Philipse Patent

The Philipse Patent was a British royal patent for a large tract of land on the east bank of the Hudson River about 50 miles north of New York City. It was purchased in 1697 by Adolphus Philipse, a wealthy landowner of Dutch descent in the Province of New York, and in time became today's Putnam County.

Philipse bought the roughly 250 sq mi (650 km²) tract from two Dutch traders who had purchased it from "Wiccopee chiefs" of the Wappinger native American people. The parcel received a land patent from the British Crown on 13 August 1702.

Originally known as the Highland Patent, it spanned from the Hudson to the then Connecticut Colony along today's northern Westchester County border.

In 1731 it was incorporated into Dutchess County, and divided in 1754 among three Philipse heirs. It remained in the Loyalist Philipse family until seized in 1779 during the Revolution. The Commissioners of Forfeiture of the Revolutionary Province of New York auctioned it in parcels, without compensation to its prior owners. In spite of a provision requiring restitution in the 1783 Treaty of Paris, it never was made. In 1812, the southern part of Dutchess County, including all of what had been the Phillipse Patent, was spun off into a newly created Putnam County.

The first step to establishing rights to real estate at the time was to apply to the colonial government for a license to purchase a tract of land from local Native American inhabitants. Natives typically had notions of communal sharing of land resources and did not understand that by such sales the buyers intended to acquire the right to exclude the native sellers from all access to the land. As a result of disagreements, and at times violence, arising from differences between the way Dutch settlers and local indigenous tribes in present-day New York understood their relationship with land and subsequent rights of ownership, the local Dutch government required settlers to obtain a license, granting a particular settler the right to negotiate land transactions with natives over a determined land area. Ideally, only upon securing a deed from the land with the consent of local natives would the settlers be granted a land patent to the property.

On December 2, 1680, Dutch traders Lambert Dorlandt and Jan Sybrant (Seberinge) applied to the New York colonial government for a license to purchase land in present-day Putnam County. According to local historians, Dortlandt and Sybrant "obtained a license... in October [of] 1687 permitting their purchase of a deed from the Native Americans then living in what is now Philipstown." Eventually, on July 15, 1691, Dortlandt and Sybrant secured from the local Wapppinger leaders a deed to a 15,000-acre tract of the "low lands" along the eastern bank of the Hudson River from the peak on Anthony's Nose to Pollepel Island, and east to a marked tree. The original boundaries of this tract appear to contain roughly half of modern-day Phillipstown, NY, including Garrison, Cold Spring, and Nelsonville. However, Dortlandt and Sybrant did not then themselves obtain a land patent from the Governor, instead, in 1697 they sold their deed (as signed by native leaders) to Adolphus Philipse, a wealthy merchant, who subsequently settled the land.

Adolphus was the second son of Frederick Philipse, the first Lord of the Manor of Philipsborough, a Dutch immigrant to North America of Bohemian heritage who had risen to become one of the greatest landholders in New Netherland.

Shortly after purchasing it, Adolphus Philipse, whose residence was the Castle Philipse near North Tarrytown (now, Sleepy Hollow, New York), and who maintained only a bachelor shooting lodge on Lake Mahopac in the Highland Patent, opened the tract to tenant settlers. Thus began a policy that lasted throughout his lifetime and his heirs' so long as they owned the land, to rent rather than sell, a practice which led to stunted growth for two and a half centuries to come.