THE OLD AND THE NEW
How small this world of ours is, and how close we are, all unknowing, to one another! I had set out to write the story of the Old Town with no thought that it touched the land across the seas and its people in any closer way than through these pages, and through the abiding affection of a few of its children who, like myself, have wandered far from home. And while I wrote there fell into my hands the account of a sale of some building lots half a dozen years ago, in Jersey City, part of a property which for three hundred years had belonged to the Van Riepen family. And the Van Riepen name was shown to mean “from Ribe”—the Old Town itself. This is the historical record:
From the port of Ribe there sailed in April, 1663, a ship bearing the nameTe Bonte Koe, meaning “The Brindle Cow,” bound for New Amsterdamwith eighty-nine passengers aboard. Among them was one Juriaen Tomasson, a citizen of Ribe, who, four years after reaching these shores, married Pryntje Hermans—to be exact, on May 25, 1667; and died on September 12, 1695. From their union sprang two well-known families, one that twisted the Danish name of Jörgen (Juriaen in the record) into Jurianse, which later became Yearance; and the other the Van Riepen, or Van Ripen, family, which thus preserved the name of the Old Town in its purity of pronunciation. For Ribe is pronounced Reebė. The Germans to this day call it Ripen on their maps.
It did more than preserve the mere name—it kept its spirit alive. In the chronicles of the Revolution preserved in his home state we read of a Lieutenant Daniel Van Riepen,1one of the descendants of the Juriaen who came over inTe Bonte Koe, being captured by the Royalists and imprisoned in the old Sugar House with otherpatriots. He must have borne the marks of the hardships they suffered there, for when he was brought before a court-martial in Hoboken to be tried and shot as a rebel, he was ragged and without uniform or distinctions of rank. Asked by the presiding judge why he came thus, being an officer, he made reply: “It is not clothes or arms that make the man.”
“What then?” sneered his accuser, one Van Horst.
“This, sir!” said Van Riepen, and smote his breast proudly. Whereat the British officer who attended ordered that he be released.
“He is a man,” he said. “Were I ten times a prisoner, I could give no better answer.” And the patriot went free.
So the old world and the new have met, and the Old Town won the day once more, this time far from home, with the best of all weapons,—the manhood that is its hall-mark wherever its children are found.