Jans Martense Schenck house
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6302 Avenue U, Brooklyn, NY 11234, USA Print route »
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Jan Martense Schenck (1631 in Amersfoort, Utrecht, Netherlands - Aug, 27 1687) arrived in New Netherlands on June 28, 1650, on the ship De Valckenier (the Falconer) with his sister Annetje and brother Roelof. He bought a parcel of land on Molen Eylandt (Mill Island) in the Dutch town of Nieuw Amersfoort in what is now the Mill Basin section of Brooklyn, New York. He purchased the land with a grist mill on it from Elbert Elbertse Stoothoff who had arrived in Nieuw Amsterdam in 1637 aboard the Vrede (Peace). The land was half of a tract Stoothoff purchased from Englishmen John Tilton Jr. and Samuel Spicer. John Tilton Jr. formerly resided in Lynn, Massachusetts, due to his Anabaptist beliefs he along with his wife were among the founding colonists of Gravesend, with Lady Deborah Moody. Tilton and Spicer had bought the land from the Canarsie Indians on May 13, 1664.Dutch efforts to establish the colony of New Netherland brought significant population change to the area we today call Brooklyn. When the Dutch arrived in the early 1600s, the area was inhabited by the Canarsie, one of thirteen Algonquin tribes. The Canarsie had resided here for thousands of years and called the area where Jan Martense Schenck settled Keskateuw.
Between the 1630s and the 1680s, conflict and disease decimated the local Canarsie population, and after trading their land to the Dutch, only a few remained. By the time Jan Martense Schenck built his house, the area that is now Brooklyn was populated mostly by Europeans, the majority of whom were Dutch, with significant numbers of English and smaller numbers of people of other European backgrounds, including Italians (see the tea set displayed nearby). The Dutch had also begun importing enslaved Africans to New Netherland in the 1620s, and by 1698 approximately fifteen percent of the population of what is now Brooklyn was of African descent, nearly all of them enslaved.
