Hendrick Hendricksen Kip ★

Born 1600 in Nieuwenhuys (probably Nyhuizum, Friesland), Netherlands. 1637: Possibly came from Amsterdam to America with his wife and 5 children. He married April 201 or May 56, 1624, in Amsterdam, Netherlands and worked as tailor. He died September 14, 1685, in Kippenburg, Manhattan, New York.

A Tailor on Bridge Street

Hendrick Hendricksen Kip was born around 1600 in Friesland, in the Netherlands, and emigrated to New Netherland around 1637, possibly prompted by the economic collapse following the Dutch tulip market crash that February. He built a career as a tailor from his home and shop on what is now Bridge Street in Manhattan, and rose to become one of the colony's leading citizens: elected in 1647 to New Amsterdam's first Board of Nine Men under Director-General Peter Stuyvesant, and in 1656 appointed one of the city's five Grand Schepens, or aldermen. Hendrick was an outspoken critic of authority when he thought it deserved — his family name may even have originated as an ironic nickname, since “kip” is Dutch for chicken; a contemporary poem later described him as having spoken “of the haughty lip.”

Opposing Kieft's War

Hendrick was a vocal opponent of Director-General Willem Kieft, whose massacre of over a hundred Indigenous people at Corlear's Hook and Pavonia in February 1643 plunged the colony into a war the settlers feared would bring retaliation. Reported in 1643 as wishing aloud that Kieft be shipped back to Holland for “a nobleman's death,” Hendrick was pointedly excluded two years later when the city's other citizens were called to hear the terms of the peace treaty ending that war, on account of his open hostility. In 1649 he was one of eleven leading citizens who signed a formal remonstrance asking that New Netherland be placed under direct crown rule rather than the mismanagement of the West India Company. He was granted Great Burgher status in 1657, swore allegiance to England after the colony's surrender in 1664, and died at his Manhattan home, Kippenburg, on September 14, 1685, leaving an estate of 7,800 guilders; his family's coat of arms was set in the stained glass of New Amsterdam's first church.