Transcriber’s Notes
Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Variationsin hyphenation and accents have been standardised but all otherspelling and punctuation remains unchanged.
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THE OLD TOWN
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO
MACMILLAN & CO., Limited
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.
TORONTO
THE OLD TOWN
BY
JACOB A. RIIS
AUTHOR OF “THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN,” “HOWTHE OTHER HALF LIVES,” “THE BATTLE WITHTHE SLUM,” ETC.
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
BY W. T. BENDA
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1909
All rights reserved
Copyright, 1909,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1909.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
TO ALL WHO LOVETHE OLD HOME AND THEOLD FRIENDS
[Pg vii]
THE OLD AND THE NEW
How small this world of ours is, and how close we are, all unknowing,to one another! I had set out to write the story of the Old Town withno thought that it touched the land across the seas and its peoplein any closer way than through these pages, and through the abidingaffection of a few of its children who, like myself, have wandered farfrom home. And while I wrote there fell into my hands the account ofa sale of some building lots half a dozen years ago, in Jersey City,part of a property which for three hundred years had belonged to theVan Riepen family. And the Van Riepen name was shown to mean “fromRibe”—the Old Town itself. This is the historical record:
From the port of Ribe there sailed in April, 1663, a ship bearing thename Te Bonte Koe, meaning “The Brindle Cow,” bound for NewAmsterdam[Pg viii] with eighty-nine passengers aboard. Among them was oneJuriaen Tomasson, a citizen of Ribe, who, four years after reachingthese shores, married Pryntje Hermans—to be exact, on May 25, 1667;and died on September 12, 1695. F