Kingston Stockade District: New York's First Capital

The streets of uptown Kingston do not follow a grid. They trace the outline of something much older: a wooden stockade wall that Peter Stuyvesant ordered built in sixteen fifty-eight to protect Dutch colonists who had been settling the Esopus Valley since sixteen fifty-two.

Stuyvesant, the Director-General of New Netherland, gathered the scattered farmsteads into a single fortified village he named Wiltwyck, meaning something close to Wild Woods. The colonists signed what is known as the Stockade Bond, pledging to build and maintain the walls. The ground here was raised as the timbers were set, and that slight elevation is still visible today, nearly four centuries later, in the way the streets rise and fall along what was once the palisade's perimeter. It is the only one of New York's three original Dutch settlements where the outline of the stockade is still evident.

Kingston grew into a river trading town, and when the Revolution came, it grew into something more. After the British captured New York City in seventeen seventy-six, the colonial legislature of New York moved inland. They chose Kingston. For a brief, remarkable moment, this stockade town became the capital of New York State.

It did not escape notice. In October of seventeen seventy-seven, as General Burgoyne's army was about to surrender at Saratoga, a British fleet of about thirty ships under Major General John Vaughan sailed up the Hudson. The militia, outnumbered nearly eight to one, could not hold. On October sixteenth, Vaughan's soldiers burned Kingston nearly to the ground. Almost every building in the stockade was destroyed.

What the town rebuilt on the old footprint is what you see today: stone houses from the late seventeen hundreds and early eighteen hundreds, colonial-era church foundations, and lanes that still trace the ghost of Stuyvesant's wall. The first historic district here was added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy, and the larger Stockade District followed in nineteen seventy-five. It is rare American ground, where the oldest outline of a town is written into the earth itself.