There is an aspect of history that can never be dismissed. Official records that prove the chain of title to land are something that is steeped in history and impossible to ignore. Ownership of land is not something that happens with a handshake. Land tenure is a tenuous thing if it's not sure and there's no value in it unless it's title is clear.

In the Hudson Valley ownership starts with a Native American making a swap using some words that may or may nor represent the landmarks they were believed to be by the buyer. Those with the right to state a claim based on these strange words written on paper and read back to a Sachem who makes his “mark” to attest to their correctness were those with the connections to the director or governor representing the King or Queen or Staats General or some other high body whose a seal on a patent officially accepted those foreign words for whatever they believed them to mean.

The first generations of the earliest settlers, in the 17th century and into the next, were accustomed to strong autocratic rule. The Dutch directors such as Peter Stuyvesant were military men as were the English governors beginning with Richard Nicolls and Edmond Andros. Church officials were selected based on the authority of the Classis of Amsterdam for the Dutch and the King of England for the English. Generally speaking the population accepted that their lives, including what they owned, was subject to authoritarian control.

However, there's always a percentage of every group that has a greater need for independence and firmly stated legal rights. Two concepts of this time in history helped. The Dutch had their burgher rights under their federal system and the English had Rights of Englishmen under the Magna Carta.

On two occasions in the 17th century a desire to exert these rights was attempted counter to the general population's complacency. Both times they were spearheaded by the Dutch of New York.

The first was in the acceptance by Nicolls of the Dutch Freedoms and Exemptions rights of merchants and patroons to their property and inheritance customs in the surrender of Stuyvesant in 1664. And then in 1683, after the withholding of custom payments by Dutch caused a financial crisis, they were allowed to elect representatives and meet in assembly. From that a list of "rights and liberties" corresponding to the Rights of Englishmen was submitted and actually accepted by the proprietor, the Duke of York, in 1684. But this was subsequently disallowed by the Kings council once the Duke became King James II the following year.

It is this setback that sets the stage for the establishment of the Corporation of Kingston, the starting point for nearly every deed to the ownership of land in Saugerties. The territory around Kingston was settled late and only when there was a need to tap its agricultural potential. Since its first settlement in 1651 this land, known at the time as "the Esopus", went through two wars to take its fertile plantation lands from the native owners. Title to the land here thus originated in conquest. From the time of these conquests this settlement continually grew until it became the major supplier of grain, dairy and meat products to the English sugar plantations of the Caribbean.

At the peak of its importance, in 1687, this Esopus territory was primarily under the control of the families of the original Dutch settlers that arrived in 1651. They had become influential enough to command two seats on the 13 member assembly that drafted the "rights and liberties" in 1683. Twelve of these Esopus Dutch were now presenting a petition for a patent to lands that had been ceded by the natives in the Andros Treaty of 1677. The land was north of their home village of Kingston in the territory called De Sagiers. On the face of it this was a petition not unlike the one granted to the south ten years earlier to twelve Huguenot partners for the land of New Paltz. They had purchased that land from the same natives that had relinquished it under this same treaty.

Colonel Thomas Dongan, governor at this time, had been dealing with numerous demands from the Dutch related to the 1664 treaty obligations. These demands conflicted with rights to assembly which England was not allowing to its colonial subjects. Whether by direct request from the Esopus petitioners or as a general appeasement gesture to the Dutch, Dongan chose to issue this patent together with, and inseparable from, corporate governance powers, all within the same document, as the Kingston Patent. In one sweeping measure this document established an enclave of liberties for the Dutch they had nowhere else in New York. The purpose may have been to focus their attention on a single gesture but this proved to be revolutionary.

Dongan had made the patent request from one covering just the northern treaty lands to one covering all the territory then recognized as the Esopus. He made its area total about 64,000 acres; 100 square miles, running ten miles along the west shore of the Hudson River directly south from the line between the original Ulster and Albany Counties. He then didn't grant the patent to the petitioners but to "one body corporate and politique to be called by the name of the Trustees of the Freeholders and Commonality of the Town of Kingston", and named the petitioners as this body's initial trustees. This Town of Kingston would eventually encompass what is today the towns of Esopus, Ulster, Kingston and Saugerties and the City of Kingston, an area of nearly 140 square miles.

There are two key words relative to the way Dongan crafted this document that would eventually make this Town into the Kingston Commons. These are "patent" and "corporate". A patent in the 17th century was an official right to own land in exchange for an annual payment to the colonial proprietor or Crown. The patent is a deeded ownership to the soil but the use of that land is governed by the jurisdiction it falls in and the ownership right must conform to that government's laws.

A corporation, on the other hand, is a chartered right from the Crown to govern as a municipal body through an elected instead of appointed governing body. It is a charter to make laws, hold court, tax a population, etc. By the creation of a corporation with rights to the soil the colonial governor, with the seal of the Kings council in 1688, was allowing something very unique for a colony: a patent to land owned and governed by the large group of citizens that already occupied it.

There were many patents owned by partners, such as the New Paltz patent owned by 12 individuals jointly. But they had no governance rights. This Kingston Patent was granted to a corporation made up of an unspecified "commonality" that could be changeable year to year but, none the less, had the right to elect each year a body of 12 from among them to govern their affairs.

This was indeed a unique institution in colonial America. If not the first, then Kingston was among the first of a very small number of corporations created in the English colonies in all of their existence. By comparison, New York City was not granted a charter as a corporation until 1730 and even then their highest officials were appointed by the governor and they owned no land above high water. The Dutch Reformed Church of Kingston did not receive its corporate charter until 1710 and its consistory was still under a Dominie supervised from Holland.

With the creation of the Corporation of Kingston the Esopus immediately became the focus of Dutch culture and a magnet for Dutch interests in New York. The right to assemble and elect representatives and be governed by peers were chartered rights there and the ownership of property and the right to establishment of a business were all locally granted rights there. Quickly investment in village property and the building of Dutch-friendly business environments boomed. Thus began a path to what 90 years later would be recognized as a home to such a radical population that the total destruction of Kingston could be justified during the Revolution; the only such event during the entire war.

The targeting of Kingston for destruction in 1777 was due by a combination of highly symbolic factors. The Town of Kingston occupied a critical geographic position relative to commerce. It is where a centralized land route, the King's Highway, links the southern colonies to the Hudson River. To be represented as a merchant of Kingston was to be in a position to support inter colony commerce and this became a decisively important position to be in as these colonies moved closer to rebellion.

The liberties long enjoyed in Kingston since 1687 became symbolic of the rights that were sought in a new national identity in 1776. So when the citizens of Kingston published and read on its court house steps the first constitution of the new State of New York in April of 1777 it did not go unnoticed that this had been drafted in the same place their Trustees met after their annual election one month earlier. Seven months later the British fleet would burn this court house and this meeting room and all other houses, barns and places of commerce and places of worship in the entire village of Kingston.

But Kingston was more than this population center. It is called the Kingston Commons because since its inception the vast majority of its patent grant was used communally for grazing cattle, growing crops, quarrying stone and harvesting timber for lumber and firewood. In the Commons there were many dwelling houses along well traveled wagon roads. Few, though, were on private land. There were also storage buildings and lower level shelters for animals and field dwellings for slave laborers. There were sawmills and similar light industrial buildings. Much of this infrastructure had been placed there and had been communally maintained for close to half a century. This was all well known to the working population of Kingston. Their homes were burned in the fall and it was in the Commons that they spent their winter; the same winter so memorialized by the hardships of Valley Forge.

At the end of the Revolutionary War, when it was time to join New York to a nation under a national constitution, Kingston was again looked to for its century of experience in self governance. Indeed, the strength of this symbolism even assumed for a short period that the capitol of this new nation would be on the Hudson shores in Kingston's Commons. That was not to be but what this symbolism did accomplish was an even greater tribute to its powerful spirit. When New York held out for the promise of a Bill of Rights in exchange for its ratification of the Constitution it was the voices of nearly five generations of the "Freeholders and Commonality" of Kingston that were heard.

Throughout the period up to the Revolution and after the rebuilding of Kingston the Dutch made up the majority population within the Corporation of Kingston. They stubbornly resisted use of any language other then Dutch and continued in this well after Dutch even ceased to be the language of preaching in the center of their culture, the Dutch Reformed Church. As a people and society this only served to emphasize their minority status in the overall English speaking population of the new State and Nation. As a consequence the Kingston Commons fell into being a pariah in post-Revolution New York once its status was no longer politically unique. When the Corporation of Kingston's municipal authority was given over to a state sanctioned township to be divided into standard-sized towns the Trustees no longer had any function except as what would be termed today a condominium board. They thus decided in 1803 to survey the commons into lots, sell them to the population and disband.

The Trustees plan for the sale of these lots would prove to have a lasting effect on the social makeup of the towns its lots occupied. That plan sold the lots based on a graduated pricing depending on the length of residency of the purchaser in the Corporation of Kingston. Also the prime lots and lots of larger size were first offered to those of the longest residency. The larger lots went to heads of households born in and residing in the Commons possessing a freehold valued at over £200. Heirs to someone born in the Commons and themselves residing in the Commons fitting the same financial criteria were also entitled to these larger lots. Those meeting the same criteria of residency but possessing a less valuable freehold, not less than £100, were entitled to the smaller lots.

After these came those not born in the Commons but residing there prior to 1777. They were also entitled to the smaller lots if they had a freehold of over £100 but they paid more. Last in line were those that fit the same financial criteria but that had taken up settlement after 1777. They were entitled to the same size small lots but they paid even more.

There was a hidden purpose in this plan. The financial criteria they used for purchase qualification related also to voting requirements and this related to the political influence of Kingston in elections for State and National representatives. This was to be dissipated with the division of Kingston into smaller towns. So by their division method and selling criteria the Trustees were allowing a Dutch electorate to select which town they would place their future and the future of their families' political influence within. A critical mass of any one influential group would be able to structure the bounds of any one of the three new townships that were to be formed out of the ancient Corporation of Kingston town.

So the political clout of this landed Dutch relic of colonial New York would go on ruling the government and commerce around Kingston until a decisive battle with progressive interests finally dissolved its base when the City of Kingston and the town of Ulster were carved out of Kingston in 1875. In this part of the late 19th century, at about the same time the Pilgrim fathers were becoming more fashionable as a symbol of America's founding principles, necessitating the burial of our Dutch legacy to achieve that purpose, the Kingston Commons also fell victim to the editor of time; history. Eventually nothing remained of this once great institution but the occasional reference in surveys and deeds to the classes and lots it sold between 1803 and when it ceased to exist legally in 1816.