Friday, May 15, 2009

Further: Isaac Allerton, Puritan in New Amsterdam

I was researching his warehouse in New Amsterdam just outside the famous Wall for the English doing business there as part of an archaeological assessment of the parking lot in the South Street Seaport Historic District adjacent to the National Register Building at 251 Water Street. A large block covering building was proposed to be named "250 Water St."

I read records of a current historian on the Yale University which acquired the cemetery in it's "front yard" I think and learned that the first cemetery of its kind to have "family plots" was where he had been, modeled after the French "Pere Lachaise" where before it was wherever the clergy placed the remains. However, that cemetery was impacted and the bones of Isaac Allerton were moved to the Yale University now controlled one. I seem to recall however the headstone was incorporated into a wall and was barely legible. So any other info to the final resting place I do not know. He's sometimes called the last "Pilgrim" to pass-on in Connecticut a claim perhaps that had been falsely attributed to one of its early governors.

His ship the "Hope" was what he traveled in between NYC and New Haven according to some of the history also used in his business of trade to Maine and back, perhaps at Pemaquid (near Bristol, Maine) once part of the later Duke of York holdings and the colony of New York.

In 1903 the Mayflower Society put up a monument to Isaac Allerton, Puritan, whose warehouse was in the parking lot in NYC. There are some interesting stories about the warehouse run by former indentured servant of George Holmes, Thomas Hall, that are important to the early history of the city and rise of merchants in New Amsterdam then New York.

You might be interested:

From Archaeoseek:

Very early in New Amsterdam there's also cited an "old shipwreck" nearby Philippe du Trieux whose property became the Isaac Allerton Warehouse, outside the Wall for the English doing business there. Isaac Allerton is reburied in New Haven in the cemetery Yale University maintains. He's also named in Allerton Ave. in the Bronx a large street, the exit between the Bronx Zoo and the Botanical Gardens on the oldest motor parkway in the US the Bronx River Parkway. He kept a home in New Haven had business in Maine and "abandoned" the Pilgrims, he a Puritan, apparently a partial construction's archaeology discovered discussed "In Small Things Forgotten" by J. Deetz. Once upon a time a monument erected by the Mayflower Society was up in the Seaport, across the street from where Alfred E. Smith grew up, first Catholic to run for President, I reported.

You must know however the context of my blog entry? The Yale University "Skull and Bones" club of which many prominent Yale grads were a part of, later in important governmental positions, take some oath over bones that some claim were dug up from Geronimo's grave and "treated"?

When presented with lawyers they showed something that those who knew of the "secret ceremony" (former President George W. Bush is thought to have a small brand on his buttocks) were the wrong ones so something exists in reality. There is also a petition signed by thousands to have them produced, including Geronimo's grandson on behalf of the Apache?

Further: New Haven Green: "The Green was used as the main burial grounds for the residents of New Haven during its first 150 years, but by 1821 the practice was abolished and many of the headstones were moved to the Grove Street Cemetery. However, the remains of the dead were not moved, and thus still remain below the soil of the Green." - Wikipedia "New Haven Green"

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