A Real Life Rip Van Winkle Tale: City Got Peak at Past

I have for you a tale in the Rip Van Winkle line, though this one is true, and rather than being about one man disappearing for 20 years, it’s about a local town losing its founding Dutch family for 300. I was reminded of it while stopping off in Amsterdam last week following our visits to the and .

Last Friday, we had dinner with Joan Peeck and his wife Maureen in a nice little French place in a neighborhood near the University of Amsterdam. Joan is a dapper gent, silver haired, retired as a psychology professor from the University of Utrecht. Like most Dutch, he speaks excellent English, and is quite well spoken.

We first met in April 1988 in Peekskill, where I co-owned the local newspaper. But you have to jump much farther back in time to start this story, nine generations to 1638, the approximate year when one Jan Peeck arrived in New Amsterdam, now New York, from Holland. He was a trader, tavern owner and a bit of rapscallion, according to a history compiled by Joseph Rodgers. The Peeck of the seventeenth century was arrested for operating his pub on Sunday and assaulting a soldier of the Dutch West India Company.

In 1654, he moved up the Hudson River to do business with the Native Americans, to where a creek met the river. In old Dutch, a creek is a “kill,” so the location became known as Peeck’s kill, or Peekskill (that is what’s up with all the “kills”—Catskill, Fishkill—in the Hudson Valley). Peeck’s venture was illicit trade in guns and liquor for beaver skins, says Rogers. Dangerous stuff on what was the nation’s first frontier. Peeck disappeared while on an expedition sometime before Feb. 25, 1660.

For as Peekskill, Peeck was gone. A village, then city, carried Jan Peeck’s name—dropping the “c”—as did the city square, railroad bridge, an annual race and other landmarks. But no one thought there was a living connection to the city’s founder. He had disappeared into the Hudson Highlands, and so the mists of history.

The modern day Joan Peeck didn’t know of the tie either, not until, as in most good mysteries, he found a trunk in the attic. Here’s what he told me back in 1988, when I interviewed him for the Peekskill Herald: “I found a locked case in my aunt’s house. When we opened it, we found these letters — they hadn’t been looked into in a long time.”

The documents led to the Bergen County Historical Society in New Jersey. It turns out that while Jan had gone adventuring up the Hudson and gotten himself killed, his wife and children moved over to Jersey (the town called Schraalenbrugh then, Dumont now). In 1784, the Peecks moved back to The Netherlands. The city and the family lost their connection. Until Joan Peeck found that locked case and discovered his great great great great great great great great great-grandfather. In 1988, Peekskill gave him the key to the city, a proclamation and a reception, later even a parade. At the time, he was surprised and bewildered by all the attention. He’s nothing like his great-to-the-ninth grandfather.

To put this local story in an even more local perspective, it would be as if Thomas Pell had wandered into the woods north of Eastchester and disappeared. Pelham would have no founding family, no historic manor house, no connection to descendants like the late U.S. Senator Claiborne Pell.

One of the oddest twists in all of it was that Joan Peeck paid his first visit to Peekskill in 1969, after discovering the letters in 1966. But no one paid any notice, and it would take another 22 years for Peekskill and Peeck to really meet. It shows the way missed, and made, connections create the history we know.

This spring, the kids I advise at the Colonial Times school newspaper asked me what was “the best” story I ever did. Kids love bests. Without hesitating, I said the one about Jan Peeck and Joan Peeck. I’ll admit I have no Watergates in my career, no gates of any kind; I haven’t brought down a government. But I’ve covered my fair share of the amazing, and interviewed mighty interesting people, but this little local scoop is my favorite. There is something about a tale of history walking out of the mists, like Rip Van Winkle after his long sleep in the Kaatskill mountains.