, south of the present 

 Spofford Avenue, and near Bound Brook, on the land which also 

 was acquired by the Leggett branch, and in which Gabriel Leggett, 

 the second, lived, dying there about 1786. This property also 

 remained in the possession of the Leggett family down to 1850. 



Richardson and Hunt entered upon and cultivated parts of 

 the present Hunt's Point. Richardson used a parcel of about 

 twenty acres of upland at its southerly end along the Sound, 

 probably as a cornfield, and both cut the meadows on the east side 



