Chapter 1

Brooklyn Village

From the beginning, Breuckelen enjoyed the advantage of location over the other five European settlements—four Dutch, one English—on the western end of Long Island. Breuckelen’s farmers and husbandmen sent produce, meat, and cattle directly across the tidal strait to New Amsterdam, a trade made more reliable in 1642 by the establishment of a ferry located just south of where the eastern tower of the Brooklyn Bridge stands today. Unlike the great bridge, the ferry was a modest affair, a small skiff whose departures were announced by the blowing of a horn that dangled from a nearby tree. But it helped secure an advantage that strengthened with the years, long after New Amsterdam became New York City and Breuckelen became Brooklyn.¹

If this was a New World success story, however, it was a long time coming. For nearly a century and a half Breuckelen/Brooklyn remained a small country settlement of scattered farms, centered if at all around the Dutch Reformed Church located a mile inland from the ferry landing. When a new minister arrived in 1660 to take charge of this church, he found only 134 inhabitants.² And yet this tiny community of Europeans had already largely replaced the native Lenape, Munsee-speaking members of the Delaware nation, who for countless years had hunted, fished, and farmed from a number of communal sites in what would later become Kings County. Armed conflicts, including the ruinous war against the natives pursued by New Netherland governor Willem Kieft in the early 1640s, along with the spread of smallpox and other European diseases, devastated the Lenape population in Breuckelen and beyond. Hard-pressed survivors moved away. Daniel Denton, a co-founder of the nearby town of Jamaica, wrote of the Lenape in 1670: “It is to be admired how strangely they have decreast [sic] by the hand of God … for since my time, when there were six towns, they are reduced to two small villages.”³ These remaining villages did not survive. By the 1680s all but a handful of natives were gone from the hilly, forested land that had long been their home.

European expansion into former Lenape land was slow, even with the significant assistance of African slaves in the clearing and cultivation of new farms. A full century after the initial Dutch and English Kings County settlements, a 1738 English census recorded only 547 free inhabitants in Brooklyn along with 158 slaves.⁴ These are hardly impressive numbers, even as they call attention to the role of slave labor in Brooklyn’s mostly rural economy. The substantial involvement in the slave trade of Manhattan-based merchants in both the Dutch and English eras made New Amsterdam/New York and its hinterland a major center of African habitation in the northern American colonies. Many slaves who were brought to Manhattan remained in the city to perform diverse tasks essential to an urban economy. But neither were those who were carried across the river to Kings County subjected to the gang labor increasingly characteristic of the rural South; rather, they toiled along with white families and perhaps one or two other slaves on small and medium-sized farms. Partly because of this dispersal their numbers remained small, in absolute if not relative terms.⁵ Even with the injection of enforced labor into Brooklyn, this largest and most commercially connected of the townships of western Long Island increased at an unremarkable pace during its first century of European (and African) settlement.

A 1767 map of Brooklyn shows an emerging village in the area surrounding the ferry landing, and in 1785 a number of inhabitants of this village thought their collection of wooden houses, barns, taverns, workshops, and stables large (and vulnerable) enough to warrant the formation of a fire company. Three years later the state legislature recognized the landing area as an official fire district.⁶ Nonetheless, only about 350 people lived in the village and some 1,600 in the township as a whole.⁷ The village and rural populations, moreover, were by no means distinct. Many of the villagers were butchers and produce dealers who slaughtered cattle and took in farm produce for sale in New York City’s markets.⁸ In Brooklyn before the last years of the eighteenth century, the more things changed the more they stayed the same.

By the waning of the century, however, men appeared with new ideas for themselves and the town. Two in particular, Joshua Sands and Hezekiah Beers Pierrepont, had important effects on Brooklyn’s future; to tell their stories is to gain a glimpse not only of the city and suburb that flourished during the coming years, but also the close connection between the individual entrepreneurship and the communal religiosity of Brooklyn’s Yankee leaders. Sands and Pierrepont were the vanguard of a larger cadre of New England-born or New England-descended businessmen and professionals who endeavored to build their own fortunes (material success, according to age-old Puritan doctrine, was an outward if imperfect marker of God’s grace) and at the same time shape Brooklyn as a moral community, subject to the will of its Protestant leaders.⁹ In ways they themselves may not have fully realized, they were builders of Brooklyn’s Protestant hegemony.

Joshua Sands was born in Cow Neck, now in the village of Sands Point, on the North Shore of Long Island, in 1757. Though a New Yorker by birth, Sands came from a family with New England roots. James Sands, his great-great-grandfather, migrated from England to the Pilgrim colony at Plymouth in 1658 before moving again with several other families to Block Island off the coast of Rhode Island (claimed at the time by the colony of Massachusetts Bay). This was one of several migrations of New England Puritans southwestward toward and into Long Island, a migration sustained by James’ son John who moved in 1691 to Cow Neck, the family base for the next two generations.¹⁰

Cow Neck lay a good deal closer to Manhattan than to Boston, Plymouth, or even Block Island. When Joshua Sands came of age during the early years of the American Revolution, he became an officer in New York’s Fourth Regiment, and like many young men gravitated to New York City after the war, forming a mercantile partnership there with his older brother Comfort in 1783. The brothers soon looked back across the East River to the little village of Brooklyn. In 1784 they purchased 160 acres that lay along the river from just above the ferry landing. This tract had been the estate of John Rapalje, a Dutch-descended Brooklynite who had sided with the British during the occupation, and the Sands brothers bought it from the commissioners of confiscated Loyalist property. When old Mrs. Rapalje refused to leave her house, which had been in the family for generations, the sheriff had her carried to the street in her armchair.¹¹

She might have sat there a long time, as the Sands brothers were not in a great hurry to improve their investment. Comfort did not leave Manhattan for Brooklyn, but in 1786 Joshua moved his family into a new frame house, the largest in the village. And then, in cooperation with his brother, he did two novel things. First, he divided the old Rapalje estate into building lots, gave the area the grand name City of Olympia, and proceeded to sell many of the lots. The City of Olympia was not officially recognized, and its aspirational name seems not to have lasted much past the end of the century. But Sands did introduce the idea of planned urban development to the village emerging along the river and the lower ferry road.¹² He was convinced that with the end of the Revolutionary War, and New York and its East River harbor certain to flourish, Brooklyn would grow rapidly. And grow it did. From the 1,600 or so inhabitants in 1790, the township increased to 4,400 in 1810, and more than 15,000 in 1830. Five years later, the state census tabulated 24,529 residents in the newly incorporated City of Brooklyn, nearly 15,000 of whom lived in the downtown wards where Sands had once promoted the City of Olympia.¹³

The second initiative was even more closely tied to New York’s (and the Sands brothers’) commercial prospects. Soon after moving to Brooklyn Joshua built a rope factory (in the language of the day a “ropewalk”) to supply rigging and cordage for the ships owned by the brothers’ mercantile firm.¹⁴ The first of many such projects, it proved a stimulus to the development of other manufacturing enterprises along the Brooklyn waterfront.

Among the people who purchased lots from Sands were maritime tradesmen who in 1798 fled a yellow fever epidemic in the coastal town of New London, Connecticut. Their arrival helped fulfill Sands’ idea of Olympia as a center of trades and industries supporting maritime commerce. Around the same time John Jackson gave this idea a further boost by building a shipyard and more ropewalks on land he had bought where Sands’ land ran eastward toward Wallabout Bay. Jackson named his smaller development Vinegar Hill to honor the latest futile rebellion against English rule in Ireland. This helped him attract Irish workers, and Vinegar Hill soon became Brooklyn’s first Irish neighborhood. At the turn of the new century Jackson sold land that abutted Wallabout Bay to the US government, giving rise in 1801 to the Brooklyn Navy Yard.¹⁵

Joshua Sands may have considered these developments the seeds of a real city on the Brooklyn side of the East River. When a City of Brooklyn did emerge, the long-forgotten City of Olympia, along with Vinegar Hill, became its downtown district. But Sands’ vision was, in contemporary terms, more suburban than urban. In the late eighteenth century “suburb” did not convey the middle- or upper-class bedroom community of more recent times but described instead an often unattractive and even foul-smelling urban fringe of cattle yards, slaughterhouses, tanneries, and various proto-industrial activities, along with the shanties and other cheap houses of workers who toiled in such places. Hospitals, insane asylums, poorhouses, and prisons were also built on this noxious periphery, where land was cheaper and the places themselves less visible to the urban population. While merchants’ docks and warehouses along the waterfronts were located as closely as possible to the banks, exchanges, and merchants’ homes of the urban core, shipyards, iron foundries, and ropewalks were built at more distant landings. The City of Olympia and Vinegar Hill might well have formed the emerging core of urban Brooklyn, but they were in a prior sense part of the “suburbs,” properly understood, of New York City.

Brooklyn became a suburb in the more modern sense as well, and it is here that we encounter the contributions of Hezekiah Beers Pierrepont.¹⁶ Pierrepont sprang from a New England family with long ties to the civic and religious life of Massachusetts and Connecticut. John Pierrepont arrived in Massachusetts around 1640, purchased land in Roxbury, and served as a town officer and a delegate to the General Court (Massachusetts Bay’s colonial legislature). John’s son James rose still higher. Ordained as a minister in 1685, he soon moved to New Haven where he helped found and then served as a trustee of what became Yale College. James married three times, all to daughters of New England clergy, the third time to the granddaughter of Thomas Hooker, principal founder of the colony of Connecticut. His daughter by this third marriage married New England’s most notable divine, Jonathan Edwards. James was no doubt the most distinguished of the colonial era Pierreponts and the most influential within the church. But the family lost no luster during the next two generations, which produced Hezekiah, an impatient Yale student who promised his father that he would ask for no further financial support if he were allowed to leave the college to seek his fortune. Granted that permission, he trained for a mercantile career in several firms and the New York Custom House, and in 1793 formed a partnership with his cousin William Leffingwell to engage in trade with France. As a young merchant in revolutionary Paris his adventures included watching Robespierre mount the guillotine. Pierrepont was quite successful, but the loss to a French privateer of a ship loaded with goods from the Far East cost him his fortune. He returned to New York in 1800 determined to regain it. Marriage to the daughter of one of New York’s wealthiest landowners (who gave him a wedding present of half a million acres of upstate land) enabled him to purchase a distillery on the Brooklyn waterfront.¹⁷ In 1804 the Pierreponts moved to Brooklyn, settling on the long, high bluff south of the village, and into its most elegant home, named Four Chimneys, which they expanded and surrounded with an estate of sixty acres. Pierrepont’s distillery was successful for a time, but profits eventually lagged. In 1819 he abandoned it and turned his attention to the land around him on that high bluff.¹⁸

The Lenape called it Ihpetonga, the English Clover Hill, and it would soon become Brooklyn Heights. It could not have been more unlike Sands’ City of Olympia, which rose more gently from the river and was more easily developed as a productive waterfront and densely inhabited village. South of the village, across from the road that leads to the ferry landing, the land rises rapidly into a long ridge overlooking the river, Manhattan, the bay, its islands, and distant New Jersey. It was a grand place to establish a country home. There were old woods of oak, chestnut, sycamore, and cedar, a few substantial eighteenth-century houses surrounded by orchards and vegetable gardens, spectacular views, reliable sea breezes that contemporaries believed essential to good health, and a beach on the narrow strip of land below the bluff. Hezekiah Pierrepont had a small dock down there and a staircase leading down the steep hill. Each day, even as an older man, he rowed across the river to and from his office on Water Street in New York City.¹⁹

Pierrepont hoped to transform Clover Hill into a nightly retreat for well-to-do New York businessmen, a commuter suburb, although he did not use that term.²⁰ This idea became more feasible in 1814, when Robert Fulton and his partner William Cutting were granted the right to run a steam ferry from the old landing, supplanting a system that relied on oarsmen and sails with one far less susceptible to the variations of wind and tide, and to some extent the dangers of winter ice.²¹ Scheduled to leave hourly from each side of the river, the Nassau could carry two hundred passengers and many horse-drawn wagons on each trip. When a second boat was introduced some years later, crossings were made each half-hour. According to Brooklyn’s first newspaper, the Long-Island Star, the trip could be made in five to twelve minutes. A friend of Fulton’s and an early supporter of this enterprise, Pierrepont became a director of the ferry company after Fulton’s death from tuberculosis in 1815.²²

Pierrepont did not rush into selling his land, even after the steam ferry made daily travel between Brooklyn and Manhattan practical for New York businessmen. One reason may have been the unincorporated village’s inability to establish adequate policing, street cleaning, lighting, and other municipal services, which, according to some, discouraged Manhattanites from relocating to Brooklyn.²³ A Brooklynite who lived in Gowanus, several miles from the village, wrote to the Star that “nothing but the total want of good regulations in Brooklyn (particularly relating to streets and markets) prevents them from giving your village a preference over every other place at the same distance from the centre of business.”²⁴ Another correspondent, under the heading “Brooklyn, to the state’s disgrace, / Thou art a horrid dirty place,” argued facetiously that the ladies of Brooklyn should be grateful for Brooklyn’s filthy streets, which require them to use water-tight footwear, thereby sparing them the illnesses and early death so prevalent among fashionable New York women who wore dainty, thin-soled shoes. They benefited, too, from the absence of street lighting, as their lovers, after having “barked their shins” a few times in the darkened Brooklyn streets, learned to go home sober.²⁵ Yet another correspondent maintained that even migrants to Clover Hill suffered from these problems: “It is in vain that our heights display their inviting charms to the man of wealth and taste if he finds in the village some disgusting circumstances to counterbalance those charms.—He tries it for a year or two, and returns to town, as several have done.”²⁶

Determined to establish more effective government services, Hezekiah Pierrepont joined a committee to petition the state, which in 1816 incorporated the Village of Brooklyn. Clover Hill was included within its bounds, and Pierrepont became a village trustee. But the plan for expansion adopted by the new village government presented him with a new problem. A few years earlier, a disputed boundary between the Hicks and Middagh families, landowners who lived at the northern edge of the heights, resulted in a survey that included the mapping of streets and lots on and around the two properties. When the new village government considered this plan for expansion Pierrepont objected. If this spectacular site were to attract wealthy Manhattan families, he argued, it must have wider streets and larger blocks and building lots. Pierrepont hired his own surveyor and submitted just such a plan. The village adopted it for the area south of Clark Street, which included all of Pierrepont’s property and about two-thirds of the high land. Unsatisfied with this compromise, Pierrepont extended his holdings further north by buying land between Clark and Cranberry streets from the Hicks brothers.²⁷ By 1823 he was ready to advertise his larger “Building-Lots on Brooklyn Heights” (the name was now established) “as a place of residence combining all the advantages of the country with most of the conveniences of the city,” aiming his appeal to “Gentlemen whose business or professions require their daily attendance in the city.”²⁸ Thus was born “America’s first commuter suburb.”

As they laid the groundwork for two different types of development in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Brooklyn, Joshua Sands and Hezekiah Pierrepont set the pattern of Brooklyn’s growth for decades to come. Sands’ commercial and industrial village of wharves, manufactories, slaughterhouses, artisan shops, taverns, groceries, and retail shops was the more populous and economically diverse of the two areas. The numerous smaller shops and taverns of an emerging Brooklyn downtown were housed, as were the people who ran them, in a dense array of modest wooden frame buildings, intermixed with several of greater size and style, and some of brick, that were owned by the village’s wealthier families. Brooklyn Heights, on the other hand, retained for a long while—on many streets even to our own day—the elegant and more uniformly residential character Pierrepont had intended. Between the two areas, one prospectively urban, the other suburban, lay the Old Ferry Road, renamed Fulton Street within village bounds, and this became a distinct and consequential boundary, an “invisible line of demarcation between the social sheep and goats,” according to a long-time Brooklyn Heights resident, and a “veritable Chinese wall of exclusion” that became more pronounced over time.²⁹

A large and well-known painting by Francis Guy presents an intriguing snapshot of part of Sands’ Brooklyn—where the social goats lived. Trained initially as a tailor, Guy became both a dyer of fabrics and a landscape painter. He migrated to America from England in 1795 in straitened circumstances, plied his several trades with varying success in New York, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, and wound up back in Brooklyn in 1817.³⁰ Guy completed Winter Scene in Brooklyn (now in the Brooklyn Museum) shortly before his death in 1820. The painting was so popular in the village, even before it was finished, that Guy published a “Card” in the Long-Island Star announcing he would allow only visitors who were represented in the painting to stop by his studio to watch him work.³¹

To an unknowing viewer, Guy’s painting depicts a rustic village that could have been located nearly anywhere. The buildings are mostly modest, a barnyard and village pump occupy the center of the painting, and the scene is filled with villagers in unhurried social concourse or at a winter day’s outdoor work. Brooklynites might well have loved it for that, or for the portraits of people they recognized, or for the mere fact that their own village was emerging on the canvas. But they must have known that what Guy left out of the painting was more important and more indicative of Brooklyn’s present and future than what he included. For whatever reasons—one, surely, was that it was cold outside—Guy chose as his point of view his own second-story window on Front Street, a major street that runs parallel to the river. Because the window faced away from the river the painting does not depict Brooklyn’s waterfront, its proximity to New York City, or the ferry that since 1795 ran from Main Street to link the two.³² And because of the location of Guy’s house, the center of his view across Front Street is of the backs of the houses that lined Fulton Street, the so-called Chinese wall that was also the village’s main artery running inland from the old ferry landing. We see neither the street nor the fronts of structures that could have given the viewer a sense of Brooklyn as a rising city. Two of the village’s most imposing homes, including that of Joshua Sands, are barely seen at the left edge of the painting.³³

Winter Scene in Brooklyn does reveal something of the range of village society in the portraits and character types that populate the scene. On the far left, the two men engaged in conversation are the wealthy manufacturer and philanthropist Augustus Graham and his next-door neighbor, Joshua Sands; two men who were decidedly not social goats. They stand in front of Graham’s large and elegant brick house, built recently on land purchased from Sands. Other village notables are included—the portly man on the near left is Judge John Garrison—as are several tradesmen. The carpenter Thomas Birdsall stands to the right of the judge, while Abiel Titus, a butcher, feeds his chickens in front of his barn and slaughterhouse. Other personae include a wood sawyer, a shoveler of coal, and at least two wagon drivers. Several characters in the painting represent Brooklyn’s African American population, among which were a small number of slaves awaiting the general emancipation mandated by the state for 1827. (In 1820 190 slaves lived in the township along with 676 free Blacks.) It is difficult to say whether anyone in the scene, about half a mile from Vinegar Hill, is Irish.

Francis Guy did not carry his easel or sketchbook up to the Heights, even in warmer weather. Our view of the area comes from descriptive accounts and from trying to place back in time existing homes that were built there in its early suburban days. Many did survive, though some of the grandest of them, including Four Chimneys, were demolished to make way for new streets and structures. Hezekiah Pierrepont’s initial vision of a parklike cluster of houses similar to Four Chimneys—free-standing mansions surrounded by large gardens—was not realized. Some houses of this sort were built, and one or two still exist, but most of the homes built by wealthy New Yorkers were attached wooden, brick, or brownstone townhouses that conveyed the urbanity of Manhattan as much as or more than a new suburban aura. To be sure, the streets were lined with trees and below Clark Street the large townhouses had ample room for gardens. Many of these were enhanced by a neighborly gesture from George and Isabella Gibbs, a pair of early Heights settlers who had transplanted a grapevine from North Carolina to their garden on the corner of Willow and Cranberry. The vine flourished and the Gibbs shared cuttings of it with their neighbors. “Isabella” grapevines soon grew nearly everywhere and became a signature of the Heights as a green space, even as trees were felled for new residential construction.³⁴

Pierrepont’s efforts to promote the Heights were impelled in part by another yellow fever epidemic, this one in the heart of New York City, which in 1822 had driven some Wall Street merchants and bankers to relocate their businesses and homes to the then distant village of Greenwich. The fear was great enough and the exodus large enough that the Fulton Ferry abandoned its city landing place for a time, skirting lower Manhattan for a Hudson River landing at Greenwich Village nearly two miles north of Wall Street.³⁵ Some of the city refugees relocated their homes and families (but not their businesses) to the still safer high ground across the water in Brooklyn Heights. Brooklyn was not immune from this epidemic, but it recorded only six deaths, all of them on Jackson’s wharf in Vinegar Hill, far from Brooklyn Heights.³⁶ In any case, a number of New Yorkers did buy and build on the Heights, initiating a construction boom that resulted in some nine hundred new homes by the end of the decade.³⁷

Pierrepont prospered from this boom, but most construction occurred north of his property, where the Hicks and Middagh estates had been platted into more modestly sized lots, and homes were more often in wood than in brick or stone. Most of the grander houses of the Heights, south of Clark Street and on Columbia Street running along the brow of the bluff, were built somewhat later, after the severe economic depression of the late 1830s and early 1840s played itself out. In a memoir written many years after her family had moved from Greenwich Village to a large house near the Heights, and then to one of Pierrepont’s prime properties on the Heights itself, Elizabeth Leavitt, daughter of Wall Street banker, merchant, and manufacturer David Leavitt, recalled the openness of the land surrounding their Willow Street home. “Possibly there may have been two or three other buildings near, but all about us were open fields, with, of course, an unobstructed view of river and harbor.”³⁸ She also pointed to the continuing presence of wooden houses, as well as the proximity of the Heights to lower Manhattan, in her description of New York’s Great Fire of 1835: “Many of the houses on Brooklyn Heights were of wood, and men were on watch all night as sparks and burning pieces came over the river.”³⁹ The brick and brownstone townhouses, as well as most of the grand, free-standing mansions, including one with two-story Corinthian columns built by Elizabeth’s father in 1842, lay mostly in the future.⁴⁰ Hezekiah Pierrepont, who died in 1838, did not see the completion of his suburban project.

Whether they lived in Olympia or on the Heights, Brooklynites needed public institutions that went beyond their individual businesses, homes, and private lives. With one significant exception, however, the institutions they built were limited in number and scope. The new village government was one such institution, and its trustees quickly set out to clean and light the streets, improve fire protection, and provide more effective policing. They also experimented with a version of a New England town meeting by inviting villagers to convene to approve the board’s annual budget. But complaints in the local press and poor turnouts at the budget meetings spoke as much to the limits as the achievements of Brooklyn’s local government.⁴¹ Accepting these limits, residents reached beyond village government to address several communal needs. They took steps, for example, toward what would become a highly regarded educational system, supporting the first of their public schools and, more notably, several private schools, particularly those devoted to the education of girls and young women. In a similar spirit they funded an Apprentices’ Library, which opened in 1823, first in makeshift quarters, and then two years later in its own building. The laying of the cornerstone of this, Brooklyn’s first public building, was attended by no less a figure than the Marquis de Lafayette, who made a quick trip across the river as part of his triumphal tour of the country he had helped bring into existence half a century earlier.⁴² The modest two-story structure the great man helped dedicate was enough to induce the village trustees to abandon the back room of a grocery to make it their headquarters.⁴³ A Hibernian Provident Society and a Brooklyn Savings Bank were founded in 1824 and 1827 to foster thrift among village workingmen.⁴⁴ By 1830 there was a Young Men’s Literary Association, soon renamed the Hamilton Literary Association of Brooklyn.⁴⁵ For purely secular institutions that was about all the Brooklynites accomplished. Their communal energies lay mostly elsewhere, in institutions that bring us closer to understanding the culture of this growing village.

Those institutions were, of course, the churches of Brooklyn and the moral and benevolent societies spawned by them. For more than a century the only place of worship in the town of Brooklyn was, naturally enough, the Dutch Reformed Church. This changed only in the 1780s and 1790s when Episcopal and Methodist (formally, Methodist Episcopal) churches were organized. The Dutch church, as we have seen, was located a mile inland from the ferry landing and remained in this somewhat rustic spot even when a new church structure replaced the old building in 1807. That it was not moved into the growing village almost surely reflects the church’s long-standing relationship with the Dutch-descended farmers of Brooklyn’s interior. “It is plain that the church derived its real strength from the soil,” wrote local historian Ralph Foster Weld, “which had sustained the families of the town of Brooklyn for six generations.”⁴⁶

The Episcopal and Methodist churches were, in contrast, very much of the village. Episcopal (Anglican) worship began in Brooklyn during the British occupation, but when the redcoats departed they left no physical church behind. In the mid-1780s, under the auspices of the American church, Episcopal worship continued in a private house, a barn, and finally an abandoned British barracks, before settling into a small church on Old Ferry Road (not yet Fulton Street). This church was built in 1785 by newcomers from Connecticut, who preceded the influx from New London, and styled themselves Independents. By 1787 the Independents had merged with and turned over their church to the Episcopalians. In 1795 the church was incorporated as St. Ann’s, in honor of Ann Sands, Joshua’s wife, and a larger church soon appeared on Sands Street.⁴⁷

As this dedication suggests, St. Ann’s attracted support from the better-off inhabitants of the village as well as the wealthy landowners of Clover Hill, including the Pierreponts, Hickses, and Middaghs. This was less true of the Methodist Church. Methodism had emerged earlier in the eighteenth century within the Church of England as a more emotional and immediate style of worship, and as a theological departure stressing the doctrine of “perfect love” and the possible salvation of all souls. Although Methodism originated at Oxford University under the guidance of the brothers John and Charles Wesley, it appealed mainly to the working classes and smaller farmers of England and, after George Whitefield brought a more Calvinistic version of it across the Atlantic, the American colonies. Methodism came to Brooklyn during the 1790s, when a group of whites and free Blacks (including former slaves) initiated open air services on land purchased from Sands, and then built the Sands Street Wesleyan Methodist Episcopal Church on the site. A few prominent men joined Brooklyn’s Methodist Church—John Garrison, the judge depicted in Guy’s village painting, was particularly active—but most adherents were small retailers, artisans, and less-skilled workers. In 1800 about one-third of the church’s membership was African American. “The plain white wooden building on Sands Street, without spire or belfry,” Weld observed, “was a symbol of the unpretentious character of the sect.”⁴⁸

Racial integration at this church was never complete and survived less than a generation. According to one account, whites at Sands Street demanded that the growing number of African American congregants pay ten dollars per quarter to sit in galleries set aside for them. Unwilling to pay this discriminatory fee, the African Americans withdrew from the church and for a time prayed together in private homes. In 1817, each family began to contribute fifty cents per month to a building fund. Two years later they built Brooklyn’s first African Wesleyan Methodist Episcopal Church on High Street, just a block from Sands. The church thrived. In 1854 the congregation moved to larger quarters on Bridge Street, and from its new downtown home this Methodist body remained a core institution of Brooklyn’s African American community through and beyond the remainder of the nineteenth century.⁴⁹

There was no doubt little if any New England influence on Brooklyn’s African Wesleyan Methodist Episcopal Church. But that influence was strong in the three white or mostly white churches present at the incorporation of the village, however much these institutions differed in organization and doctrine from the Congregational and Presbyterian churches that were the most direct descendants of Puritan Massachusetts and Connecticut. These denominations, too, soon came to Brooklyn, as part of a wave of church founding that would justify the title “City of Churches.” In the meantime, the three churches on the ground in 1816 anticipated in various ways the role of New Englanders in Brooklyn’s religious and secular life. The Dutch Reformed Church was Calvinist in tradition and historically linked in the Old World to England’s Puritans. In the New World, the Dutch church often called upon New England Presbyterians for its clerical appointments. In 1816 Brooklyn’s Dutch Reformed Church was led by Selah Strong Woodhull, a Yale graduate of New England stock.⁵⁰ Seventeen years later we find a more remarkable connection: Pastor Maurice W. Dwight, a native of Northampton, Massachusetts, was the grandson of Jonathan Edwards.⁵¹

The New England influence on the Episcopal Church of St. Ann’s was found mainly in its laity, which included not only Joshua Sands but also leaders such as Rebecca Spooner, who worshiped at St. Ann’s in anticipation of the forming of a local Presbyterian Church. Rebecca’s husband, the Long-Island Star editor and publisher Alden Spooner, a native of Vermont, was a direct descendant of John (“speak for yourself”) Alden of Plymouth. And as we have seen, some less easily named congregants were the Independents from Connecticut who provided Brooklyn Episcopalians with their first house of worship. New England Methodists are harder to trace in Brooklyn, but a significant number of worshipers at the modest church on Sands Street were likely drawn from those maritime artisans and workers who came from New London around the same time the church was founded.

The heart of New England influence in Brooklyn was the First Presbyterian Church, formed in 1822 on Brooklyn Heights and installed in a large new church on Cranberry Street the next year. Except for the new African American Methodist Church that had hived off from Sands Street, this was the next Brooklyn church to be formed and the first to be located on the Heights.⁵² Its leaders and early communicants were prominent Brooklynites, including several, Rebecca Spooner among them, who transferred their affiliation from St. Ann’s. And First Presbyterian soon became the spiritual destination of wealthy newcomers from Manhattan. David Leavitt was a member, as was the young New York merchant Fisher Howe, who bought a building lot from Leavitt, married his daughter Elizabeth, and became the manager and treasurer of his father-in-law’s manufacturing firm, the Brooklyn White Lead Company. The Willow Street homes of the Leavitt and Howe families, both of whom had New England roots (the Leavitt’s were all from Connecticut; Howe was born in New Hampshire), were two hundred yards from the new church.⁵³ “Less closely identified with the past of the village community than the three church organizations which preceded it,” wrote Weld, the First Presbyterian Church “represented more than any of them the combination of Puritanism with the new spirit of aggressive material progress, a synthesis which was to characterize much of the social activity in Brooklyn for years to come.”⁵⁴

This new force—whether more properly called Puritan or post-Puritan—was by no means confined to Presbyterians. Founded a year later, the First Baptist Church gave its support to the various movements emanating from Cranberry Street.⁵⁵ Cooperation between Presbyterians and Baptists—so different in doctrine, organization, and the social class identities of many of their adherents—suggests a larger Protestant outlook and agenda, and the point is easily extended to additional churches that proliferated in Brooklyn. Nor should the older churches be excluded. The Calvinistic Dutch Reformed and the socially active Episcopalians and Methodists participated in and even anticipated some of the initiatives that flowed, from the mid-1820s, primarily from the Presbyterian Church on Brooklyn Heights.

In May 1815, seven years before the founding of First Presbyterian, adherents of the three Brooklyn churches (including the then racially united Methodists) formed an Association for the Suppression of Vice. Less than five months later, possibly in response to the large but all male roster of members of this association, “a number of females, of different religious denominations” met to create the Brooklyn Female Religious Tract Society.⁵⁶ The following April saw the formation of the Brooklyn Sunday School Union Society, which sponsored a nondenominational Brooklyn Union Sabbath School.⁵⁷ And in June 1816, the new village government got in the act, passing a comprehensive Sabbatarian law prohibiting “any work or servile labor on the Lord’s day,” as well as “shooting, sporting, playing ball, or other unlawful exercises or pastimes on said day” for anyone over fourteen years of age.⁵⁸ Children were evidently still allowed to play, but this quite comprehensive measure was enacted very early, when the village trustees were busy setting up mechanisms for cleaning streets and protecting villagers from fire and crime. It must be said that all these initiatives reflected not only the will of local leaders but a more general religious reform movement in the early republic, one that extended well beyond Brooklyn’s borders. By far the strongest lines of influence flowed westward (and in Brooklyn’s case a bit southward) from New England, across New York State and as far as the Northwest Territory, even to those places that lacked Congregational or Presbyterian worship. Brooklyn’s Association for the Suppression of Vice was based on the Connecticut Society for the Reformation of Morals, founded in 1811 by one of New England’s most prominent clergymen, Lyman Beecher.⁵⁹

Some resisted these efforts at moral reform, for it was not just the streets that were rough in Brooklyn Village. Brooklyn was not an especially dangerous place, but there was a good deal of drinking, horserace gambling, and general rowdiness in this waterfront community, and no small amount of resentment toward those who made it their business to control such behavior. There was even the occasional genteel objection. Organized temperance had not yet taken hold in Brooklyn, but enough people railed against the frequenting of the village’s many taverns and grogshops to elicit the reminder (from a correspondent to the Star signing himself PUBLIC DECENCY) that respectable men often “go to quiet and decent porter houses where they can read the newspapers, and enter into conversation,” a custom “not to be styled ‘vice and debauchery.’ ” AN EPICURE was less concerned with defending public drinking than in celebrating the “wines, brandies, etc.” available to “friends of the Turf” at the Steam Boat Hotel. Alden Spooner published many articles on local horseracing during these years, and only rarely disparaged the gambling that accompanied it. He gave favorable reviews to the occasional local theatrical performance, too, while gently suggesting to his sterner peers that the theater could be “a medium for conveying fine ideas and noble sentiments to many who would not take the trouble to obtain them in any other way.” A solid Presbyterian, he defended dancing against the strictures of an upstate Presbytery. And as a New Englander he wrote with sympathetic humor about an eccentric, old-fashioned Dutchman who could not “withstand the force of yankee intrusions.”⁶⁰

Those “yankee intrusions” grew stronger as Brooklyn’s churches multiplied and the Heights began to fill up with residents who considered themselves guardians of public decorum. In 1826 Reverend Joseph Sanford of the First Presbyterian Church urged parents to enroll their children in his Sunday school to counteract the “overflowing of the lava from the great volcano of vice and immorality in our immediate vicinity.”⁶¹ Sanford was succeeded in the Cranberry Street pulpit in 1829 by Daniel L. Carroll, lately of Litchfield, Connecticut, where he had succeeded Lyman Beecher. The Brooklyn Temperance Society was founded in that year and was soon joined by a Young Men’s Temperance Society, both organizations headed by men attached to the First Presbyterian Church. The Young Men’s Society, whose president was David Leavitt, reached a membership of three hundred within three years. One of its members, George Hall, was elected president of the village board in 1832, with the result that the number of licenses for the sale of liquor in the village was greatly reduced.⁶²

Some of the earlier local organizations had faltered and disappeared, but they were revived or replaced in this more vigorous era of Protestant reform. The Apprentice’s Library—which was not so secular after all, having been a response to drinking, gambling, and other youthful sins by “those who represented the social conscience of the community”—reappeared as the Brooklyn Institute. The Brooklyn Union Sabbath School, which had also died out, was revived under the auspices of the Methodist Church, with cooperation from the Dutch Reformed and Presbyterians. A Sacred Music Association and a Lyceum, both offered as respectable alternatives to the theater, were founded in 1833. The driving force behind the latter was Alden Spooner. A Brooklyn Theater built in 1828 soon disappeared, having been opposed as an inducement to immorality by local Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists.⁶³

Brooklyn’s surviving institutions expressed the values and aspirations of a New England Protestantism that transplanted as easily as Isabella grapevines to “America’s first commuter suburb.” It also transferred to at least parts of that industrializing waterfront community—which had its share of Manhattan-bound commuters—once known as the City of Olympia. The effects were real, even on the once-filthy streets. Brooklyn, declared Ralph Foster Weld, “had become the city of homes and churches, a lecture-going, church-going community, a pleasant suburban place, quieter and more sedate than New York…. The disheveled, unkempt village of 1816 had undergone a metamorphosis.”⁶⁴ To Spooner, this metamorphosis would continue until it yielded something more than a suburb. “And what is Brooklyn now?—a pleasant populous village, the vegetating seed of a progressive city, which the future will ripen into greatness, ere many waning moons.”⁶⁵