Our founding fathers, or so the story goes, set sail for the New World in search of religious freedom, a persecuted people destined to manifest a more perfect union, a New Jerusalem. Like all myths, this one contains some truth. But our national narrative has always been a tall tale, a creation story built on an ideal and a lie.
My father passed down our family’s version of the founding myth to me. Jean Lettin III, an early Protestant convert, was chased from his ancestral home in the Burgundian Netherlands in 1567 by the northern arm of the Spanish Inquisition. His family found religious refuge in England for a couple generations, then set sail for Boston in 1638, arriving just eighteen years after the Mayflower.
We remember the Mayflower pilgrims as a pious band of true believers crossing the Atlantic, searching for a safe harbor where they could practice their Christian faith. We forget that half the people on that ship had nothing to do with the English Separatist movement of the Puritans. They were adventurers and economic opportunists eager to plunder and “subdue” the wilderness, to exploit and extract whatever people and natural resources stood in their way. We also forget that the Puritans quickly established themselves into a strict theocracy of religious fanatics that had more in common with today’s “radical Islamic fundamentalists” than the proponents of a free, pluralistic society.
Richard Lettin, my eighth great-grandfather, was born in 1608 in Salford, a village in Bedfordshire, England, about fifty miles north of London. He was the grandson of Jean III, who fled from the Low Countries to England during the Wars of Religion, that horrific and seemingly endless struggle between Europe’s Roman Catholic rulers and a rising Protestant elite.
My adventurous ancestor was not looking for a place to practice his faith. Richard Lettin was running from religion, or at least the version of religion that dominated Europe and tore our family to pieces.
From 1494 to 1564, three generations of the Jean Lettin family were appointed to work as court officials in a small city known today as Mechelen, Belgium. They adjudicated cases before the Grand Council of Mechelen just as Martin Luther, John Calvin and other trouble-making preachers of the Reformation were challenging the Catholic monarchy’s monopoly on interpreting the will of God. The Lettin family appears to have been caught up in the ensuing Counter-Reformation, which included efforts by the king and his cardinals to use the previously secular court in Mechelen as venue for heresy trials designed to put down the Protestant resistance.
Jean III, a lawyer who apparently opposed using the courts to try accused heretics, was among thousands of refugees forced off the western edge of the European continent by Philip II, the Spanish monarch who in 1567 ordered a mercenary army into Flanders and the Netherlands to ruthlessly put down the Iconoclastic Fury, an infamous Protestant revolt.
Jean, his wife and young son fled to England, settling first in the town of Norwich, England.
By the 1630s, the second and third-generation children of these Protestant refugees were moving beyond the congregations established for them in Norwich and London, known at the time as the “stranger churches.” They had by then worn out their welcome in England. Popular sentiment was turning against the newcomers, a xenophobia that some of these refugees would take with them to the New World, turning from victim to oppressor.
At the same time, King Charles I had imposed a “high church” form of Anglicanism upon both the English Puritans and the descendants of the Netherlandish congregations. They considered the state-run church under this monarch to be overly “popish,” meaning it reminded them too much of the Roman Catholic pontiffs they thought they’d left behind.
Richard Lettin was among a wave of immigrants who came to New England in the decades following the landing of the Mayflower in 1620. They sailed in search of religious liberty and economic opportunity — freedoms that came, of course, at the expense of the Native American tribes they would soon decimate or otherwise destroy through plague, genocide and economic exploitation.
An estimated 25,000 settlers came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630s, riding in the wake of the Mayflower. We call them “Puritans,” but they were not all as “pure” as we have been led to believe. Some, like my ancestor, had dueling loyalties and motivations for coming to America. Richard Lettin had business dealings with both the English in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the Dutch merchants on Long Island and Manhattan, then part of New Netherlands.
Many of the Plymouth and the Massachusetts Bay colonists came as families. They were more intent on building lasting communities. Other immigrants, such as French fur traders and those commissioned by the Dutch West India Company, had more mercantile motivations for coming to America. Farther south, the early colonists of Virginia, Georgia and the Carolinas tended to be more desperate immigrants, including slaves, indentured servants and other impoverished refugees who found themselves working the plantations of the New World elite. This was not so much the case in New England, where the Yankees in the Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut colonies tended to be independent farmers, doctors, skilled craftsman and — like Richard Lettin’s grandfather — lawyers.
Here’s how the nineteenth century author Elizabeth Hubbell Schenck, in her history of Fairfield, Connecticut, describes their founding vision:
“Fleeing, as our forefathers fled, from the religious intolerance of the mother country, they found but little time to think of the heraldic devices of their sires. Labor, and the honor of labor, with the freedom of worshipping the Great Jehovah according to their peculiar views, were the thoughts uppermost in their minds. Idleness alone was disgrace.”
“Many of the colonists brought servants and slaves with them, yet such was the scarcity of laborers that with the exception of the clergy, nearly all the original proprietors toiled earnestly upon their plantations, and frequently in the same field with their servants.”
This organizing force, later called the “Protestant work ethic” by a new brand of scholars named sociologists, appears to be what more-or-less fueled my ancestors, not to mention myself. In the colonial era, it inspired the Lattins to flee England and for the next four generations devote themselves to “subduing” land on both sides of Long Island Sound.
As refugees, it seems unlikely that Jean III’s son and grandson would have been allowed to practice law in England. But once he was in the colonies, Richard Lettin did not hesitate to file lawsuits, nor be named in them, to slander his enemies nor accuse them of the same. His appearances in the centuries-old public record reveal a bit of a loose cannon — a man who was prone to angry outbursts, someone who pissed off the wrong people.
Things got so heated in this seventeenth century mix of geopolitical intrigue, land grabs, theological backstabbing that the wife of one of Lettin’s adversaries was accused of witchcraft. Known only as “the Goodwife Knap,” she was convicted and executed in the New Haven Colony in proceedings that set the stage for the more infamous Salem witch trials.
Richard Lettin himself did not last long under the theocracy imposed by the New England Puritans, whose colonial government was even more repressive than the Roman Catholic theocracy Richard’s grandfather had left behind.
Religious conformity was severely enforced by Boston’s new Protestant elite, and to a slightly lesser extent by the colony’s agents down in the New Haven and Connecticut colonies. Dissenters were banished. Quakers were especially despised. Some had their ears cut off, while others were branded as heretics by having an “H” burned into their foreheads. Adulterers and blasphemers were executed.
The execution of the Goodwife Knap for witchcraft was carried out in 1653, around the same time that Richard Lettin sold off his land in Connecticut, abandoned his spouse, known only as “the Goodwife Lettin,” and slipped across the Long Island Sound with his oldest son to start anew in a settlement that is still known today as “Lattingtown.”
Lettin’s own dislike of the intolerant Protestant elite in New England would get him banished from at least three of the fledgling colonies in what are now the states of Massachusetts, Connecticut and New York. Perhaps Richard was continuing the free-thinking tradition of his Flemish grandfather. Like Jean Lettin III, Richard sailed off in search of new lands and new beginnings, skirting across the Long Island Sound a decade or so after his treacherous ocean crossing.
No ship records have been found to document Richard Lettin’s passage to the New World, but we know that he arrived from England sometime in late 1638 or early 1639. He had just turned thirty years of age.
We also don’t know much about Richard’s early life in England, other than the fact that he married a woman named Joan Chad in Salford in 1634, who was two years younger than he. Joan gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth, on October 25, 1635. Two sons were born in 1637, the first in February and the second in October, but neither of them lived into 1638. That’s the same year Joan Chad died, perhaps while attempting to give birth to that second son.
So it was with this grim family history that Richard, perhaps with the toddler Elizabeth in tow, set sail for the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They arrived in Boston and first tried settling in Concord, which was then on the edge of the colonial frontier. They joined a settlement that had just been founded by a group led by Capt. Simon Willard.
Willard was a fur trader and a colonial official who had obtained land in the area from a Native American leader named Tantamous, or Old Jethro, who had defaulted on a loan with a local gunsmith. Decades later, when he was seventy years old, Willard would lead colonial forces in the 1670s in King Philip’s War, an infamous conflict that ruthlessly put down an early resistance effort by Native American tribes.
Richard Lettin’s second wife, whose first name may have been “Christian,” is only recorded in most colonial records as “the Goodwife Lettin.” That title predates the modern tradition that would have referred to her as “Mrs. Richard Lettin.” It denotes the mistress of a household, a woman who is respected but ranks below a female holding the noble title of “Lady.”
We don’t know where the Goodwife Lettin came from, or how she and Richard crossed paths. All we know is that she gave birth to Richard’s first son, Josiah, in Concord on February 20, 1641, and then to his second son, Thomas, on September 12, 1643.
Five days before that, on September 7, 1643, Richard Lettin’s name first appears in the colonial public record as one of seven signatures on a petition filed before the General Court of Massachusetts. Three of the seven petitioners are male relatives of Thomas Wheeler (Timothy, Ephraim and Thomas, Jr.). Lettin and the Wheelers were joined in their pleading by a gentlemen names Roger Draper.
Whereas your humble petitioners came late into this country about 4 years ago, and have since then lived at Concord, when we were forced to buy what now we have, or the most of it, the convenience of the town being before given out: your petitioners having been brought up, in husbandry, of children, finding the lands about the town very barren and the meadows were wet and unuseful, especially those we now have interest in; and knowing it is your desire the lands might be subdued, have taken pains to search out a place on north west of our town, where we do desire some reasonable quantity of land may be granted unto us, which we hope may in time be joined to the farms already laid out there to make a village; and so, desiring God to guide you in this and all other your weighty occasions, we rest your humble petitioners.
Their petition was granted by the court, which ruled, “We think some quantity (of land) may be granted to them, provided that within two years, they make some good improvement of it.”
Richard Lettin apparently got his piece of that land grant on the outskirts of Concord. For he was still there nearly three years later, in the summer of 1646, when he was named, along with Joseph Wheeler and Capt. Simon Willard, as co-administrators of the estate of the late Richard Stark.
Lettin was among a group of Concord planters who felt burdened by taxes imposed by colonial officials in Boston. They especially disliked that requirement that they support two ministers. Some in the Concord group refused to pay this ecclesiastical charge. So many of the planters either moved onto other settlements or returned to England that the population of the town rapidly declined.
In the mid-1640s, approximately one eighth of the Concord planters, including Richard Lettin, moved down to the Connecticut settlement of Fairfield. They were led by a minister, the Rev. John Jones, and found richly fertile farm and pasture land. In her history of Fairfield, Schenck describes a veritable Garden of Eden:
“Fine oaks of all kinds abounded in the early days, as well as chestnut, hickory, beech, birch, white and red ash, elm, butternut, basswood, poplar, sassafras, hemlock, spruce, cedar and pine,” she wrote in 1889. “Wild fruits were abundant, and a great variety of wild flowers of exquisite texture adorned the woods, meadows and hillsides. The sound furnished some of the most exquisite sea-mosses to be found on the New England coast. The deer, bear, wolf, fox, otter, mink, muskrat, and an endless number of squirrels afforded furs valuable for barter.”
William Wheeler, a member of the clan that accompanied the Lettins from Concord to Fairfield, painted a similar picture in his journal:
“White-fish were so plentiful that they were drawn in by nets and distributed for manure upon the lands. Lobsters, crabs, mussels and other inferior shell-fish were found in great quantities while the fresh water streams afforded trout, lamper-eels and turtles of considerable size.”
As for the human resources and other costs of doing business, Wheeler adds, “Land was cheap and produced large crops. Labor was cheap — there were many Indians who would work for small wages.”
Ah, yes, the Indians…
Various tribes of Native Americans had been living for hundreds of years along these abundant shores and inland waterways. They called the “fair fields” that the colonists discovered “Uncoway,” where they had gathered together for generations in villages of wigwams.
Many of these tribes were not aggressive and did not resist the first wave of English and Dutch traders who arrived on their shores. But in the early 1600s this native population found itself decimated by epidemics of small pox, measles and other diseases for which the Indians had no immunity. It was been estimated that early plagues killed off between fifty and ninety-five percent of the native population in various New England tribes.
Much of this happened even before the arrival of the Mayflower in 1620. Upon landing, the Pilgrims found numerous Indian villages littered with the sun-parched bones of Native Americans who died in the first wave of plague. The natives perished so suddenly that they could not even be buried by their brethren. Back in England, King James saw the epidemic as a blessing, a sign of God’s “great goodness and bounty toward us.”
Some tribes were lucky enough to avoid these viruses. The surviving Native Americans who most fiercely resisted the new settlers were the Pequot, but they would soon face a different but equally deadly fate.
Richard Lettin was still living in England when the early colonists at Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay and Saybrook declared war on the Pequot in 1636, convincing two other tribes, the Narragansett and Mohegan, to join their crusade.
In the decade before the war began, the Pequot had been battling other tribes in the fertile Connecticut River Valley and clashing with Dutch and English explorers who’d established trading outposts along the river and on Long Island Sound.
Hundreds of Pequot Indians were killed or enslaved in the war, most notoriously in a massacre in the spring of 1637 when colonial forces surrounded a fortified Pequot village near the Mystic River. The war ended in the defeat and virtual elimination of the Pequot in 1638, the same year Richard Lettin sailed to the New World.
Elizabeth Schenck, writing some 250 years later, describes the triumph over “haughty Pequots” as a victory that “has scarcely a parallel in the history of warfare.”
“Peace with the much-dreaded savages who roamed at will about the rebel settlements, and in fact throughout all New England, was thereby secured. Prosperity followed quickly after days of great adversity; and the planters found themselves not only in a position to extend their own borders, but to enlarge the jurisdiction of the colony by beginning plantations along the coast of Long Island Sound.”
“The Indians of this region were no doubt glad to enter into a friendly alliance with the English, whom, since their remarkable victory over the Pequots, they must have regarded as beings endowed with supernatural power.”
Of course, this triumphant account of the colonists’ encounter with the native population of Connecticut is a mythic fantasy. But it’s our fantasy, our Judeo-Christian origin story, promulgated by Calvinist crusaders inspired by dreams of Manifest Destiny. These first European settlers may have seen themselves as faithful citizens who “came together of their own free will and pledge to each other and to their god to form and support of godly society, and their god in turn vouchsafes them prosperity in a promised land.” But they were also ruthless invaders engaged in a genocidal campaign waged by European corporations intent of expropriating lands and resources — all done with the backing of government armies. Captain John Mason (1600-1672) led the Pequot campaign for the Puritans. He was a veteran military commander hardened by fighting on the Calvinist side in the bloody Thirty Years War (1618-1648) in the Netherlands. “The Puritan settlers, as if by instinct, jumped immediately into a hideous war of annihilation,” writes historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, “entering Indigenous villages and killing women and children or taking them hostage.”
Native American tribes participated in this brutal effort to put down the Pequots, but they were shocked by the colonists’ decision to burn down an Indian fort with its occupants still inside. One of the Narragansett chiefs allied with the English against their Pequot enemies quipped that this was an odd way to conduct war, since the English were squandering valuable slaves by burning them alive. That statement revealed some essential ideas of the Indian way of fighting war and its chief rationales. The natives of New England warred seasonally, but their wars consisted of raids conducted by temporary alliances between various subgroups. The motives were largely centered on rites of passage rituals for young men who needed to prove themselves by enacting revenge for previous wrongs suffered at the hands of those now being raided. The second reason, as the Narragansett leader hints, was the procurement of captives, who were then routinely inducted as household slaves. Often they were kept and turned into wives, husbands, and children. These practices were widespread among many tribes in North America well into the late 19th century. Captives turned into household slaves and then family members included many Europeans. There are numerous captivity narratives, the first written by Mary Rowlandson, who was captured and then ransomed during King Philip’s War. The most famous story of these abductions is the basis of the great western film by director John Ford, “The Searchers,” staring John Wayne and Natalie Wood.
Fairfield was founded in the immediate aftermath of the Pequot war by Roger Ludlow, an English lawyer who came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 and soon clashed with the leaders of that ecclesiastical society. Ludlow was one of the principal authors of the Fundamental Orders, which was drafted in 1639 and slightly broadened democratic rights and self-rule in the new Connecticut Colony.
Ludlow also mediated disputes over land ownership rights, paving the way for settlers like Richard Lettin to claim their first stake in the New World. Property records show that Richard bought various plots of land in and around Fairfield, Connecticut between 1647 and 1653, when he suddenly started selling off his holdings. There was some kind of dispute between Lettin and the civic authorities in Fairfield that may have seen him briefly imprisoned and then banished from the town.
My ancestor’s disputes with the colonial government in Connecticut appear to have been part of a larger conflict over whether various settlements on Long Island Sound should land under English or Dutch control. Richard Lettin was born in England, and emigrated from there, but he had business dealings with — and lawsuits against — the Dutch on Manhattan island, then known as New Amsterdam.
Lettin worked in New Amsterdam and Long Island with a Dutch builder named Richard Ogden, who migrated from New England to New Netherland in the early 1640s. Ogden built a meeting house for Governor Willem Kieft in New Amsterdam in 1646, just after Kieft, a director of the Dutch West India Company, ordered the massacre of local Native Americans who’d resisted his efforts to tax and drive them off their lands in the Dutch colonies.
Ogden went on to acquire properties with Richard Lettin in western Long Island in 1653, and in 1660 built a house for Lettin that still stands in Huntington, Long Island. It is known as the “Richard Latting House” and is now attached to the back of a larger two-story Georgian frame house. According to architectural historians, Ogden is among the pioneer builders responsible for the presence of Dutch building techniques in this seventeenth century settlement, a blending of Dutch and English framing styles that coexisted in this farming community for the next two centuries.
It seems that architectural styles blended better than political loyalties in these colonial outposts on both side of Long Island Sound. Lettin had been banished from Connecticut in 1653, perhaps because of sympathies with the Dutch and disputes over the border between New Netherland and the English colonies.
That year also marked a split in the family of Richard Lettin. His older son, Josiah, accompanied his father to Long Island, where they began spelling the family name “Latting.” Richard’s younger brother, Thomas, from whom I descend, stayed in Connecticut with “the Goodwife Lettin.” Thomas started spelling his family name as “Lattin,” without the ‘g.”
It seems that Richard and his second wife lived apart from each other for the rest of their lives. The hint that the Goodwife Lettin may have been named “Christian” comes from a court record in Hartford in March of 1661 describing a woman by that name who won a slander suit against a plaintiff named “Hendrickson.”
Was she, like the Goodwife Knap, accused of witchcraft?
We don’t know, but later that year, the wife of Richard Lettin petitioned for permission to remain on the Connecticut side of Long Island Sound without her husband. On May 16, the General Court of Connecticut “grants Goodewife Lettin liberty to inhabit in Fairfield, in case that Towne admit her.”
There are no more records of her activities until her death in 1667. Richard Lettin’s troubles, however, continued on Long Island.
At an April 10, 1660 meeting of the Huntington town council, Richard got into a heated dispute with a Mr. Wood, a Justice of the Peace. According to the minutes of the meeting, Latting (as he had come to be known) was “threatened with punishment in the stocks, but boldly intimated that Mr. Wood would get there first.”
Richard was protesting a decision by the Town of Huntington to align itself with the Province of Connecticut and the New Haven Colony, putting it under English rule, not Dutch. This dispute went on for months. In June, the Town of Huntington voted to banish Richard Latting “on account of turbulent conduct.”
Richard’s son, Josiah, stayed in Huntington, while Richard left to live in Oyster Bay, a remote region on the Long Island coast a bit closer to the Dutch-controlled New Amsterdam. When Richard continued to visit the Huntington area despite his banishment, he was seen as such a threat that the Town Council voted on February 19, 1662 to impose a fine on anyone who provided him lodging for longer than one week.
Richard Lettin kept his properties in Huntington, much to the dismay of those in the town who had English sympathies and favored an alliance with the province of Connecticut. They asked the second Colonial Governor of New York, Francis Lovelace, to reach out to Lettin. Lovelace was an English Royalist who had supported Charles I in the English Civil War. He assumed his post when King Charles’ brother, the Duke of York, was granted the rights to the island and took New Amsterdam over from the Dutch in 1667, changing the name of the place to “New York.”
Feb. 10, 1668
To Richard Lettin at Oyster Bay
Whereas I am informed by ye inhabitants of the Towne of Huntington, that your having a lot is ye said towne and living in another place, do not only neglect, and out of a vexatious humor do refuse to manure or fence ye lot to the great damage…of ye inhabitants; I have thought fit to give you this advice and notice. That you are to cause the lot to be fenced (as by ye law is required) within one month after (this) date hereof, so that ye neighbors there receive no further damage — otherwise some other course shall be taken for (your) lot to make satisfaction for damage already sustained.”
Yr. friend,
Fran. Lovelace
Lovelace did not fare much better than Lettin. In 1673, the Dutch briefly recaptured Manhattan island, causing Lovelace to be recalled to England and committed to the Tower of London. His Staten Island plantation, which he had bought from a local Native American tribe, was confiscated. Lovelace died in penury in 1675.
During the 1660s, Richard purchased various properties in Oyster Bay. In April of 1669, he bought some Matinecock Indian land on the coast of Long Island a few miles closer to Manhattan. This tract of one hundred and thirty acres is part of the present site of Lattingtown, now one of sixty-four villages in Nassau County, NY.
Richard and Josiah Latting, as they are now remembered by local historians, purchased more land from two Matinecock chiefs, Suscannemon and Werah, in the 1670s.
Richard was also a friend and business associate of Thomas Ireland of Hempstead, a part of Long Island closer to what is now known as Queens. Thomas died in 1668, leaving his widow, Joan Ireland. Richard’s long-estranged second wife, the mother of his two sons, had died in Fairfield the previous year. On August 24, 1670, Richard Latting took Joan Ireland as his third wife, moving into her estate in North Hempstead and living there until his death in 1673, at the age of sixty-five.
Josiah (1641-1720) started out by collecting marsh reeds for the thatched roofs for the first settler homes in the area. Later, in 1690, he built the “Josiah Latting House,” which still stands on Lattingtown Road across from Frost Creek Drive. Public records show that he owned twenty head of cattle, which grazed on common pasture land in and around Huntington.
In 1667, his banished father deeded over his property in the area to his son, including the “Richard Latting House.” Josiah became a land owner, businessman and respected civic leader in this farming community, establishing the “Latting” branch of the clan begun by Richard and the Goodwife Lettin.
Thomas (1643-1713) is the founding father of the “Lattin” branch of the family, the ones who remained in Connecticut. Thomas married Mercy, the daughter of Henry Wakelyn, of Stratford, Connecticut, in 1687.
Public records reveal that Thomas was a cattleman and resided in or near Oronoke, just north of the village of Stratford. In 1709, Thomas bought twelve acres of land on the west side of Orinoco Highway, near the present site of Putney Chapel. Thomas Lattin is also mentioned as being among a group of colonists who obtained hunting and fishing rights on Potatuck Indian land in exchange for a brass kettle. That property is now part of Kettletown State Park in Connecticut.
Thomas Lattin’s name first appears in the Stratford town records on June 26, 1688, describing the brands on the ears of the cattle he owned. Other town records the following year describe his sale of oxen, including a “Brown Nagg,” to another colonist.
Thomas and Mercy Lattin had four sons and one daughter. I descend from Thomas and Mercy’s son, Benjamin, who was born on April 13, 1702. Benjamin married Mary Barlow of Stratford on November 11, 1723. He died in 1760.
My Lattin line traces back to Benjamin and Mary’s son, David, who was baptized in 1732 at the Stratford Congregational Church. He married a woman named Phebe and fought in the Revolutionary War.
David Lattin served under Captain John Skinner and Colonel Jonathan Latimer in the War of Independence. Military payroll records show that he was paid for twenty months and twelve days of service in 1777 and 1778. On December 29, 1777, he also received a payment of 10 shillings on the regiment’s “Mileage Role” reimbursing him for traveling 120 miles to reach his post with the Northern Department of the Connecticut Militia.
My family line, descendants of the Revolutionary War soldier David Lattin, remained in Connecticut until the early 1800s, when they migrated to Chemung County, New York to work on the great Erie Canal project. They labored as boatmen on the Chemung Canal and farmers until my great grandfather, Hiram Lattin, established a creamery in Pine Valley, Chemung County.
That’s where my grandfather, Albert C. Lattin, was born in 1883. As a young man, he would return to Manhattan around the turn of century, some two and a half centuries after his ancestor, Richard Lettin, became one of the region’s earliest settlers.
This was also around the time that Lattingtown was demolished to make room for the vast estates that the New York elite of the Gilded Age established around the turn of the twentieth century.
Lattingtown, known in earlier years as the town of Pleasant Valley, was a settlement of fisherman, thatch collectors and asparagus farmers. It grew during the 1700s and 1800s into a town with about sixty homes, two shops and one church.
Around the turn of the twentieth century, two wealthy Manhattanites bought up the entire village. A deadly blight had devastated the asparagus crop, forcing farmers to sell their land. One of the new owners was John E. Aldred, a public utilities tycoon. He built a Tudor Revival Mansion with forty rooms on 119 acres, completing the project in 1918. The other Gilded Age millionaire who bought out the local villagers was a New York lawyer named William Dameron Guthrie, who built a Renaissance Revival mansion with elaborate terraced French gardens. Guthrie also donated land and funds to build St. John’s of Lattingtown Episcopal Church, which survives today.
Guthrie named his estate Meudon, after the Chateau de Meudon outside Paris. The main house had eighty rooms. It was the centerpiece of a 300-acre estate that had its own working farm and dairy, along with several outbuildings, greenhouses, a kennel, a beach house and its own coal-fired plant to produce its own electrical power.
During the Gold Coast era, over 500 mansions were built along sixteen miles of the north shore of Long Island. Private rail cars shuttled this new elite into and out of Manhattan.
But in just a matter of decades more than half of these great homes fell into disrepair. Great fortunes were lost during the Great Depression. Heating and upkeep costs were high. It was another chapter in boom/bust America. Many of the mansions were soon demolished to make room for more modest housing developments in the aftermath of World War II.
In the early decades of the twentieth century, my grandfather worked as a telegraph operator, reporter and a broker at the New York Stock Exchange, then went on to open a chain of bowling alleys. He got a reputation as a pioneering New York sports promoter, earning himself the moniker “Big Al Lattin from Manhattan.”
His only child, Warren Charles Lattin, my father, was born in New York City in 1917. He continued in the capitalist “Protestant work ethic” tradition, spending most of his life working his way up the corporate ladder of the Thomas J. Lipton Company, which sent him and his young family from New Jersey to Ohio, Colorado and finally to Southern California during the post-World War II economic boom.
My father had a way of coining an expression that ironically encapsulated the truth behind our family’s lies. It was a joke, an acknowledgement and a back-handed rite of confession. He passed that tendency onto his only surviving son. This slight-of-hand was employed in a quip we both used to explain our ancestors’ economic relationship with the indigenous tribes of New England and New Amsterdam: “We stole that land from the Indians fair and square.”
What really happened is, of course, another story.
In “buying” land from the Indians, Richard Lettin and his two sons were following the lead of Peter Minuit, a director of the Dutch West India Company. In the spring of 1626, Minuit famously bought the isle of Manhattan for $24 worth of beads and trinkets. From the invaders and the investors point of view, it was the greatest trade ever made.
Minuit, whose name means “midnight” in French, grew up in a Calvinist family in Wallonia, Belgium, giving him a similar ancestry to the Lettins. After falling out with the Dutch and returning to Europe, Minuit stuck a deal with Swedish government to establish a new colony in what is now the state of Delaware. Those hopes, and Minuit’s life, were lost in 1638 when a ship involved in that colonization effort went down in a Caribbean hurricane — the same year Richard Lettin sailed into the New World.
As we’ve seen this chapter, my ancestors’ “starter home” in New World was a piece of land on the edge of Concord, Massachusetts, a tract Richard Lettin obtained from an Indian who “defaulted on a loan from a local gunsmith.” His son, Thomas, was later connected with a con to trade up-river land in Connecticut for a brass kettle presented to the Potatuck tribe.
Details are sketchy as to exactly what Richard and his other son, Josiah, traded for their holdings on the coasts of Connecticut and Long Island, but we can be fairly certain that some kind of wampum was involved in those transactions. That’s because Long Island was the Wall Street of wampum. Its shores were the harvesting grounds for the specific blue and white sea shells that were used in the manufacture of beads strung together to create these artifacts of colonial commerce. In his journal, The History of New England, the Puritan leader John Winthrop recalls that Long Island “had store of the best wampum peak, both blue and white.”
My understanding of the actual dynamics of these seminal trades was deepened by my reading of Shell Game — A True Account of Beads and Money in North America, written by the Northern California poet Jerry Martien. It’s a convoluted, nuanced story, but Martien does manage to sum the saga up in a single sentence. “This is how the New World was ‘conquered,’ ” Martien writes, “not with a bang, but one crooked deal at a time.”
Belts of wampum beads were not originally meant to be a form of currency, although they came to be that in colonial times, as did beaver pelts. Wampum beads were more like a gift than a commodity, used by various tribes as a kind of promise to be kept.
“Message and ornament, record and symbol, article of exchange — in all these forms the beads moved through the forest. Strung as if on telegraph lines or hands, they not only represented but were the path from heart to heart, the agreement to agree,” Martien writes. “It was only to be expected that the Dutch should perceive the beads with their own sense of what constituted wealth — valuations they were willing to enforce.”
Native Americans did not see land as something to be owned or traded in the tradition of the Dutch or English. These early trades and agreements between the natives and the colonists were in some ways a tragic misunderstanding — a culture clash that would soon lead to war and genocide.
Most of the Southern New England Indians were in some sort of protectorate relationship with the Pequots or Narragansett, who dominated the coastal areas of northern Connecticut and Rhode Island. Narragansett domains included Indians stretching across Rhode Island’s waters onto Cape Cod and the islands, Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard and the northeastern parts of Long Island, like Montauk.
We must remember that these indigenous peoples participated in an annual circular migration that had them living on the coast in the winter, harvesting shellfish and fish, then moving up to the northern reaches of rivers like the Connecticut in the spring and summer, farming, subsisting on wild crops, and hunting the forestlands.
This regular migratory pattern was not understood by the colonists who wanted their Indians to sit still. With everyone on the move on foot and by boat all year round, it proved hard to set boundaries that would keep people off “your land.”
So, as my father liked to say, the origins of our family’s modest wealth lay in land we “stole fair and square” from the indigenous people of North America. I suppose whatever white privilege and real property I possess today — including my half-interest in a home on a small plot of land on an island on the eastern edge of the San Francisco Bay — could somehow be traced back to those early land acquisitions in Concord, Connecticut, and along the northern shore of Long Island.
Equally important to these real estate holdings are the attitudes I inherited from my Netherlandish ancestors. While the Lettin/Latting/Lattins sailed from England and first settled in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, our family seems to have been mostly shaped by the values of the Dutch colonists in New Amsterdam. In that regard, they reflect the traditions forged in fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in the greater Burgundian Netherlands, which included Flanders and modern-day Belgium.
“There characteristics — diversity, tolerance, upward mobility, and an overwhelming emphasis on private enterprise — have come to be identified with the United States, but they were really the legacy of the United Provinces of the Netherlands,” writes Colin Woodward, the author of American Nations — A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America.
“Uniquely among the people of seventeenth-century Europe, the Dutch were committed to free inquiry. Their universities were second to none, attracting thinkers from countries where the use of reason was curtailed.”
In chapter three, we’ll go back to sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe, a time and place where “running from religion” has a long and tortured history. But before heading back to the Old World, let’s take a quick look at one of Richard Lettin’s colonial contemporaries, the first great American martyr to the cause of free inquiry and a woman so powerful that history could not forget her.