a part of the
family farm to John Smith, a wealthy slave-holder. On the choicest site
of the purchase, now the centre of Fourteenth Street just west of Fifth
Avenue, Smith built his country residence. After he died his widow
continued to occupy the house until 1788, when the executors of Smith's
estate, among whom was James Duane, Mayor of the city, sold the property
for about four thousand seven hundred dollars to Henry Spingler.
Spingler lived in the house until his death in 1813, and used the land,
comprising about twenty-two acres, as a market garden farm. Spingler's
granddaughter, Mrs. Mary S. Van Beuren, fell heiress to most of the
property, and built the Van Beuren brown-stone front house on
Fourteenth Street, where she lived for years, and maintained a little
garden with flowers and vegetables, a cow and chickens. In the
fifty-seven years between the Smith sale and 1845 the value of the
estate had increased from four thousand seven hundred dollars to two
hundred thousand dollars. Keeping still to the bucolic days of the
Avenue, we pass, going from Fifteenth to Eighteenth Street, through what
was the farm of Thomas and Edward Burling, relatives of John and James
Burling, old-time merchants whose name was given to Burling Slip, down
by the East River. Also in the course of these blocks the Avenue crosses
land that was the farm of John Cowman until 1836. Between Eighteenth and
Twenty-first Streets was part of the farm acquired in 1791 by Isaac
Varian, who bought from the heirs of Sir Peter Warren.

This Sir Peter Warren was one of the great figures of the old town. Many
have written of him. It was only a year or so ago that Miss Chapin
devoted to his story a chapter of her book on Greenwich Village. So here
the outline of his career will be of the briefest possible nature. It
was in 1728 that he first saw New York Harbour. He was twenty-five years
of age then, and in command of the frigate "Solebay." Irish to the core,
a Warren of Warrenstown, County Meath, who got their estates in the
time of "Strongbow," he had already seen a dozen years of active service
in southern and African waters, and as captain of the "Grafton," had had
a share in the seizure of the rock of Gibraltar by the British. But New
York was his first official post, and here he had been sent at the
orders of the home government, to keep an eye on events, and to sound
the loyalty of the American colonies. The little island above the great
bay and b