Colonial days in old New York

								


    4 new osinbrig britches

    1 gray hat with a black ribbon

    1 gray hat with a blew ribbon

    1 dousin black buttons

    1 dousin coloured buttons

    3 pr gold buttons

    3 pr silver buttons

    2 p^r fine blew stockings

    1 pr fine red stockins

    4 white handkerchiefs

    2 speckled handkerchiefs

    3 pair gloves

    1 stuff coat with black buttons

    1 cloth coat

    1 pr blew plush britches

    1 pr serge britches

    2 combs

    1 pr new shoees

    Silk & thred to mend his clothes.
In 1685 Goody Davis taught a dame-school at Jamaica; and in 1687 Rachel
Spencer died in Hempstead, and her name was recorded as that of a
schoolmistress. In 1716, at the Court of Sessions in Westchester, one
of the farm-wives, Dame Shaw, complained that “a travelling woman
who came out of y^e Jerseys who kept school at several places in Rye
parish, hath left with her a child eleven months old, for which she
desires relief from the parish.”
It is easy to fancy a vague romance through this short record of the
life of this nameless “travelling woman” who, babe in arms, earned a
scanty living by teaching, and who at last abandoned the school and the
child whose birth may, perhaps, have sent her a nameless wanderer in a
strange country,--for “the Jerseys” were far away from Rye parish in
those days.
There was a schoolmistress in Hempstead at a later date. She was old
in 1774. I don’t know her name, but I know of the end of her days. The
vestry allowed her forty shillings, “to be dealt out to her a little
at a time, so as to last her all winter.” She lived through that
luxurious winter, and died in 1775. Her coffin cost twelve shillings,
and Widow Thurston was paid six shillings for digging the grave for
her old crony and gossip. Schoolmistresses were not many on Long
Island,--can we wonder at it? Had this dame been one of the penniless
church-poor in a Dutch community (which Hempstead was not), she would
probably have had forty shillings a month instead of a winter, and a
funeral that would have been not only decent in all the necessities
of a funeral, but a triumph of prodigality in all the comforts and
pleasures of the mortuary accompaniments of the day, such as wine, rum,
beer, cakes, tobacco, and pipes.
The “book-learning” afforded to colonial girls in New York was
certainly very meagre. Mrs. Anne Grant wrote of the first quarter of
the eighteenth century:--


“It was at that time very difficult to procure the means of
instruction in those island districts; female education was, of
consequence, conducted on a very limited scale; girls learned
needlework (in which they were indeed both skilful and ingenious)
from their mothers and aunts; they were taught, too, at that period
to read, in Dutch, the Bible, and a few Calvinistic tracts of the
devotional kind. But in the infancy of the settlement few girls read
English; when they did, they were thought accomplished; they generally