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A few months after his arrival he died suddenly, so suddenly that there was a suggestion that he had been poisoned by some friend of Leisler. But it was proven that his death was a natural one, and his body was placed in a vault next to that of Peter Stuyvesant, in the Bouwerie Village church-yard. GOVERNOR FLETCHER and the PRIVATEERS
The city was at once renamed New York, in honor of the Duke of York, to whom it had been granted; and the hard-headed old governor spent the remaining years of his life very comfortably on his great farm, the Bouwerie, just outside the city limits. This conquest, bloodless and easy as it was, was fraught with momentous consequences.
There, to the left of Fifth Avenue, at No. 18, is where Paul du Chaillu wrote Ivar the Viking, and to the right the house opposite, covered from basement to eaves with green clustering vines, is the home of Richard Watson Gilder. It is only a question now of crossing half a dozen city blocks towards the east to wander into what was called the Bouwerie Village.
On another bouwerie he laid out a tobacco plantation, and had slaves paid by the Company to look after it. When Van Twiller had been Governor three years, he gave to one of the colonists a farm on the western side of the city along the Hudson River. The colonist died the year after the farm was given him, leaving his widow, Annetje Jans, to care for the property.
The Expedition to the Delaware. Sack and Plunder. Change of Name. Testimony to the Dutch Government. Death of the Governor. His farm, or Bouwerie. War Between Holland and England. New York Menaced by the Dutch. The only response which Colonel Nicholls deigned to make to the remonstrance of Governor Stuyvesant, was to put his fleet in motion.
Then Stuyvesant went to live in a little settlement he had built up and called Bouwerie Village, which was far out on the Bouwerie Road, and Nicasius De Sille settled down as a merchant, and little more was heard of him as a poet. It was a simple enough thing to rename the town and call it after the brother of an English king, but that made but little change in the customs of the people.
For the first time Helen realized the origin of the name of "Bouwerie," and how far into New York's and the nation's traditions reached some of the mossy gravestones in Trinity Churchyard.
In the afternoon he rode away on the highway that led into the country, past the Collect Pond, over the Kissing Bridge at the Fresh Water, on to the stretch that was to grow into the Bowery, through the forest till he came to the few clustering houses of the Bouwerie Village, where Stuyvesant had spent his old age.
A road which led through these farms was named Bouwerie Lane, and the same road is to-day known as The Bowery.
Then there were other times when maybe the very next day after our hero had fought with great valor with his fellows he would go a-rambling with them up the Bouwerie Road with the utmost friendliness; perhaps to help them steal cherries from some old Dutch farmer, forgetting in such an adventure what a thief his own grandfather had been. But to resume our story.
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