Thomas Chambers, First To Settle The Poesten Kill

The earliest settler on the Poesten Kill was Thomas Chambers. The Chambers farm was positioned for commercial success in part because it was ideally situated to serve as an intercept point for the furs of Mohican traders as they made their way from the eastern and northern woodlands toward the river and along the Hudson to Albany. Also, with no streams capable of supplying enough water for sawing wood and milling grain in Albany, these operations were mostly located on the east side of the Hudson. Chambers was given the right to build a saw mill on the Poesten Kill if there was opportunity and he desired to; he apparently did not. Eventually however, a number of dams were built all along the Poesten Kill to divert water along open sluices to turn water wheels and drive millstones and early lumber saws. For a sense of the long history of life along the Poesten Kill, consider that large scale industrial harnessing of the Poesten Kill didn’t begin until the late 1790s – nearly 150 years later.

Chambers ran into conflict with his Mohican neighbors. Regardless of the cause of the conflict, the Mohican challenge to Thomas Chambers’ farm had the desired effect, and in January 1651 the officers of the colony made the effort to purchase the Wynants Kill from the Indians. It was described as a “certain creek situated south of the farm of Thomas Chambers and north of Monamin’s Castle [which by then had moved north of Greenbush], with the surrounding wood and adjoining land and the jurisdiction thereof, to the castle, obliquely opposite the house of Broer Cornelis.” This was the farm between the Poesten and Wynants kills and it secured the farm Chambers was running while extending European land opportunities south.

Image: Thomas Chambers moved to the Espous where he built the Manor of Foxhall and is commonly understood to be Kingston’s first settler. Chambers died childless in 1694 and left the manor to his stepson, Abraham Van Gaasbeek, later Abraham Gaasbeek Chambers.