Alone in the wilds, 'Madam' Brett thrived

By Denise Doring VanBuren
For the Poughkeepsie Journal

In 1691, at the age of just 3, Catheryna lost her father but inherited his share of the 85,000-acre Rombout Patent, where native tribes still dwelled. She married British navy Lt. Roger Brett at age 16 and within five years they set out to tame her ‘‘land in the Wappins,’’ approximately 28,000 acres that stretched from what is today Poughkeepsie east to Connecticut and south to Putnam County.

In 1708, the Bretts built a mill and modest home at the mouth of the Fishkill Creek and settled down to raise a family and plan a community. Shortly thereafter, they moved into a larger home, which stands today on Van Nydeck Avenue in Beacon.

Brett mastered business

The Bretts had four sons, only two of whom lived to adulthood. Roger himself was killed in June 1716, when the boom of his sloop struck him in the head and knocked him overboard to drown in the swirling currents of the Hudson.

Left alone with her young family in the wilderness, Catheryna Brett became a woman of business to survive. She began selling off her inheritance to encourage settlement. She ran the grist mill and formed a farmer’s cooperative that transported goods to Manhattan. She was considered a friend by members of the Wappinger Indians and a philanthropist by her neighbors, donating, for example, seven acres of property for the Dutch Reformed Church in Fishkill. She died in 1764 at the age of 77.

So well respected was her memory that succeeding generations came to call her ‘‘Madam.’’ Her home, which was nearly razed in 1954 to make way for a supermarket, has been saved by members of the Melzingah chapter of the daughters of the American Revolution. The oldest building in Dutchess County, the Madam Brett Homestead, is open to the public as a house museum.

Denise Doring VanBuren is manager of corporate communications at Central Hudson Gas & Electric Corp., and vice regent of the Melzingah chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, Beacon.