Rhinecliff: Up and Down
by Jane E. Smith

More than 300 years ago, a prosperous man named Hendrickus Kip lived on the west bank of the Hudson in Kingston. Now being Dutch, a people with considerable derring-do and a way with trading, Hendrickus began eyeing the wilderness on the other side of the river with more than a slight degree of interest. So in the summer of 1686 Hendrickus and four other Kingston Dutchmen (among them his brother Jacobus) bought a wide swath of waterfront land—2,200-acre's worth—from the Lenape tribe, who'd been fishing and hunting in the neighborhood for at least 8,000 years. In exchange the native Americans got, among other items, eight pairs of stockings and a frying pan.

Before long, the Kip brothers settled their families in the wilds on the eastern bank. The other Dutchmen, sensible sorts, stayed put. Why leave the safety of Kingston for a place with such eccentric topography, no matter how open to the river—and hence to trading—it was? They may have thought the Kips, like their new land, with its cliffs and outcroppings, dips and swells, wetlands and rocky soil, were a little crazy.

To find out what happened over the next three centuries, you'll have to read Cynthia Owen Philip's terrific new book, Rhinecliff, A Hudson River History: The Tangled Tale of Rhinebeck's Waterfront, just out from Black Dome Press.

A writer and historian who moved to the hamlet 30 years ago (and still considers herself a newcomer), Philip says she was astonished to learn that no one had bothered to chronicle the history of Rhinecliff. Which she firmly points out is really the history of Kipsbergen, the name the Kips gave their new home. The name Rhinecliff is the mid 19th-century concoction of developer Charles H. Russell, who hoped the romantic name would induce people to plunk down cash for lots on the new Hudson River Railroad.

Rhinecliff, A Hudson River History answers the mystery of Rhinecliff's absence from the historical record, despite its status as only the fourth significant settlement on the Hudson after Manhattan, Albany, and Kingston—and the only one on its eastern shore. Philip argues that Rhinecliff's quirky terrain and easy access to the river meant that from the word go the people who lived there were, like Hendrickus Kip, just a little different from their neighbors. Geography may not be destiny, but as Jared Diamond hypothesizes in Guns, Germs, and Steel, it comes pretty close.

The settlers of Kipsbergen were especially different from those of Ryn Bek, the inland precinct to the east established by the British in 1738 and blessed with rich farming land. (Rhinebeck was organized as a town in 1788.) "They were two entirely different cultures," Philip says. "Farming is simply different than sailing. People who are tied to the waterfront have a different set of ways. They're more expansive. The Dutch in Kipsbergen sailed all over the place—up to Albany, down to New York. They had a larger vista of the world.

"The Dutch were a bunch of traders and they admitted they were a bunch of traders," Philip laughs. "They didn't have the hide-bound social system that England has to this day." Neither were they as patriarchal a society. The lintel above the doorway of the Hendrickus Kip homestead (which you can see in the Rhinebeck post office) bears not only his initials but also those of his wife Annetje, and Hendrickus bequeathed equal shares of his property to his two sons and daughter Catholyntie.

Heritage wasn't the only thing separating Kipsbergen from Ryn Bek: there was the ordeal of the hill. Walking or riding up the two-mile-long slope between the two settlements was an occasion for a fair amount of profanity. Without that climb, the two settlements might have blended their differences, but as matters stood it was a whole lot easier for Kipsbergians to go courting across the river.

And finally, the main reason Rhinecliff has, until now, been exempt from historical curiosity: wealth, class, and power. The inhabitants of Kipsbergen were traders, sailors, cloth makers, carpenters, and wheelwrights. But the man who in the 1690s began gobbling up the great tracts of land that encircled little Kipsbergen—Hendrickus Beekman—came from a Dutch family with heaps of cash, influence, and social stature. Allying himself with the Livingston family, British bluebloods, Beekman turned their unwanted indentured German laborers into his own renters. Practically serfs, they paid landlord Beekman with their labor, livestock, and produce. Their chances of owning the land they worked? All but nil.

Discovering "the feudal characteristics of this part of the world" surprised and puzzled Philip. "There was no other place in the United States with a similar society, except in Virginia," she says. "Now these tenants were not slaves, but they were tied to the land in a lot of ways and were there to serve the great landowners who kept the mineral and mill rights, which were very important."

The citizens of Kipsbergen may not have been rich, they may not have been mighty, but they owned their land. Its spiky terrain (including that hill) helped protect them from the Beekmans and their ilk. Its perch on the river—and later, its bond with the railroad—meant that the settlement would always be an important center of transportation. And so it was that the people of Rhinecliff held on to a distinct character—a mix of independence, egalitarianism, toughness, and eccentricity.

Speaking of eccentricity, one of the pleasures of Philip's book is the opportunity to meet some unforgettable folks. Like poor Nancy Shippen, who in the late 18th century was torn from her true love and married to loony Henry Beekman Livingston, who plowed his fields in silk hose and satin coat. And the men who in the 1920s gathered of an evening in Rosewell Beach's and James Hester's grocery store, telling tall tales and arguing about politics. "For sizzling emphasis," Philip writes with characteristic wryness, "they shot streams of tobacco juice into the coal-fired potbellied stove." And then there's George Cave, a chap who cured his infected fingers by chopping them off, went from reprobate to upright churchgoer, and was once so anxious to move into a new house that he carted away an oven in which the bread was still baking.

It's no coincidence that Philip, being a plucky sort herself, was drawn to Rhinecliff in the 1970s. She remembers her first sight of the community. First there was the grandeur of the backdrop—the broad river that spoke to her family's seafaring history, the indigo Catkills beyond, and the sky whose clouds turn implausibly pink at sunset. These sights routinely make jaws drop.

But Philip also saw and admired something that others seldom see—evidence everywhere of the human capacity to survive, to make do. She saw right away that the houses and the topography were a perfect match. Built nearly on top of each other, "the houses are where they can be," she says, none of them exactly distinguished, but each with a modest character of its own. I suspect the seed that grew into this first-rate, bottom-up social history of Rhinecliff was planted at that moment.

Hear Cynthia Owen Philip give a brief talk about and sign copies of Rhinecliff, A Hudson River History on Sinterklaas Day, Saturday, December 6 at 7:30 pm at Oblong Books in Rhinebeck.

"The Galloping Goose" in the 1930s — one of the last cars to run on the Rhinecliff & Connecticut tracks.

Left: Tombstone of a Van Etten descendant; Van Ettens still live in the hamlet. Right: Jan Kip's house, built around 1715.