Forest and Stream 
A Weekly Journal of the Rod and Gun. 
Copyright, 1903, by Forest and Stream Pubushing Co. 
Terms, $4 a Year. IOICts. a Copy. 
Six Months, $2. 
NEW YORK, SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 1902, 
( VOL. LIX.-No. 10. 
I No. 346 Broadway, New York. 
THE OLD OAK. 
In many a quarter of our land there still remain living 
monuments of a past so distant that it is hard fully to 
realize its antiquity. Botanists have estimated that the 
giant trees of California are over two thousand years 
old, but within easy reach of the homes of many of us 
-i-,<row trees, whose ages — if much less than this — still 
stretch back a long way. Standing before such an ancient 
tree, one often muses upon its past, and the changes 
that have taken place since as a tiny seedling it first 
struggled upward toward the light. 
I In those old days, long before they hanged witches 
in Salem, and even before the feet of the Pilgrims had 
become firmly established in New England, the oak was a 
sturdy young tree. Already it had reared its head alike 
above the alders that grew in the swamp just to the east, 
and the sumachs and little birches to the west, but dur- 
ing much of the day the tall white pines and hemlocks 
still shaded it, and it was in no respect unlike a thousand 
of its fellows of the forest. 
Yet in the economy of the forest, the young tree played 
its part. In the spring when buds were swelling, and 
multitudes of insects gathered about the sweet sap exud- 
ing from them, hundreds of tiny birds — warblers, vested 
in blue and black and white, and gold and orange 
and green — ran over its branches and fluttered about the 
ends of its twigs as they fed. After the warblers had 
passed on to their northern home, a pair of sweet-voiced 
wood thrushes chose a horizontal branch for their nest, 
and while the mother bird tenderly brooded her blue 
eggs, the male, on the branch of a giant pine far above 
her, poured out sweetest music at morning and evening, 
or when the sun peeped through the clouds at the close of 
some summer storm. When frost had stripped other 
trees of their leaves, but its deep red foliage still clung 
rattling to the branches, the rusty grackles, rising from 
the swamp in a thick cloud, sometimes settled on it, and 
covered it as with a dark pall ; and later it was often 
whitened by the quiet snows of winter. 
In the swamps and forests among which the tree stood, 
the black bear, the deer, the turkey and the fox used to 
wander. 
Down from the higher land to the northward runs a 
broad and almost level plain, the valley of an ancient 
stream which once flowed from the front of a retreating 
glacier. Along a ridge of high ground, well hidden by 
bushes, and passing close to the oak, ran a trail followed 
by the Indians, who journeyed from the interior down to 
the shore, where were to be had fish and clams and 
oysters, and many other things inaccessible to the far 
inland dwellers, though forming the chief sustenance of 
V the gentler tribes that lived along the coast. But chieflj^ 
the trail was used by the fierce people of the interior on 
their war journeys ; for the broad river a little further to 
the westward furnished an easier path to the shellfish 
gatherers who paddled down its course, and later, with 
full canoes, pushed their way up the stream toward their 
northern homes. 
The years passed on, and as the oak waxed and grew 
stronger, there came into the land new and strange be- 
ings, different in a thousand ways from any that had been 
there before. At first few in numbers, these newcomers 
clustered close to the shore, but almost at once some of 
the hardier spirits began to push inland in all directions. 
They seemed to hold all nature in enmity. They slew the 
dwellers in the forest; they felled the trees and bushes, 
and burned them, and tore up the very ground where 
they had stood, and then a little later, strange new plants 
grew up thickly from these open spaces in an even regular 
crop, which these people cut down again and carried 
away. 
The oak grew and thickened and sent out fresh branches, 
which in turn became stout and heavy as trees. The new- 
comers increased. Their houses of wood or stone or 
brick dotted all the landscape. On either side of broad 
roads lay fair fields of grain or grass and in many of 
them pastured slow-moving cattle or sleek-sided horses. 
A new empire was born and grew— feebly at first, yet 
steadily — till it had reached a hundred years and had 
passed through struggles and agonies that shook it to its 
very foundations. Yet it survived and became stronger 
than ever. Most of the wild creatures have now gone, but 
the fox remains, and in the hollow which time and the 
weather have worn in the old oak's heart, the raccoon 
niakfs his winter home. These are the only ones left. 
The old forest has disappeared. The mighty trees 
v/hich were tall when the oak was young, have long since 
fallen. For generations the oak has been the greatest 
tree in all the countryside, and people come long distances 
to wonder at its vast size and its beauty. 
Yearly, as the weather grows cooler and leaves fall 
from the deciduous trees, the sportsman, pursuing the 
few birds that still inhabit the country, pauses beneath 
the great oak to rest or to eat lunch, or to smoke a pipe, 
while the thirsty dogs push through the fringe of alders 
to the brook, and greedily lap the cool water, and wallow 
in the stream that they have roiled. 
One day, not many years ago, the dogs from the nearby 
farm chased a raccoon into the tree, and following the 
dogs came men to kill the beast. A fire was kindled at 
the lower opening of the hollow to smoke the animal out, 
and when it emerged at the top it- was killed. A little 
later, the men found that a spark had ignited the dry, rot- 
ten wood within the hollow, and in the chimney formed 
by the trunk a hidden fire was raging. Flames spouted 
high from the opening above, and it was feared that the 
old tree must be destroyed, but the brook was near, and 
hands w^ere many and willing, and the fire was put out. 
So the oak stands to-day, ancient, but green and 
flourishing. At intervals some wind or ice storm tears 
away a venerable branch, but the tree remains, singular 
for its beauty, its size and its symmetry. 
THE COLLECT POND. 
The work of the New York underground railway is in 
progress in Elm street, which is the first street east of 
Broadway and parallel with it; and where the digging is 
now being done, a quarter of a mile north of the City 
Hall, the operations are overlooked from the windows of 
the Forest and Stream office. At this point the excava- 
tion is from the surface, and the method is to hoist the 
earth in great metal buckets, which are swung through 
the air and their contents dumped into carts. Interest 
was aroused the other day when from far down below the 
surface of the street the buckets came up filled with mud 
which was almost of liquid consistency, and instead of 
being deposited in the carts, was dumped out on the 
surface that the water might drain off. It developed that 
down below the gas pipes and the Croton water mains and 
the sewer, the workmen had come to a flowing stream. 
This is not the first of the Manhattan's forgotten water- 
ways which the contractors have encountered still flowing 
far below the surface, for there are numerous such sub- 
terranean streams on the island, and they often present 
very difficult problems to the engineers who are laying 
foundations for buildings. 
This Elm street water was struck just north of the 
Criminal Courts building and within 150 yards of the 
Tombs, and the stream must flow from one of the springs 
which in the old days fed the Collect Pond. For the site 
where the Tombs now stands, with the streets and blocks 
surrounding it, was once a body of water, which was 
called the Fresh Water or Collect Pond. This had no 
small part in the New York of an earlier day; but by later 
generations has been almost entirely forgotten, save when, 
as now, some deep street excavation or the digging for a 
building foundation brings to light some reminder of the 
old conditions. 
The pond covered the site of the blocks bounded by 
Baxter, White, Elm. Duane and Park streets. In 
aboriginal times the Manhatoes lived on its banks; and 
from their excursions to the oyster beds in the adjacent 
waters the Indians brought vast quantities of oysters- 
coming in through the stream which connected the pond 
with the East River, or through the larger stream from 
the North River. The women, we are told, dried the 
oysters for future use and cast the shells on the shore, so 
that in time there came to be great heaps of oyster shells 
on the west bank, and when the Dutch gave the place a 
name they called it Kalch Hoek, which meant Shell Point. 
When the English succeeded the Dutch, the name Kalch 
Hoek was easily corrupted into Collect, and thenceforth 
the water was known as the Collect Pond, or the Fresh 
Water. 
The lake was very deep— the old records range from 
fifty to seventy feet — and the water was very clear, for 
it was supplied from numerous living springs sending out 
their generous floods and overflowing, as has been said, 
through the two streams which went, one to the east and 
the other to t)ie west, These streams, too, had a pl^ce 
in the topography of old New York. The one which 
went to the East River, following the line of the present 
Roosevelt street, was in British times called the. Old Kill, 
and formed the northern boundary of the city down to 
the close of the Revolution. The old Post Road crossed 
it over a bridge, the famous Kissing Bridge, of which the 
Rev. Mr. Burnaby, an English visitor, wrote, "Just be- 
fore you enter the town there is a little bridge commonly 
called the Kissing Bridge, where it is customary before 
passing beyond to salute the lady who is your companion" 
— which goes to show that in the earlier days on Manhat- 
tan Island some things at least were ordered better than 
now. 
The stream which flowed west to the Hudson in turn 
formed the northern boundary of the city until 1808. 
Beyond it lay the stretches of marsh and swamp known 
as Lispenard Meadows, much resorted to by the sports- 
men and the pot-hunter of that day, before whose flint- 
lock fell abundant snipe and woodcock. The territory 
as now seen from the windows of Forest and Stream 
is a broken and jagged expanse of walls and roofs. There 
was at one time a project to utilize the two Collect Pond 
streams for a canal across the island from the Hudson 
to the East River; and there actually was a canal from 
the Hudson to Broadway, following the line of the pres- 
ent Canal street. From the north there flowed into the 
stream a brook from the famous spring which gave its 
' name to Spring street. 
But in the earlier days the Manhattan gunners and 
anglers had no need to go so far north as Canal street 
to find their sport. The low marshes about the Collect 
gave good shooting ; and if one knew how to shoot, he 
was in season assured of "a large quantity of fly-abouts." 
. And as for the fishing, the Collect was famous for that ; 
and there must have been trout in it, for.it was a spring- 
fed water, and the fish could run down to the sea and back 
into the fresh water again, as do their Long Island suc- 
cessors to-day. It is of record that in 1734 a law was 
enacted to prevent the taking of fish from the Collect 
Pond by any other means than angling. But things went 
then as they do now, and we may be certain that the 
Collect was altogether too near town, and too convenient 
for the picnickers long to maintain its fishing and shoot- 
ing attractions. 
There was skating on the pond in the winters, and it 
was here that Prince William Henry, then a junior officer 
in the navy, and afterward King William IV. of England, 
learned to skate. 
By far the most important and memorable event con- 
nected with the history of the Collect Pond occurred in 
the year 1796, when John Fitch, the early American steam 
inventor, in the presence of a distinguished company, 
sailed his experimental steamboat oh the water. This 
was a ship's yawl, eighteen feet long, fitted with a pro- 
peller and a steam engine of which the boiler was a ten- 
gallon iron pot. The little craft successfully made several 
circuits of the pond, and got up a speed of six miles an 
hour. This was eleven years before Robert Fulton's Cler- 
mont made its trip on the Hudson; and it is here to the 
site of the obliterated Collect Pond that history points for 
the first American steamboat. 
These steamboat experiments by Fitch are about the 
last things of interest the records have to tell us of the 
Collect Pond as a pond. For already the city was creep- 
ing northward, the shores of the pond were used for the 
dumping of refuse, and about the year 1800 the place had 
become such a nuisance that the authorities set about the 
task of draining it and filling it in. Streets were laid 
out and blocks of houses followed, and in 1835, on the 
site of the Collect Pond was built the Halls of Justice, 
the city prison, which, because of its gloomy architecture, 
borrowed from that of Egyptian tombs, was nicknamed 
the Tombs. 
The meting out of justice to malefactors on this spot 
began very early in the history of the Collect Pond, for 
we are told that a Weekquaesgock Indian, who had 
come to town to sell beaver skins, was set upon and 
killed by three negro servants of the Dutch Governor 
on the sores of the pond. An Indian boy who had wit- 
nessed the deed inflicted justice by the murder of an in- 
offensive trader whorn he killed or^ ^he same spot. In 
later years the gallows was erected here, <»nd criminalsi 
were hanged after the fashion of the day in public, while 
the people flocked from town to witness the spectacle. 
In the days whe:p the murderers were hanged iii 
