Biography
Upon reaching his legal majority, John Marston's executor John Hinchman handed Cornelis his inheritance: half of the family lands in Flushing. Cornelis was ambitious and realized his small inheritance wouldn't stretch far. He also held a modest cash payout from the estate of his maternal grandfather, Jan Langendyck — a hardworking Manhattan tavern keeper whose house lot had recently been liquidated to settle debts.
Cornelis made a bold, calculated gamble. He sold his inherited shares of the Flushing land, packed his life into chests, pocketed his coin, and likely travelled up the Hudson River on a sloop. At that time, Kingston was a booming, raw frontier trading hub over 90 miles up the Hudson River, where a young man's starting capital could buy massive opportunity.
Arriving in Kingston as a single, landless outsider, Cornelis had to navigate his first few months carefully. He likely lived in one of the Stockade's crowded Dutch boarding houses, paying for his meals with his inheritance money. To stretch his coins, he was probably quick to find that he could make a living as a hired hand, helping established farmers clear trees and harvest wheat in the fertile valley. At this time, labor in the Kingston area was in high demand. However, Cornelis's ultimate strategy for survival and status relied on a permanent anchor: land.
Within his first year in the settlement, he found a mate in a young woman named Elizabeth Aertse Van Wagenen. Elizabeth was an orphan herself. Her father, a prosperous early settler named Aert Jacobsen (van Wagenen), had died years prior, leaving behind a massive, 96-acre farm along the very fertile Esopus Creek. Because the five children had been too young to divide it at the time, the estate had sat waiting. When Cornelis and Elizabeth married around 1676, the legal landscape instantly shifted and Elizabeth and Cornelis found themselves with almost 20 acres of farmland.
Instantly elevated from a landless traveler to a respected “” farmer, Cornelis built his life. Colonial safety laws required him to build his house and a large barn inside the fortified village — the historic Kingston Stockade District — directly across the road from open fields. In 1689 he signed an oath of allegiance pledging his loyalty to the new (Protestant) British Monarchs, William III and Mary II.²
For the rest of his days, Cornelis Masten would walk out of his stockade home each morning to cultivate his highly profitable wheat fields along the creek, completely transforming his destiny from a displaced orphan into a founding civic leader of Ulster County.
Children of Cornelis and Elizabeth
Our early Dutch settlers (including Cornelis, who technically was half-English), followed the expected rules when naming their children. Those following the naming rules included the grandson Petrus (Peter), who famously fled to Pennsylvania in 1770 to avoid the long arm of the law.
The Old Dutch Church
The church was a huge part of the life of early settlers! Given its history, it is absolutely amazing that so many of the early records of baptisms and marriages survived for centuries. The congregation itself is one of the oldest continuously existing bodies in the United States. Built as a simple wooden building built directly in the village's protective stockade, it was mostly destroyed during an Esopus Indian raid in 1663. The building was rebult of stone around 1769, just in time to be burned down again by British forces in October 1777 when they set fire to the entire village of Kingston. Church officials rushed to save the historical registers from the flames. While they successfully rescued the baptism and marriage logs dating back to 1660, the original ledger tracking deaths and burials prior to 1777 was lost or destroyed. Fortunately, most the church's baptism and marriage registers—which date back to 1660 and include early records for families like the Mastens—survive and are among the oldest and most complete in the country. The ancient churchyard and grounds contain gravestones dating back to the early 1700s, holding many of the early townspeople beneath and around the current sanctuary.
The Stockade
The non-elected, universally hated governor Peter Stuyvesant ordered the wood stockade built in 1658, and settlers were strictly forbidden from living outside it due to the Esopus Wars. Under English Governor Francis Lovelace, living outside the stockade transitioned from "tolerated" to explicitly authorized and encouraged in ~1669. Ulster County has a website if you want to learn more about the history of the Stockade district.
A Note on "William L. Masten"
Now, if you look at certain internet family trees, people love to claim that Cornelius and Elizabeth had another son named "William L. Masten" (1691–1772), who allegedly packed up and moved to Kent County, Delaware. There is not a single shred of colonial evidence in Kingston to prove William ever existed in Kingston. No baptism records, no land deeds, no tax lists, and no wills mention him.
Sure, early colonial customs occasionally allowed a youngest son to take a suitcase full of cash and run away from the family estate early. But given the absolute zero-percent trace of primary data in the Hudson Valley area, it is safe to say William of Delaware just crashed the wrong Masten family tree.
The Will
On January 30, 1712, Cornelis signed his last will and testament and died that exact same day at age 61. Talk about precise scheduling. He was buried in the Old Dutch Churchyard, but he has no tombstone. He either got the cheap package, a random unmarked fieldstone, or his wooden marker rotted away centuries ago5.
The will of Cornelis Maston of Kingstown, dated Jan. 30, 1712 and written in Dutch with a religious preamble, leaves a gun to his eldest son Johanis Masten. His wife Elisabeth is named executrix and granted full possession of his estate during her widowhood; upon remarriage, she must divide half the estate among his children, with the remaining half going to them after her death. The five children named are Johanis Masten, Aart Masten, Diewertje (Deborah) (wife of Gysbert Van den Bergh), Antie Masten, and Geertie (wife of Arien Vliet). The will was signed by the testator, witnessed by Abraham Lametter, Willem Schepmoes, Aart Van Wagenen, and Wm. Nottingham, and proven in court before Henry Beekman, Jacob Rutsen, and Dirck Schepmoes on March 6, 1711/12.
Anjou, Gustave, compiler. Ulster County, N.Y., Probate Records in the Office of the Surrogate, and in the County Clerk's Office at Kingston, N.Y. Ulster County Clerk's Office / Ulster County Surrogate's Court, 1906.
Footnotes
- We're pretty sure Cornelius was younger than his brother, Jan (John Jr) because he was mentioned second in his father's will rather than first, and that is traditionally the way it was done: oldest to youngest.
- Because Cornelius was born under Dutch rule in New Netherland (later New York), the political climate made oaths of allegiance mandatory for all adult males who were landowners, regardless of birth location. Men of English ancestry were expected to immediately swear fealty to the new monarchs, William and Mary, to prove they did not harbor secret loyalties to the deposed Catholic King James II. For those of Dutch ancestry, swearing allegiance to a Dutch-born king ruling England was a matter of intense cultural pride and a way to secure their local political standing against English colonial elites.
- See the Wikipedia article on the Old Dutch Church Parsonage, and the full Historic Places filing at the National Archives (very slow to load).
- Probably. We actually don't know because the death records were lost when the British burned down the church in October of 1777, leaving only the marriage and baptismal records. However, since he was an upstanding, property-owning member of the Kingston community, municipal custom dictated that he be buried in the village's primary cemetery — which at the time was the Old Dutch Churchyard.
- To make matters worse, when it came time to rebuild the church building, the architects constructed the building directly on top of the oldest section of the cemetery, completely obliterating or flattening a bunch of early graves. So technically, he could be UNDER the church!