NICASIUS DE SILLE HOUSE... 

WHERE THE GENERAL WOODHULL DIED OF WOUNDS


	General Nathaniel WOODHULL, for nearly a year president 
of the Provincial Congress of New York, gave his life to the 
Patriots' cause in the battle of Brooklyn. He was captured
on the 28th of August, I776, by a party of Tories commanded 
by Captain De LANCEY, after which he was brutally treated 
and given the innumerable sabre thrusts that caused his death. 
Mortally wounded, he was taken and lodged with other prisoners
for the night in the Presbyterian church at Jamaica, near which 
he was captured. The following morning he was carried to a 
hay-boat which went down Jamaica Bay to New York Bay, and, in a 
dying condition, was taken on shore at New Utrecht, and laid in 
the church there, which stood where the burying-ground now. is. 
Shortly before the arrival of his wife, he was removed to the 
stone house near by built by Nicasius DE SILLE, where he died,
swearing his love for his country.
	
	This famous old stone house, with its roof of red tiles imported 
from Holland, torn down by Baret WYCKOFF, its last occupant, in 1850,
stood east of the church on what is now 84th Street, New Utrecht.
It was one of the first houses erected in the town. On May 20, 1916,
The General Nathaniel WOODHULL Chapter, Daughters of the American 
Revolution, dedicated a tablet marking as nearly as possible the site
of the DE SILLE House.

	Nicasius DE SILLE came to the town shortly after the patent of land 
in New Utrecht had been granted early in 1657 and laid out into
twenty lots of fifty acres each by Jacques CORTELYOU, surveyor. He was 
an important person, having been appointed fiscal or attorney-general 
by Petrus Stuyvesant; and his zeal for the well-being of the
town of his adoption and the burdens of his official position 
brought incessant woes on his illustrious head.. Nineteen 
other individuals, whom the records show as havipg unmistakably 
Dutch names, occupied the lots laid out for them. Fiscal DE SILLE 
built in the town the first house covered with red tiles. He erected 
a palisade about his house and trim garden. Wonderingly the 
neighbors whispered that the fiscal feared attacks from the Indians. 
As a matter of fact, the good Nicasius was protecting his domain 
against the depredations of droves of swine that evinced an unyielding 
propensity to eat up his garden. Shortly after this precautionary 
palisade was erected, Surveyor CORTELYOU complained about the pigs 
of Anthony Jansen Sale, a Moor and a rover, who respected neither 
Dutch tradition nor Dutch cleanliness, and who had spent several 
years--contrary to the law-in dickering with the Indians, from 
whom he purchased land, which the redmen readily parted with for a
rusty knife or a looking-glass. From them this Moorish gentleman 
obtained a salt meadow, where he proceeded to keep snugly his hogs.

	Among the nineteen proprietors in New Utrecht dissensions 
arose, and they disputed constantly concerning land, houses, 
plantations, and rights. In the midst of the troubles, 
Nicasius DE SILLE faithfully kept the first town records of 
New Utrecht, and interspersed them with poems of his own. His 
later years as fiscal brought him woes innumerable, for his 
neighbors fought, their swine were destroyed, fences were broken, 
and thieves were abroad by day and by night. Added to all these 
things, John Schott, accompanied by a hundred Puritan guerillas, 
rode into New Utrecht with an immense brandishing of knives and 
blare of trumpets. They terrified. the inhabitants and tormented 
the peace-loving fiscal in an unknown tongue, which they reinforced
with threatening gestures and flashes of steel. DE SILLE had hard 
work to get rid of Schott and his horde. Not least of his troubles 
in office was the charge made against him by the States-General, 
asserting that he forbade the soldiers in the fort of Amsterdam to 
fire on the English troops into whose hands the colony fell.





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