James Mott

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. It was in or about the year 1762 that james mott re moved with his family from Long Island, in the State of New York, to the Nine Partners Patent in Dutchess County, on the east side of the Hudson River. A journey of seventy five miles as the crow flies, with wife and at least five young children, and with the personal effects of a household dependent on the slow progress of an ox-drawn farm wagon was no trifling undertaking. The course was probably to Hempstead Harbor, on the Sound, thence by barge across water to a suitable landing place, perhaps at New Rochelle, from which the long and tedious march proceeded over the hills, through the farms and woods the length of Westchester County, to its destination Within the bounds of the Nine Partners Patent. The family, at the time of the migration, was made up of the father, James Mott, then in his thirty ninth year, his wife Anna, thirty-four, James, hardly twelve, John, nine, Jemima, seven, Zebulon, five, and Anna, two. If Jesse were born at the time, he could have been but a babe in arms. The Nine Partners Patent was already the home of more than one household of Motts. Two years earlier, Joseph, the grandson of the patriarch of the Long Island family, adam mott, with two sons already at man's estate, had settled in Crom Elbow Precinct, on the banks of the Hudson, and but ten miles distant from the spot that was to become the home of James and Anna. Back, among the hills had gathered a little colony of Long Island and Con necti'cut families, sturdy, industrious farming people, not a few belonging to the community of Friends. The place was at almost the geographical centre of Dutchess County, in the region drained by the tributaries of Wappinger Creek, that itself tumbles into the great river below Poughkeepsie, and in a precinct that subsequently (in 1788) became the township of Washington. The neighborhood had been settled as early as 1750, and the presence of a Rogers family there, possibly relatives of Anna, may