Abundance
Those moist, low grounds are covered with timber and underwoods which we call cripple bushes. … Where those lands are cleared and cultivated, they are wonderfully fertile. Thus we tender to the kind reader the fruitfulness of this land, subject to his own judgment. I admit that I am incompetent to describe the beauties, the grand and sublime works, wherewith Providence has diversified this land.
–Adriaen van der Donck, A Description of New Netherland
The Hudson Valley’s fertile soils grounded life here for thousands of years. Esopus people—the local Indigenous Lenape community—cultivated a “mosaic landscape” of crop fields, fishing grounds, foraging spots, and hunting trails that saw them through every season.
Dutch colonizers arrived in the 1600s, drawn by the valley’s richness, and rapidly imposed their settlements on land previously inhabited by Indigenous communities. Other Europeans followed, mainly from England and French-speaking regions. Almost immediately, these settlers sought to multiply their labor by importing enslaved Africans, most with origins in West and West Central Africa.
These three sophisticated cultures, all deeply familiar with trade and adaptation, each knew their own ways of drawing nourishment from the earth. Though they lived in constant tension and with unequal power, a new food culture arose from their shared presence. For all three groups, food was more than sustenance: it was medicine, identity, and cultural continuity.
Esopus
Seeing everything on earth as alive and aware, the Esopus practiced reciprocity, or taking care of beings that take care of you. Esopus people experienced devastating change during this time. Thousands of people were lost in waves of viral epidemic disease, carried by colonizers’ livestock. The surviving communities faced the loss of their lands to European settlers as colonies grew. By the end of the 1600s, the Esopus were a minority in their own homeland, yet continued to assert these lands as a sovereign Indigenous nation, making strong efforts to maintain rights to hunt, fish, and gather in their ancestral territory.
Mortar and Pestle
Found in Hurley, New York. HHS Permanent Collection, gift of Reuben B. Crispell.
Reproduction Lenape Cooking Pot
HHS Purchase
European
The early European settlers, mostly Protestants, believed that God had led them to the Hudson River Valley to thrive as planters and exporters. Expanding their footprint on the land, they aimed to replace the Indigenous landscape with European-style agriculture. In 1677, here in what is currently New Paltz, a group of about sixty French-speaking colonists, who had originally settled in a nearby Dutch village, presented a written land agreement to the Esopus. Under its terms, they would give European goods—iron cooking pots, wine, farming tools, and other items— in exchange for settling on nearly 40,000 acres of Indigenous land. Under pressure from colonization and losing access to traditional ways of life, Esopus representatives accepted.
Detail of signer names and marks of Patentees and Indigenous sachems on the 1677 Esopus-Huguenot Land Agreement. New Paltz Town Records Collection.
African
Terrorized and forced from home, enslaved Africans lived here under constant threat. European enslavers tasked them with growing and cooking unfamiliar foods and exploited their knowledge of profitable skills like animal husbandry, brewing, and raising grain. Rarely, enslaved people supplemented the limited provisions furnished by their enslavers by growing squash, beans, and leafy greens similar to those they knew at home. Many may have held onto traditional religious practices like making food offerings to the divine and to their ancestors as a way to connect with protective spirits.