Tangent 2

The other tangent I went on recently came up, again, because my mother has said on many occasions when I refer to our Pruyn ancestors, "You know, the North Country [Warren and Washington Counties, generally speaking] is full of Pruyns. And of course, they were quite a force in Glens Falls as they owned Finch Pruyn Paper Co." I can't tell you how many times I have heard that. No time like now to figure out how we are related. After all, I have the tools!

The Pruyn family, as everybody knows, were principals in Finch, Pruyn and Co., founded in 1865 and still a privately-owned mill though now called Finch Paper LLC. At their mill, located on the banks of the Hudson River, they convert raw logs into pulp and pulp into paper, all on their own premises. Finch Paper employs about 850 people, making it the largest for-profit employer in the Adirondack region, and is the second largest private landowner in New York. In 2007, The Nature Conservancy purchased all 161,000 acres of the company’s forest land in the Adirondacks for $110 million, or $683 an acre. Finch Paper has a twenty-year agreement with The Nature Conservancy to continue logging on the timber lands. Samuel Pruyn (1820-1908) was one of the co-founders of the firm.

In this case, the family ties are a lot closer. Samuel Pruyn's father, Hendrick VanNess Pruyn (1783-1859), was the brother of my relative, Hannah Francis Pruyn (1791-1874), who married Ludowecus Viele. The Pruyns were an old Dutch family who settled in Albany, NY in the mid-17th century. Francis Pruyn, the scion of the family, arrived in Albany in 1661 from Reusel-de Mierden, Noord-Brabant, Holland. Pruyns figure in all the early history of Albany, NY.

My branch of the Pruyn family became big landholders in upstate New York when Francis Samuel Pruyn (1757-1812) married Maria Hendrick VanNess (1760-1847). Francis and Maria were the parents of both my Hannah Pruyn and Hendrick VanNess Pruyn. Maria owned a substantial amount of land along the Hoosick River in what became Washington and Rensselaer Counties through her father, Hendrick Gerritse VanNess (1718-xxxx).

The Van Ness family were proprietors of the Hoosick Patent, which was granted in 1638 to Maria Van Rensselaer of Albany, Hendrick Van Ness of Albany, Gerrit Teunis Van Vechten of Kaatskill, and Jacobus Van Cortlandt of New York. The patent comprised 70,000 acres on both sides of the Hoosick River.