The River

Where Fishkill Creek meets the Hudson, in what is now Beacon, stands a clapboard farmhouse built in 1709 by Catheryna Rombout Brett and her husband Roger. Mount Beacon rises behind it. The river runs south from there into the Hudson Highlands, where it narrows between mountains on both banks. The house is the oldest standing building in southern Dutchess County.

Catheryna was born in New York City in 1687, the daughter of Francis Rombout, a Dutch merchant and one-time Mayor of the city. In 1683, her father and two partners bought 85,000 acres of land along the east bank of the Hudson from the Wappinger people, and at four years old Catheryna inherited a one-third share. She married Roger, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, at sixteen. A few years later the couple moved upriver to the family lands, where they built the house and a gristmill on the creek.

Roger died in 1718, leaving Catheryna a widow at thirty-one. She ran the estate alone for the next forty-six years. Unlike the other holders of the Rombout Patent, who only rented, she sold parcels of her land to incoming settlers, and helped grow the small settlement around her mill into what is now the city of Beacon. She lived on the river until her death in 1764.

Brett Quintett is named for her. Its five members serve in the West Point Band, a few miles south of her homestead on the Hudson.