TOWN OF WASHINGTON / VILLAGE MILLBROOK

HISTORICAL SOCIETY

A hodge-podge page of historical tidbits that have caught our eye.

Road trip circa 1940

Select Roundtable articles:

Printed in the Millbrook Roundtable on Friday, January 8, 1943

TELEGRAM

Received: Millbrook, N.Y., Jan. 7, 1943 to JOHN D. FITCH:

OPA has ordered all pleasure driving stopped, effective noon January 7^th, in 17 Eastern States where critical oil shortage necessitates sharp curtailment in gasoline shipments. We urgently request your cooperation in asking the citizens in your locality for patriotic co-operation in this war emergency. In obtaining compliance with the new regulations, the full cooperation of enforcement agencies in your locality will be most helpful. We suggest that you request your local enforcement agencies to lend us their aid in reporting violations. OPA enforcement officials will communicate with such agencies as soon as practical and outline in more detail, ways in which this cooperation may be extended. We shall keep you advised as fast as we get further information. Should violations be reported to you at the Board level, hold them for further instructions.

R. H. POTTER, Acting State Director

Originally reported in the Millbrook Roundtable, September 1, 1900

Single copies, Three Cents

Saturday Morning

TABLE TALK

Dr. deGaris has the honor of being the first to own an automobile in Millbrook. It was brought in on Friday, the doctor riding out from Poughkeepsie with John VanBenschoten, from whom the machine had been bought. It is of the kind called locomobile, the same make as the one bought by Lane Brothers, with improvements, and similar to the machines now made by that firm. The motive power is steam, and the carriages have an excellent record as hill climbers, and for general utility. Now that the example has been set, probably others will follow it till horseless carriages become common here. By the way it is a gratifying evidence of prosperity in the dental business in Millbrook.

Millbrook Roundtable, Friday, November 20, 1914

Page Six

NINE PARTNERS LANE

The sign post erected on the Dutchess Turnpike Road at the bottom of Nine Partners’ Lane brings up a bit of local history of interest to us all.

Nine Partner’s Lane is the name recently given by the Village Board of Trustees to the road leading from the Dutchess Turnpike Road to the Dover Road and its easterly side constitutes a portion of the easterly line of the Village and upon this road face the places of Mrs. Rowell Miller, Silas Woodell and Keyes Winter. The greater part of the westerly side of the road is owned by the Wing family. It is a fact greatly to be deplored that the early records of the Town of Washington are lacking and much of its early history is thus lost and not available to the student interested in its early doings.

The name chosen for this road takes the record back to May 27^th 1697, when a grant of a tract of land was made by the Crown to nine men, Col. Caleb Heathcote, Major Augustus Graham, James Emmott, Lieut. Col. Henry Filkin, David Jamison, Hendrick Ten Eyck, John Aaretson, William Creed and Jarvis Marshall. This grant called, the Nine Partners’ Patent, extending from the Hudson River to the Connecticut line was subdivided into lots and set off to the original patentees. One of our Millbrook residents now owns a map of this subdivision from a survey made in 1734, and without being absolutely accurate it may be stated that Millbrook Village probably lies within Subdivision Lots Nos. 25 or 26. The former was allotted to Henry Filkin and the other to William Creed.

It is difficult to determine when this road was opened as a public thoroughfare. Probably the first mention of it on record as a road running from the Dutchess Turnpike Road appears in a deed of land “situated in the Great Nine Partner, Washington Town, County—beginning at a stake and stones on the east side of the road – Wm. Whites-to a place called Mechanic, thence south 89 degrees east 18 chains—corner of Isaac Thorne’s farm” containing 100 acres.

This extract is from a deed made by Isaac Thorne and Samuel Dorland as executors &c of Daniel Bedell to Benjamin Haight, dated in 1808, but not recorded until 1886, and it was so mutilated when recorded that the county clerk made mention of the fact on his register. The omissions above shown may be easily supplied by the reader.

The chain of title to the 100 acre farm a butting on the east side of this road is of record back to 1788 when the ownership is given in Philip Angevine and in each of the four successive instruments of record going back to this date no mention is made of any road but the description in each instrument begins “at the north-east corner of the farm of Isaac Thorne at a stake and stones, thence south 89 degrees east 18 chains” and thus establishes a very old survey mark and locates the north-east corner of Isaac Thorne’s farm as far back as November 1788.

It is also of interest to note the record shows that in 1758 Isaac Thorne granted to Jonathan Holmes a tract of land in Crum Elbow precinct, also Nine Partners in Dutchess County which was obtained by Caleb Heathcote and eight others by patent dated May 27^th, 1697, “Part of the said land comprehended within the said patent was divided into thirty-six lots which said part of land is part of the 26^th lot in number which said lot was originally laid out to William Creed, one of the first patentees.”

Isaac Thorne acquired title to his extensive land holdings in this vicinity at a very early period and probably was among the first purchasers of land from William Creed, one of the original Nine Partners’ Patentees but the County registry of deeds does not go back far enough to record it.

The history of Nine Partners’ Meeting House and Nine Partners’ School has been well written and is familiar to most of our readers. Soon after 1796, the date of the opening of Nine Partners’ School, this road became a thoroughfare for those living along the old Filkintown Road, now the Dutchess Turnpike Road, in going to meeting and in attendance at the school then located at Mechanic.

The old meeting house stands, rugged in its simplicity, symbolic of the thrift and sturdy character of its builders and promoters. The school building has disappeared but its complete removal and demolition was saved by one of Millbrook’s esteemed citizens, the late John D. Wing, and is now incorporated in the beautiful home of his son John Morgan Wing, bordering on Nine Partners’ Lane.

So Nine Partners’ Lane seems not only a fitting tribute to those who made famous this locality around which so much centered in the days before 1800, but speaks for a sentiment which we all cherish in perpetuating names and deeds of those who have gone before.