Catheryna Rombout Brett

rdf:langString Catheryna Rombout Brett

rdf:langString Catheryna Rombout Brett (also Catherina, Catherine, and Catharyna) was the daughter of New York City mayor and land baron Francis Rombouts and Helena Teller Bogardus Van Ball. She inherited a one-third interest in the sprawling Rombout Patent in today's southern Dutchess County, New York, at just four years old. At 16 she married a formal British naval lieutenant, Roger Brett, and the two relocated afterwards from the family home in New York City to their land upstate, reportedly the first permanent White settlers there. Widowed at 31, Catheryna went on to become a respected businesswoman, tending on her own to her affairs and nearly 30,000-acre estate, extremely unusual in that day and the more so on a frontier. Unlike the families that held the remaining two-thirds of the Rombout Patent, the van Cortlands and Verplanck/Kips, Catheryna not only rented but sold off parcels of her land over the years. She is today remembered for her independence and industry, as well as being a generous host to Daniel Ninham, the last sachem of the Wappinger, a people who had previously occupied from Dutchess County all the way south to and including Manhattan, southeast and east to and including parts of Connecticut, and west to the banks of the Hudson. Catheryna is credited with teaching him English, which enabled him to argue for Wappinger land rights before the royal Lords of Trade of Great Britain, and allowing him to stay at his pleasure on ancestral lands on her estate in today's hamlet of Wiccopee. Her legacy is memorialized at the Madam Brett Homestead she and Roger built in today's Beacon, New York.