Book Description

Excerpt from A Brief History of the First Presbyterian Church of Newton, L. I: 1652-1902 Two Hundred and Fifty Years Ago, in 1652, a few English emigrants from New England came to this locality, calling it Middleburg. "Several of the new comers were direct from Greenwich, Stamford, Fairfield, and other villages along the Connecticut shore. From Boston and Salem, Mass., and from Hempstead, L. I., came men who afterward were prominently identified with the town." To the credit of the early settlers of Middleburg be it said, they dealt fairly with the Indians, who held undisputed possession of the land, purchasing from them, as the early records show, 1,376 acres of land for one shilling per acre. "The hamlet was begun upon the street whereon the Presbyterian Church in the village of Newtown now stands, on both sides of which lots were laid out. And then resounded the axe in the forest; the noise of the saw and the hammer told the arrival of a people unlike any those wilds had ever known before." A scene of life and activity ensued, and a group of cottages - fashioned after those of New England - of simple construction, and roofed with thatch, arose to adorn the new settlement, to which the name of Middleburg was given, after a place of some note in the Netherlands, the capital of the province of Zealand, and remembered with gratitude as the asylum of many of the English Puritans. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.