Talk:Yorkshire County, Province of New York
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I took another look at your yorkshire, and you still call it a County, and you say nothing about the Patroonship the Dutch established in 1645 This specific Yorkshire was never a County.
CORNELIUSSEON 02:37, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
- The Dutch never had an entity called "Yorkshire", which only makes sense, as the original Yorkshire is in England.--Pharos 02:44, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
The British established Yorkshire as a Shire, not a County, and it was based on the Dutch Patroonship established north of New Amsterdam. The Patroonship is today Yonkers, but it proved the seed for Yorkshire.
CORNELIUSSEON 12:57, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
- But a shire is here the same thing as a county; just because it ends in "-shire" doesn't mean its fundamentally different from other New York colonial subdivisions. And how can an administrative unit spanning all of Long Island, Staten Island, Westchester and the Bronx be said to have its "seed" in the patroonship at Yonkers? Yonkers was not the most important settlement at that time...--Pharos 13:16, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
They used Yonkers as a seed because of its private nature. a Dutch Patroonship is the lequivalent of a feudal villainage. Van der Donk owned the whole thing, and leased out plots to tenants who were responsible to him.
As such, it was the most important organized piece of land in what became New York State at the time because it was just as large or larger as new Amsterdam or any other such organized area.
There were lots of other "Patroonships" up and down the Hudson, but Van der Donk's was the most important one.
The British established Yorkshire to coordinate as much of the land chartered to the Duke of York as posible at the time, but it remained totally administrative. Counties are more than administrative divisions.
Finally, the 12 counties created in 1783 were not the first - some were much older - and you need to make a distinction between them.
Here is what Merriam-Webster unabridged says about county vs Shire:
Shire:
c : an administrative subdivision of colonial America.
County:
5 a : the largest division for local government within a state of the United States with administrative functions differing from state to state -- compare MUNICIPAL CORPORATION, PARISH, QUASI CORPORATION, TOWN, TOWNSHIP b in Rhode Island : a judicial district
CORNELIUSSEON 23:52, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
