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View Tree for Lion GardinerLion Gardiner (b. 1599, d. 1663)

Lion Gardiner (son of Lionel Gardiner and Elizabeth Woodhouse) was born 1599 in England232, and died 1663 in East Hampton, NY. He married Mary Willemsen Deurcant on Jul 10, 1635 in Woerden, Holland232, daughter of Derek Willemson Deurcant and Hachin Bastians.

 Includes NotesNotes for Lion Gardiner:
The first proprietor of Gardiners Island.

Lion Gardiner, the island’s first proprietor, served as an engineer with the army of William of Orange during the Low Country campaigns of the early seventeenth century. Toward the end of his long life he wrote a memoir which began, "In the year of our Lord 1635 -- July the 10 -- Came I Lion Gardiner and Mary my wife from Woerden a town in Holland , and from thence to New England and dwelt at Saybrook Fort four years of which I was commander . . . and then went to an island of my own which I bought of the Indian Called by them Manchonake by us the Isle of Wight." The Indian name means island of the dead and for them it much have been a battleground or perhaps simply a burial place. For the English settlers of East Hampton the island became, under Gardiner's able proprietorship, something quite different: a source of wealth and leadership, and something more as well, for the inaccessible island has remained through out the changing years a changeless part of the past, as stubborn as a pyramid, a monument to the intransigence of it successive proprietors and to their capacity for making or marrying enough money to keep it in their possession.

Lion Gardiner was a redheaded giant of a man who stood some six feet tall at a time when the kings of England seldom reached five feet. In 1635, as his memoirs reveal, he crossed the Atlantic in the "Batchelor", a Norsey bark of twenty-five tons. He built his fort at Saybrook in a wilderness of hostile Pequots and querulous Dutch traders, and managed to prosper despite the calculated provocation of the Massachusetts Englishmen whose deliberate injustices turned the Pequots into murderers and thus led to the eventual extermination.

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---The principal family of the Gardiners in this country derive their descent from Lion Gardiner, a native of Scotland, who served under General Fairfax in the Low Countries as an engineer. He was sent to this country in 1635, by Lords Say and Sele, Brooke, and others, to build a fort, and make a settlement on their grant at the mouth of the Connecticut river.

--On 10 July 1635 Lion Gardiner left Worden, taking passage at Rotterdam for London, and on 16 August set sail for New England, being 3 months and 10 days from Gravesend to Boston. Early in 1636 the good ship "Batchelor" of twenty-five tons, which had carried himself and family safely from Holland to England and across the Atlantic, through many tempests, bore them safely to their destination. The passengers are mentioned as 12 men and 2 women with freight for the construction of the Fort. Iorn work for two drawbridges; consisting of 62 staples, 40 staple hooks for Port-cullis, 4 chains, 10 boults, 4 plates, 8 chain-clasps, 4 under-hinges, 23 1/2 yards of red flagg-stuff, small lines and a wheel-barrow are mentioned. Lieutenant Gardiners household consisted of himself aged 36, his wife Mary aged 34, Elizabeth Collett, maid servant age 23, and William Jope workmaster aged 40, who all brought certificates from a Calvinistic church in Holland.

--- He built the fort at Saybrook, which name he gave to it after the names of his patrons Lords Say and Brooke. He then moved with his family, and gave it the name of Gardiner's Island.

----After 13 years on the Island, he removed to East-Hampton, where he died in 1656 aged 63 years. The Island which he gave to his wife, she bequeathed to her eldest son David; "en-tail" to the first male heirs following forever. Right to the Island was confirmed by grant from the Earl of Sterling, whose patent included territory in which it was embraced, after the islands of the Sound passed to New Netherlands. Under the grant, David Gardiner could make such laws as he pleased, for civil and church government; if "according to God and King."

In 1664, the English having disposed the Dutch at New Netherlands, Gardiner obtained from Governor Nichols a new grant, for a quitrent of 5 pounds a year. In 1683, the Island was attached to the County of Suffolk for taxable purposes. David Gardiner feeling aggrieved, petitioned the Governor for relief; praying for an Independent Jurisdiction for the Island. Governor Dougans confirmatory grant, created the Island in 1686, "One Lordship and Manor of Gardiners Island". Practically this did not change anything, as the Island was created a Manor by the Earl of Sterlings grant to Davids father Lion Gardiner. The original document conferring this title, with the unique seal of the Province, is a trophy still preserved; also the Geneva Bible with its family record in Lion Gardiners handwriting. Thus the early proprietors were authorized to call themselves "American Lords"

---Gardiner was an adventurer at an early age. A laudatory description of Gardiner, published in 1885, gushed, ``He was . . . of fine military presence, well proportioned although slightly under the average height, with quiet face, eyes keen, intelligent and deep-set, and the manners and bearing of a gentleman.''

---He served in the English army in the Netherlands in his early 30s. There, in a protracted war between Protestants and Catholics, Gardiner earned a reputation as a ``master of works of fortifications'' -- a fort builder.

---His fame spread across the ocean, and in 1635 he was summoned by the backers of a fledgling English colony in what would become Connecticut. The tiny colony was in a precarious position -- Dutch traders from New Amsterdam had begun to make inroads into the area, trading from their boats with the local Indians and constructing permanent outposts. By doing so, the Dutch hoped to keep the English from expanding south from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. But the Dutch were the least of the colony's problems. Of even more immediate concern were the Pequots, a group with a fearsome reputation who lived along the same stretch of coastline where the English hoped to build settlements. Records of the day show the English feared and despised the Pequots, as did other Indian groups such as the Mohegans, who lived in the same territory.

----Gardiner was 36 years old the year he and his Dutch-born wife, Mary, sailed to Massachusetts aboard the Bachelor, arriving in November after a stormy 31/2-month voyage. The couple spent the winter in Massachusetts, and by April, 1636, they were living with a small group of colonists near the mouth of the Connecticut River. They were well south of the English settlements in an area largely untracked by white men.

----Gardiner supervised the construction of a fort near the mouth of the Connecticut River, and commanded it while farms and home sites were carved out of the surrounding wilderness. As the fort was being built, two momentous events happened in his life -- his wife gave birth to their son, David, the first white child born in what is now the state of Connecticut, and a war broke out with the Pequots that would forever change the fort-builder's life.

---The event that historians call the Pequot War began with small-scale confrontations between Indians and Englishmen in the area of the fort and up and down the coastline. Distrust built, there were deaths on both sides, and officials of the Massachusetts Bay Colony decided to wage war on the Pequots. While it is clear in his own account -- written as a letter to officials in Connecticut -- that Gardiner distrusted and loathed the Pequots, he opposed an all-out war against them because he feared for his family as well as for the handful of others who were with him in the fort.

----``It is all very well for you to make war who are safe in Massachusetts bay, but for myself and these few with me who have scarce holes to put our heads in, you will leave at the stake to be roasted,'' he wrote in his account. ``I have but twenty-four in all, men, women and children, and not food for them for two months, unless we save our corn field which is two miles from home, and cannot possibly be reached if we are in war.''

----Gardiner's protests fell on deaf ears. When a group of soldiers -- led by John Underhill and another Englishman, John Mason -- reached the fort, Gardiner said, ``You come hither to raise these wasps about my ears, and then you will take wing and flee away.''

----As the soldiers prepared for an attack on a nearby Pequot fort, Gardiner tried to keep his family and the others inside his own ramparts alive. Forays outside the walls to get food were dangerous events; some of his men were caught by Pequots and tortured -- some were burned alive at a stake, their skin peeled off, according to Gardiner's account. One group of men, out on a hay-cutting mission, was set upon by Pequots who ``rose out of the long grass . . . and took the brother of Mr. Mitchell, who is minister of Cambridge, and roasted him alive.''

---- Gardiner himself narrowly escaped death when he went outside the fort's walls with 10 armed men and three dogs. A half mile away, they met up with a small band of Pequots -- some of whom were wearing the clothes of murdered English settlers -- and a fight ensued. Almost immediately, two men were killed. As the group fled toward the safety of the fort, another man was shot through the thighs with an arrow, another man was hit in the back, and as Gardiner pulled back toward the fort, he was struck in the thigh. The group, he wrote, had to fight ``with our naked swords or else they (would have) taken us all alive . . .'' In another incident a day or two later, ``I was shot with many arrows . . . but my buff coat preserved me, only one hurt me.''

----After these incidents, Underhill and Mason assembled an army of more than 80 men to stay with Gardiner. To beef up the numbers, the English recruited nearby Mohegans -- enemies of the Pequots. This army then attacked the Pequot fort near Mystic, slaughtering men, women and children and setting the building on fire. To historians today, the attack was a massacre unlike anything that had occurred in New England up to that point. To Englishmen at the time, it was a blessing. Gardiner wrote:

---- . . . and the Lord God blessed their design and way, so that they returned with victory to the glory of God and Honour of our nation, having slain three hundred, burnt their fort, and taken many prisoners.

---- Underhill's account, published in London in 1639, boasted that more than 1,000 Pequots were killed, three times Gardiner's estimate. Historians say that English soldiers conducted mop-up operations for months after the attack on the fort, hunting down Pequots hiding in the woods, and killing hundreds more. In a few months in 1637, most members of the tribe were killed.``It was a war of extinction,'' said Kevin McBride, an archeologist at the University of Connecticut.

----The Pequots would agree. Today, the descendants of the survivors operate Foxwoods Resort Casino on a site not far from the massacre. They believe their history was distorted. ``The Pequots never wrote down their histories at the time of contact with Europeans,'' said Shannan McNair, a spokeswoman for Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation. ``So it's hard to know what was true and was said about the Pequots to justify the massacre.''

----After the massacre, Gardiner's life changed forever when an Indian from Long Island paddled his canoe over to Connecticut from Montauk. Spelling the Indian's name ``Waiandance,'' Gardiner wrote in his account:

----Three days after the fight came Waiandance, next brother to the old Sachem of Long Island . . . He came to know if we were angry with all Indians. I answered No, but only with such as had killed Englishmen. He asked whether they that lived upon Long Island might come to trade with us. Gardiner said he would only trade with the Long Island Indians ``if you will kill all the Pequots that come to you, and send me their heads . . . so he went away and did as I had said, and sent me five heads . . .''

----And thus began the friendship of the English settler named Lion Gardiner and an Indian chief named Wyandanch. Two years later, his tour of duty in Connecticut over, Gardiner capitalized on his friendship with Wyandanch's people, whom the English called the Montaukett Indians, and bought some real estate on Long Island.

Lion Gardiner, was one of the key founders of the East End of Long Island, which was known for the independent little towns created in the 1640s which were pure democracies. Lion Gardiner came here in 1639. He was the first English person to settle in the present New York State. He befriended Chief Wyandanch, the sachem of the Montauk, and that friendship resulted in the lack of interracial warfare on Eastern Long Island. On the other hand, Gardiner was a real-estate wheeler-dealer. He perfected or maybe originated the idea of taking land from the Indians in return for a few yards of cloth or a few trinkets because the Indians thought land belonged to everybody. He was a really important person in the creation of the Town of East Hampton. Even though he was lord of the manor on Gardiner's Island, when he lived in East Hampton he played the game just like everyone else, as a leading citizen but not one with manorial privileges. It's a very impressive little granite tomb but it is really silly because it shows Gardiner in armor, and Gardiner would never have worn armor. He was not an aristocrat. He was a plain man with a lot of real estate.'' The Gardiner tomb is located in the South End Burying Ground on the east side of the village green at James Lane and Main Street.

---Ancient Burial Grounds of Long Island, N. Y. by Edw. Doubleday Harris, Esq., of New York City --EASTHAMPTON VILLAGE - Vol 54, July 1900, p 301 - 308

---Lion GARDINER, an Officer of ye English Army & an Engineer Master of Works of Fortification in ye Leaguers of ye Prince of Orange in ye Low Countries. In 1635 he came to New England. In ye Service of a Company of Lords & Gentlemen, he builded and Commanded ye Saybrook Fort. After completing this term of service he removed in 1639 to his Island of which he was sole Owner & Pvlr_. Born in 1599, he d. in this Town in 1663, Venerated & honoured. [Cut on the for sides - North, west, south & east - of a pretentious modern canopy tomb, with recumbent figure of a man in armor.]
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He bought his island from Wynadanch, the Montauk sachem and on March 10, 1639, was granted the right to possess it now and forever by Hame Farrett, deputy to the Earl of Sterling, secretary for the Kingdom of Scotland; in other words the agent of Charles I. The property remains the oldest continuous royal grant in the New World. He and his heirs exercised feudal prerogatives over their domain until March 7, 1788, when the state of New York annexed the island to the town of East Hampton.

Had they wished, the Montauks, even in their diminished situation due to successive epidemics of European diseases such as smallpox and measles to which the Indians had no natural immunity, could have destroyed the English settlement in the 1640s. That they didn't was a consequence of their fear of the mainland Indians and their dependence accordingly, upon the settlers for protection. In the written agreements between Wyandanch and Lion Gardiner, Wyandanch's mark is not the traditional "X" but a pair of stick figure -- two men, equals -- shaking hands. To his credit, Gardiner always treated Wyandanch with dignity. There was a plan in 1642 for fifty Narragansetts to join thirty Indians from Block Island, a hundred Shinnecocks, and a hundred Montauks, and at a given signal fall upon the whites and kill them. By Wyandanch revealed the plan to Gardiner who alerted the magistracy in Connecticut, and so according to Gardiner "the plot failed and the plotter, next spring after, died as Ahab died at Ramoth Gilead." Ahab, it will be remembered, was the king of Israel who had incurred the Lord's wrath for having plotted the death of his neighbor and then appropriating his garden. After he died in battle, the dogs licked his blood, as the angry Lord had said.

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East Hampton Star
THE FIRST GARDINER WAS OUR FOUNDING FATHER

Lion Gardiner asked Wyandanch to kill all the Pequots and "send me their heads."

Long Island's first English settler never heard the words "New York." Excerpted from Roger Wunderlich's lecture at Guild Hall Saturday.

. . . . As a townsman of East Hampton, Lion Gardiner helped to shape a new and American social design, which enabled ordinary folk to own property and enjoy the freedoms restricted to the privileged gentry across the sea. However, though he was our founding father he was not our patron saint. While his statesmanship cemented peaceful relations between the settlers and the Indians, he also presided over the peaceable but permanent transfer of Long Island real estate from its Native American owners to himself and his fellow settlers. As the symbol of two phenomena - the formation of the model Puritan township and the nonviolent displacement of Indians - Lion Gardiner personified the dual and sometimes ambivalent mission of the colonists of Long Island.

Necessity compelled Gardiner and his compatriots to cope with the basic conditions of life in completely new surroundings. This involved the providing, from a standing start, of food, shelter, and artifacts, and a safe and harmonious social order attuned to the New World, not the Old. Above all, as they dealt with these elementary needs, the uninvited settlers grappled with the question of their legal right to the land that was now their only home. It was glaringly apparent that every acre was the possession of the indigenous Native Americans.

. . . Although death by disease played the largest part, the issue of how the Indians lost their land still goads our historical conscience, and we seek acceptable motives for the policies of the colonists. The blunt reality is that the tide of English immigration, swelled by the prospect of land for the taking, proved far too strong for deterrence by legal niceties. Lion Gardiner, the intrepid pioneer and archetype of English homesteaders, was also a businessman obsessed with acquiring real estate from its present, ancestral owners.

Many of his contemporaries held that the Indians were primitive simpletons, whose collective holding of tribal grounds made real estate dealing impossible. According to the conventional wisdom, the aborigines were too uncivilized to conceive of buying and selling land they naively believed belonged to all who lived on it.

Lion Gardiner, to his credit, exhibited none of this pervasive prejudice. He accepted Indians as friends and not inferiors: his cordial relations with Yovawan and Wyandanch, the successive sachems with whom he dealt, exempted eastern Long Island from the interracial bloodshed that afflicted Connecticut and Massachusetts. In the process, however, Gardiner amassed a fortune in land by "buying" it for trinkets, and expediting sales by promoting the Native American seller, especially Wyandanch, to the fictitious but handy rubber-stamp rank of "Sachem of all Long Island."

. . . Lion Gardiner's lineage has not been traced, but according to Curtiss C. Gardiner, who wrote the history of his famous ancestor on the 250th anniversary of Lion's arrival on his island, "He was probably a gentleman without title, of the middle rank, between the nobility and the yeomanry, yet he might have been a yeoman."

Granted that 17th-century spelling was on a do-it-yourself basis, Lion generally signed himself as "Gardener," a name which Curtiss C. Gardiner pointed out "may be derived from an occupation, the keeper of a garden," and subsequently "may have been changed . . . to Gardiner, that the occupation and the name of a person might be the more readily distinguishable." His unusual first name "was Lion, as he invariably wrote it so": there is no reason to speculate that his baptismal name was Lionel. His army grade was sergeant . . .

Nothing is known of Gardiner's life before 1635, the starting point of his memoir, "Leift. Lion Gardener his Relation of the Pequot Warres . . . . "

Saybrook was a disaster. "According to promise," wrote Lion, "we expected that there would have come from England 300 able men, 50 to till the ground, and 50 to build houses. But our great expectation at the River's mouth, came only two men, Mr. Fenwick, and his man." A recent historian of the Winthrops found that after five discouraging months, John Winthrop Jr., Gardiner's superior, "quit Saybrook . . . before the end of his term as governor, and left Lion Gardiner in charge of the thinly manned outpost, to spend a miserable winter [1636-37] behind the palisades, beleaguered by Pequots."

Somehow, Lion managed to shepherd his small flock of settlers through the hardships of that bitter season, when he "had but twenty-four in all, men, women, and boys and girls, and not food for two months, unless we saved our cornfield, which could not possibly be if they came to war, for it is two miles from our home."

The war he dreaded was with the Pequots, the intractable local Indians with whom traders had been skirmishing, and whose extermination was held necessary by many New England settlers . . .

. . .The Pequots' defeat led to Gardiner's meeting with Wyandanch, the Montauk leader, who visited Saybrook three days after the battle . . . According to Gardiner, the purpose of Wyandanch's call was to "know if we were angry with all Indians," or only with Pequots. In his typically forthright manner, Lion answered, "No, but only with such as had killed Englishmen." When Wyandanch asked if the English would trade with "they that lived on Long Island," Gardiner gave him a conditional yes: "If you will kill all the Pequits that come to you, and send me their heads, then . . . you shall have trade with us." Wyandanch said he would bring this news to "his brother . . . and if we may have peace and trade with you, we will give you tribute, as we did the Pequits. . ."

. . .The price of peace on Long Island was harsh, but the pact between Gardiner and Wyandanch, and the lasting friendship that followed, relieved eastern Long Island of the English-Indian carnage that persisted for 40 years in New England, from the Pequot War in Connecticut through King Philip's War in Massachusetts.

Soon after Winthrop left Saybrook, Lion wrote to him that those who remained would be loyal and work hard for the colony, but "it seemed wee have neither masters nor owners." If not provided for, he continued, "then I must be forced to shift as the Lord may direct."

To shift as the Lord may direct was something Lion did incredibly well. At the end of his Saybrook contract, in 1639, he crossed the Sound with his family and some farmer-soldiers from the fort to become the first of an unbroken line of lords of the manor of Gardiner's Island, seven and a half miles long and three miles across at the widest point, a few miles offshore from East Hampton. Lion called it the Isle of Wight because of its contour; the Indian name, "Manchonake," meant a place where many had died, perhaps from some great sickness that swept the East End of Long Island before the coming of the English.

. . . In contrast to many of his peers, Gardiner did not clutter his mind with superstition, as proven by his reaction to an accusation of witchcraft. The defendant, Goody Garlick, was charged with causing the death in childbirth of none other than Lion's young daughter, Elizabeth Howell, in 1657. Perhaps because Goody and Joshua Garlick, her husband, worked for him for many years, or perhaps because he had too much common sense to believe in "black cats and harlequin devils . . . Lion seems to have exerted himself in behalf of this unfortunate woman," wrote Alexander Gardiner. Lion's influence aborted a trial at Hartford and saved Goody "from an awful fate."

. . .East End English settlers and Native Americans never met on the field of battle, but the Montauks and Narragansetts did. In a 1654 raid the Narragansett/Niantic warlord Ninigret is said to have pillaged the camp of Wyandanch on the night of his daughter's wedding, killed the groom, and kidnapped the bride. On behalf of the grief-stricken father, Thomas James [East Hampton's first minister] begged John Winthrop Jr. to help to speed delivery of the wampum raised for ransom, "which he [Wyandanch] hears was intercepted by Thomas Stanton [a colonist]."

"At last," wrote Curtiss C. Gardiner, "through the exertions of [Lion] Gardiner . . . (the young woman) was redeemed and restored to her afflicted parents."

To express his gratitude, Wyandanch, with his wife and son, made a free gift to Lion Gardiner . . . of land that "lyeth on Long Island . . . between Huntington and Setauket . . . [and] more than half way through the island southerly." Dated East Hampton, 14 July 1659, the deed acknowledged Lion's "kindness . . . counsel and advice in our prosperity. . . . "

If Lion used his friendship with Indians to his advantage, his trust in them was genuine. When Wyandanch was ordered to testify before the magistrates of Southampton, and his people feared for their sachem's safety, Lion, who happened to be at the Montauk camp, presented himself as a hostage. "I will stay here till you all know it is well with your Sachem," he declared, in his strong, terse, style, "if they bind him, bind me, and if they kill him, kill me."

. . .In 1660, the governor of Barbados, who was a friend of John Winthrop Jr.'s, expressed interest in buying Gardiner's Island. Oh no, wrote Lion to Winthrop, "I, having children and children's children, am not minded to sell it at present." . . . "But I have another place," went on Lion, "more convenient for the gentleman that would buy, liinge upon Long Iland, between Huntington and Setokett."

When this sale fell through, Lion and his son David conveyed to Richard Smith (then known as Smythe) the land that would be the principal part of the future town of Smithtown.

. . . Lion Gardiner died in 1663, at the age of 64, one year before the English conquest of New Netherland from the Dutch: the creator of its first settlement never heard the words "New York." Although he had to dilute his fortune in order to redeem the debts run up by David, his extravagant son, he left a considerable estate. In his will he apologized to his wife, his sole beneficiary, for not leaving more . . .

In 1665, one year after the English ousted the Dutch from New Netherland, Mary Gardiner died and, contrary to Lion's wishes, left Gardiner's Island to their son. Richard Nicolls, the Governor of the newly formed New York Province, gave David Gardiner a grant for the Isle of Wight at an annual quit rent of five pounds. Five years later, the rent was commuted to one lamb yearly, upon demand, by Governor Francis Lovelace. In 1686, David received a new patent from Governor Thomas Dongan, who erected the Isle of Wight "a lordship and manor to be henceforth called the lordship and manor of Gardiner's Island.". . . Their ownership remained uncontested, but the Gardiners' unlimited powers were curtailed in 1788, when the State Legislature annexed the island to the Town of East Hampton.

The life of Lion Gardiner, Long Island's first English settler and founding father, illumines our understanding of Long Island as America. To begin with, his experience contradicts the assumption that Long Island was cloned from New England. Gardiner and fellow settlers were not New Englanders who came to Long Island, but English emigrants who sojourned in New England before choosing to make the Island their permanent home.

He embodied the old and new system of ownership: he was the lord of his own manor who also served as a townsman of the Puritan commonwealth of East Hampton. There, in the words of the historian Peter Ross, "he filled the office of magistrate and in all respects was regarded as the representative citizen of that section of the island."

Largely due to his diplomacy, the interracial wars of the mainland did not erupt on eastern Long Island. In the process, Gardiner acquired a handsome fortune in Long Island land by inducing his Indian friends to sell him large tracts at small prices, confirmed by English deeds.

Three hundred and fifty-nine years have passed since Lion Gardiner, freedom fighter and pioneer, set foot on eastern Long Island. He and his hardy wife, Mary, who left her comfortable home in Holland to cross the ocean with her husband and suffer the rigors of frontier life, are symbols of the transition from the Old World to the New by the first generation of emigrants. They were Americans long before the word was coined.
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John Lion Gardiner, Gardiners of Gardiner's Island, (The Star Press, East Hampton, N.Y., 1927; Publisher: Jonathan T. Gardiner), page 3.
Curtiss C[rane] Gardiner, Lion Gardiner, and His Descendants, (St. Louis:A. Whipple, Publisher MDCCCXC), page 85.
Catherine Marshall-Gardiner; Edited by Harry D. Sleight, A Chronicle of Everyday People: George Schuyler Gardiner & his wife Catherine Larison Marshall,(Reprinted by: Higginson Book Company), page 24.
Margherita Arlina Hamm, Famous Families of New York.
Trumbull's Hist. Conn., (Hartford, 1797), Vol. 1, page 51.
MacKenzie, Colonial Families of the United States, (Vol. VI), 222-223.
Ruth Lawrence, Colonial Families of America, (National Americana), Vol. 4, Pages 213-218.
Charles E. Craven of Long Island, N.Y., A History of Mattituck, (FHL Book, 1906).
"Ons Voorgeslacht," [magazine published in The Neatherlands]: May 1989, Page 190.
William Bradford, The History of Plymouth Colony, (Walter J. Black, Inc., Roslyn, N.Y., 1948), p.350, "CHAPTER XVIII [1637]...
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Gardiners Island: What Next?
Questions of ownership and land use hang over the paradise between the forks
By Steve Wick
Staff Writer - Newsday, Inc.

For 358 years it has been their island. The family's ownership has survived Indian wars, pillaging pirates, the Revolution, the Civil War and two World Wars. It has survived the income tax, the inheritance tax, the Depression and bitter feuds.

And the island is not cheap to maintain -- nearly $2 million a year in upkeep and property taxes. Costs go up every year, too.

Today, Gardiners Island is the oldest family-owned estate of its kind in America, dating to the reign of Charles I of England.The 3,000-acre island holds a vast wealth of history. It has the largest stand of white oak in the Northeast, as well as rare birds, Indian artifacts, and one of the oldest wood-frame structures in New York State.

Its fields and forests, its manor house and barns, the carpenter's shed built in 1639, a stone wall built by slaves -- all hold the collective memory of Long Island history.

Since the spring of 1639 it has been in the Gardiner family -- but will the Gardiners have it much longer?

Robert David Lion Gardiner, the current lord of the manor, as each generation of Gardiners who have looked after the island have called themselves, is pessimistic. He is 86 years old, and has no children. On top of the issue of having no heirs, there's the thorny tax question.

``If you know anything about inheritance taxes in this country, how high they are, you will very quickly realize that it is all but impossible to keep this island in my family,'' Gardiner said as he toured the island last summer. Gardiner is worth millions of dollars, but said his own wealth, after taxes, will not be enough to keep the island going after his death.

``It's a miracle it has been in our family this long,'' Gardiner said.

Then there's the family situation. Gardiner shares the use of the island with his niece, Alexandra Goelet, to whom he does not speak. They have sued each other and warred for years over their sharing of the island and the question of its future. Gardiner has accused his niece of harboring a secret desire to cover the island with houses; for her part, Goelet has said in the past she has no such plan. She would not be interviewed for this story.

In the 1980s, Gardiner refused to pay his share of the taxes and upkeep, so the Goelets now carry that burden. But a court decision allowed Gardiner to continue using the island.

According to the legal agreements that tie the Gardiner family to their island, if Gardiner were to die today the ownership of the island would pass to his niece. Gardiner has said he does not want that to happen, and last summer, while touring the island and showing off its history and natural beauty, he said he was working on a plan to keep the island away from her.

``I am working on a plan to create the Robert David Lion Foundation which would own the island and make it available for small study groups,'' Gardiner said while sipping French champagne under the shade of a huge tree in front of the island's manor house. He is clearly an aristocrat in a country that doesn't have any.

Jack Raymond, a spokesman for the Goelets, said Gardiner does not have the legal right to convey the island. ``He can't unilaterally do anything with the island,'' Raymond said.

Beyond the issue of the trust, Gardiner said he would not oppose government ownership of the island, or ownership by a private group such as The Nature Conservancy. In the past, federal, state and local governments have said acquisition of the island would be beyond reach. In 1989, the island was said to be worth more than $125 million. The Nature Conservancy has described the Peconic Bay system, and its islands, as one of the ``last great places on Earth.''

So determined to keep the island out of his niece's hands, Gardiner has even gone hunting for a suitable heir. In 1989, he found a 48-year-old Mississippi businessman named George Green and made plans to legally adopt him as his ``son.'' What made this Green different from a lot of other Greens was his middle name -- Gardiner. The plan, however, fell through.

The family has nearly lost the island in the past.

In the mid-1660s, David Gardiner -- the first Lion Gardiner's son -- nearly lost the island through his own financial mismanagement. His mother, Mary, had to sell holdings in Connecticut and Smithtown to bail out the family and keep the island.

Centuries later, in 1937, the island was put up for sale by its owner. A few weeks before an auction of the island was to be held, another Gardiner -- Sarah Diodati Gardiner -- stepped in and bought the island. Upon her death in 1953, it passed to her nephew, Robert David Lion Gardiner, and his sister, Alexandra Creel. When Creel died, her rights passed to her daughter, Alexandra Goelet, and a son, who subsequently died.

Asked how the island managed to stay in the family, Robert David Lion Gardiner said last summer: ``We have always married into wealth. We've covered all our bets. We were on both sides of the Revolution, and both sides of the Civil War. The Gardiner family always came out on top.''
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Lion Gardiner died in East Hampton in 1663, two years after writing his memoirs. In 1888, a descendant, Sarah Gardiner, exhumed his grave in the South End Cemetery and made an important discovery -- he had red hair. ``Sarah was my grandmother,'' said Robert David Lion Gardiner, the 16th lord of the manor. ``She was concerned that Lion's sandstone grave marker was becoming badly eroded. She hired the architect who had designed St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan to design a Gothic granite tombstone. But she wanted to make sure Lion's remains were really there, so when the workers were putting the tombstone in place she asked them to dig deeper. ``Lion was buried in his red British army officer's uniform, which was still visible even then. He was wearing a steel corset, a steel helmet, with a beautiful sword hitched to his belt. And she discovered he had a gray beard streaked with red. Some of the hairs were clipped off and distributed to members of the family inside a Tiffany crystal and diamond case.'' Lion Gardiner's tombstone sits near the center of the cemetery. Historians say there is no tombstone like it anywhere in America. Designed by James Renwick -- who in addition to designing St. Patrick's Cathedral also designed the Smithsonian Institution's original building in Washington, D.C. -- the tombstone is carved in granite in the shape of a cathedral. Under the roof of the cathedral is a recumbent knight in steel hat and corset -- the very image of Lion Gardiner, the engineer and warrior of the Pequot War. Gardiner's is one of only a few marked graves on Long Island of people born in the 16th Century -- he was born in 1599.
Newsday, Inc.
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More About Lion Gardiner and Mary Willemsen Deurcant:
Marriage: Jul 10, 1635, Woerden, Holland.232

Children of Lion Gardiner and Mary Willemsen Deurcant are:
  1. +David Gardiner, b. Apr 29, 1636, Hartford, CT232, d. Bef. 1690233.
  2. +Mary Gardiner, b. Aug 30, 1638, Saybrook, CT234, d. Jun 05, 1727, East Hampton, NY.
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