Roeloff Swartwout ★

Born 1634 in Amsterdam, Netherlands. March 16526/16555: Came from the Netherlands to America. He married August 13, 1657, at the Reformed Church in Beverswyck, Fort Orange, New York and worked as fur trader. He died March 24, 1715 in Beverswijck, New Netherland.

A Theology Graduate on the Hudson

Roeloff Swartwout was born in Amsterdam and, on September 17, 1655, graduated from Groningen University in the Netherlands with a degree in theology — an unusual credential for the frontier trader and official he would become. He crossed the Atlantic to New Netherland to join his father Tomys, an advocate of independent, village-centered farming communities rather than the great manorial estates ruled by patroons, and Roeloff carried the same conviction throughout his life. He lived first on his father's farm at Midwout (Flatbush) on Long Island before moving to Beverwijck (Albany) around 1656, where he met and married Eva Bradt, recently widowed by the death of her first husband, Antoine de Hooges.

Founding Wiltwyck

Around 1660, Roeloff and Eva moved with his children to Wiltwyck, the settlement that would become Kingston, New York, in the fertile Esopus valley — of which Roeloff reportedly said, “Here, indeed, Eden must have been. You have but to spill the grain to get a bountiful crop.” He traveled back to Amsterdam in 1659–1660 to secure farm equipment and farmhands, mortgaging his own property in Beverwijck to afford the trip, and returned with three hired workers and a shipment of agricultural tools. He served as schout (a combined sheriff, prosecutor, and local administrator) of Wiltwyck, and later as commissary and justice, though his tenure was marked by conflict: a bitter, long-running feud with fellow settler Tjerck Claeszen de Witt over a botched horse sale escalated to threats of violence, and in 1667 Roeloff was accused of selling liquor to Indigenous people in quantities exceeding his recorded supply — a charge ultimately dismissed when his accuser was found unfit to testify. Financial trouble dogged him throughout this period: by 1667 the court described him as “a man without means, and all his property having been mortgaged, he is on that account, poor,” with even his cows and horses mortgaged, and he spent years trying to recover money his late wife's first husband had owed at his death.

Rebellion and Redemption

Roeloff became active in provincial politics as tensions rose in the English colony of New York, serving as Ulster County's representative to New York's Committee of Safety in 1689. When Jacob Leisler seized control of the colonial government that year, Roeloff became his chief political organizer in Ulster County, and Leisler appointed him in quick succession as chief justice, justice of the peace, tax collector, and collector of excise for the county. In April 1690, tasked with supplying grain to British forces defending Albany against the French during King William's War, Roeloff gathered all the corn he could find and shipped it upriver himself. When Leisler's government collapsed in 1691, Roeloff and his son Anthony were sentenced to death for their role in the rebellion; the sentence hung over them for nearly a decade before they were formally declared innocent and indemnified in 1699. In his March 1714 will, written, in his own words, with more religious penitence than was common for his time, Roeloff divided his Ulster County estate among his children and prayed that his repentance would be “enough to justify his body being returned to the ground in a Christian manner.” He died leaving behind a reputation as an independent-minded frontier official who quipped, in a letter to Maria van Rensselaer, that “he who wishes to become rich, blessed and healthy must rise early in the morning.”