Simeon De Witt

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Simeon De Witt painted by Ezra Ames

Simeon De Witt (1756 – 1834) was the Geographer and Surveyor-General of the Continental Army during the American Revolution and Surveyor General of the State of New York for the fifty years from 1784 until his death.

De Witt grew up in Wawarsing in Ulster County, New York, one of fourteen children of Jannetje Vernooy and his physician father Dr. Andries De Witt. De Witt was the only graduate in the class of 1776 at Queens College (now Rutgers College of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. With the capture of New Brunswick by the British during the war, De Witt fled to New York City where he joined the Revolutionary army.

In June 1778, having been trained as a surveyor by his uncle, James Clinton, De Witt was appointed as assistant to the Geographer and Surveyor of the Army Colonel Robert Erskine and contributed to a number of historically significant maps. Col. Erskine died from a fever in October 2, 1780 and in December of that year De Witt was appointed his replacement.

De Witt was married three times. In 1789, he married Elizabeth Lynott, the daughter of Thomas and Elizabeth Van Valkenburgh Lynott. Elizabeth died in 1793, after bearing two children. Around 1791, he married Jane Varick Hardenberg, a widow and niece of the New York City mayor. She died in 1808 — their son, Richard Varick De Witt, became a prominent civil engineer. Simeon’s third wife was Susan Linn.

De Witt held four slaves at his residence in Albany, but by 1810 he had freed them, a common practice of the area. They continued to work in his household. He owned a considerable amount of land in the Finger Lakes area and is considered one of the founders of Ithaca, New York. He was often given credit for giving Classical antiquity Greek and Roman names to the twenty-eight central New York Military Tract townships that his office mapped after the war (to be given to veterans in payment for their military service). More recently, credit has been given to one of his clerks, Robert Harpur, apparently a reader of classical literature.