Minetta was a fine fishing brook, and the adjacent region was full of wild duck; so, take it all in all, it was a game preserve such as sportsmen love.  It seems that the old Dutch settlers were fond of hunting and fishing, for they came here to shoot and angle, as we would go into—­let us say—­the Adirondacks or the Maine woods!

“A high range of sand hills traversed a part of the island, from Varick and Charlton to Eighth and Green streets,” says Mary L. Booth, in her history.  “To the north of these lay a valley through which ran a brook, which formed the outlet of the springy marshes of Washington Square....”

And here, on the self-same ground of those “springy marshes,” is Washington Square today.

The lonely Zantberg,—­the wind-blown range of sand hills; the cries of the wild birds breaking the stillness; the quietly rippling stream winding downward from the higher ground in the north, and now and then, in the spring of the year, overflowing its bed in a wilderness of brambles and rushes;—­do these things make you realise more plainly the sylvan remoteness of that part of New York which we now know as Downtown?

A glance at Bernard Ratzer’s map—­made in the beginning of the last half of the eighteenth century for the English governor, Sir.  Henry Moore—­shows the only important holdings in the neighbourhood at that time:  the Warren place, the Herrin (Haring or Harring) farm, the Eliot estate, etc.  The site of the Square, in fact, was originally composed of two separate tracts and had two sources of title, divided by Minetta Brook, which crossed the land about sixty feet west of where Fifth Avenue starts today.  Westward lay that rather small portion of the land which belonged to the huge holdings of Sir.  Peter Warren, of whom more anon.

The eastern part was originally the property of the Herrings, Harrings or Herrins,—­a family prominent among the early Dutch settlers and later distinguished for patriotic services to the new republic.  They appear to have been directly descended from that intrepid Hollander, Jan Hareng of the city of Hoorn, who is said to have held the narrow point of a dike against a thousand Spaniards, and performed other prodigious feats of valour.  In the genealogical book I read, it was suggested that the name Hareng originated in some amazingly large herring catch which (I quote verbatim from that learned book) “astonished the city of Hoorn,”—­and henceforth attached itself to the redoubtable fisherman!

The earliest of the family in this city was one Jan Pietersen Haring, and his descendants worked unceasingly for the liberty of the republic and against the Tory party.  In 1748, Elbert Haring received a grant of land which was undoubtedly the farm shown in the Ratzer map.  A tract of it was sold by the Harring (Herring) family to Cornelius Roosevelt; it passed next into Jacob Sebor’s hands, and in 1795 was bought by Col.  William S. Smith, a brilliant officer in Washington’s army, and holder of various posts of public office.