This article originally appeared online under the title “William Cockburn’s Map of the McLean, Treat, and McLean Patent.”
In a recent two-part article for Porcupine Soup, Sylvia Hasenkopf shed light on the grim story of the 1780 Strope Massacre in the hamlet of Round Top in the Town of Cairo. The circumstances of this raid by warring Indians and the killing of Johannes Strope and his wife were recorded by regional author and pamphleteer Josiah Priest and sampled heavily by Charles Rockwell in his book The Catskill Mountains and the Region Around. Beyond the circumstances of the massacre narrative little today endures to relate the substance and nature of Johannes Strope and his family’s life on what was then one of the frontiers of European settlement. A recently cataloged map helps dispel a bit of this obscurity.
William Cockburn was a native of Scotland with an artist’s eye and a knack for numbers. He probably emigrated to the Province of New York sometime in the early 1760s, and by the end of that decade was engaged virtually full-time surveying and delineating the vast collage of (often inconveniently overlapping) land patents which for almost a century had slowly crept their way westward from the Hudson to the interiors of the Catskill Mountains and beyond. Season after season, patent after patent, William Cockburn and his kid brother James surveyed and prepared maps which in themselves were objects of beauty and precision. However, in practical application the lines of their surveys wove a web which first expelled the land’s original inhabitants and subsequently ensnared generations of tenants on behalf of an increasingly land-rich provincial aristocracy.
The work of the Cockburn brothers was the work of colonization - with compass and chain they realized westward expansion rod by rod and blaze by blaze across the lands of countless native tribes in the name of the Province and those who ruled it. Each survey they prepared represented the definitive realization of tracts vaguely described in deeds and letters patent often prepared by proprietors who had never seen nor fully understood the scope of their own lands. The Cockburns were among those charged by the new owners with contextualizing and reporting on those lands in all their detail. In reports and maps William and James Cockburn related where respective lands were, what was on them, what merits existed for improvement, and how such improvement might be accomplished by the Cockburn brothers’ respective clients.
This work as vanguards of a new paradigm in land use and land ownership required infrastructure and support - itemized bills for the joint and individual labors of the Cockburns list everything from the total cost of provisions, payment for individual laborers who assisted the surveys, costs for searches at clerk’s offices, travel time, and the expenses for drafting reports and maps ultimately destined for the desks of the new lords of the Catskills: the Livingstons, Duanes, Van Rensselaers, Clarkes, and their peerage.
Such was the case with a map prepared by William Cockburn from a survey he completed in July of 1768 for Lieutenant Neil McLean, Doctor Malachi Treat, and Doctor Donald McLean, all late of his majesty’s service (probably in the Seven Years’ War). Treat and the McLeans were granted two tracts of land - one a large quadrilateral over the East Kill Valley in modern Jewett, the other an inexplicable shape made to fit against the bounds of the old Catskill Patent in modern Cairo. Cockburn’s map lists many anecdotes concerning the prospects of the land: the variety of timber, the prime farmlands, and the context of the land in relation to the river and “Blue Mountains.” The homes of several settlers are also shown, and the names of “persons employed in the survey” are interestingly related at the lower left of the map.
William Cockburn’s map of the McLean, Treat, and McLean Patent of 1768. Vedder Research Library.
The names of Cockburn’s assistants are as follows: John Pierce, Johannes Strop, [illegible] Young, William Hume, and John Wigram. Also shown on the map, just outside the bounds of the McLean and Treat lands in Cairo, appears the cabin of Johannes Strope on an upper reach of the Shinglekill; the house being more or less in the vicinity which local tradition bears out as the location of the massacre perpetuated twelve years after the map was produced. Whether the Johannes employed by William Cockburn was the ill-fated father or his eldest son is unclear, but it does illustrate the types of paying labor available to someone settled on the frontier in that time. It also places Strope on one side of the contentious conflict surrounding native expulsion caused by continued European encroachment on Native territory. Strope, as a participant not only in the settlement of the frontier but as a laborer in the surveys to perpetuate westward expansion, was engaged in a high-stakes contest long before the Revolution brought turmoil, and ultimately doom, to his family.
By Jonathan Palmer, Greene County Historian
Sources:
Cockburn, William. 1768. Map of Two Tracts of Land Granted to McLean, Treat, and McLean. Vedder Research Library. http://localhost:8081/repositories/2/resources/129
(the map which is the central object of the article.)Letter from William Cockburn to George Clarke, Philip Livingston, & Thomas Jones, 1797-06-15. Box 30, Folder 52, George Hyde Clarke Family Papers, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853https://nyheritage.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16694coll66/id/2204/rec/2
(A letter representative of the advisory role of the surveyor in their relationship with the proprietors who retained their services)Elisha Andrews Affadavit and Statement, 1789. Box 30, Folder 32, George Hyde Clarke Family Papers, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853 https://nyheritage.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16694coll66/id/2086/rec/1
(An interesting document testifying to the tense relationship between the surveyors working on the frontier and native people sensitive to the encroachment perpetuated by their work.)Letter from William Cockburn to Goldsbrow Banyar Jr., 1805-03-12. Box 30, Folder 83, George Hyde Clarke Family Papers, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853 https://nyheritage.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16694coll66/id/2456/rec/1
(Another letter in which William Cockburn is seen to give direct advice on the ultimate division and utilization of land to facilitate its access and improvement.)Finding Aid for the Cockburn Family Papers, 1732-1864. Revised 2017. New York State Library Manuscrtipts and Special Collections. https://www.nysl.nysed.gov/msscfa/sc7004.htm
(Honor Conklin’s finding aid for the Cockburn Family Papers, containing valuable contextual and biographical information on the family.)