Genessee Genesis, Pt. 2

Jacobus van der Hoeken, after the departure of his wife, travelled west from Defreetsville to the isolated environs of what we would now call Utica. Here, he learned from the natives of the Oneida tribe valuable tricks of the trade, so to speak. It was here that he earnestly adopted the surname of Genessee and met his new wife, Ilse de Berg, a voluptuous Dutch maiden captured by the Indians and sold to van der Hoeken (Genessee) for a bushel of maize. Jacobus built a farm on the corner of what we would now call Bleeker Street, then a maze of deciduous trees with each acting as willful New World obscurantist for our would-be patroon. Repressed in nature, Jacobus turned to textiles. Yes, textiles! He was a man far ahead of his times. He needed no Industrial Revolution. His farm became his factory, and his son Ezekial soon became his farmer, transforming the virginal soil into a proto-Community Garden.

The year was 1700, and permanent residence in Utica was not to occur for another 74 years if you believe the all too misleading yet popular historians. Jacobus moved around the area, mapping the terrain and swimming in the rivers. He had found a joy, as it were. Yet, when he contracted scarlet fever at the age of 50 in 1711 he could do nothing but sink into the inexorable abyss of death. His body flew to the shades as the Mowhawk river still flies canal-ward to Albany then sea-ward down the Hudson past the world's biggest and greatest town once known as New Amsterdam. Inscrutable to the last, Jacobus left a will and a manual for Ezekial. The will promised his estate in its entirety if Ezekial eschew farming, marry an Oneida woman, and learn the textile trade secrets found in the manual...