CHAPTER VI

THE BURGHERS

IN the earliest days of New Netherland there were
no burgers because, as the name implies, burghers
are town-dwellers, and for a number of years after
the coming of the Dutch nothing worthy to be
called a town existed in the colony. In the middle
of the seventeenth century a traveler wrote from
New Netherland that there were only three towns
on the Hudson — Fort Orange, Rondout, and New
Amsterdam — and that the rest were mere villages
or settlements.

These centers were at first trading-posts, and it is
as idle to judge of the manners, customs, and dress
prevailing in them by those of Holland at the same
epoch, as to judge San Francisco in the mining
days of 1849 by Boston and New York at the same
date. These early traders and settlers brought
with them the character and traditions of home;

but their way of life was perforce modified by the

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