32 MAY 2018 I LIC COURIER I www.qns.com
Legends
‘SHOW ME THE MONEY’
BY GREATER ASTORIA
HISTORICAL SOCIETY
You can go to Dutch Kills Green
and see two millstones. One was
a runner (which turned), the other
a bedstone (which was fixed). The fur-rows
and ridges, marked with such color-ful
names as skirt, breast, harp, fly and
Spanish cross, have remained silent for
five generations. They are the tangible
relic of something that goes back a dozen
generations. They are remnants of a tide
mill and are among the earliest European
artifacts in Queens County.
In 1674, New York’s Gov. Edmund An-dros
convened landowners and business-men
in New York’s first real legislature. They
were tasked with reviving a failed city rife
with contagion, crime and corruption. Busi-ness
was dormant: beavers were hunted to
all but extinction, and devalued agricultural
products were routinely adulterated with
chaff and inferior grains. It was Andros
who set in stone New York’s partnership
of business and government. In every real
sense, he is the true “Father of New York.”
The result of their labor was so important
that it’s displayed on the New York City Coat
of Arms to this day: flour barrels.
A series of laws, called “Bolting Acts,”
covered New York’s largest export, wheat
flour and corn meal, and set strict standards
of its milling quality and transportation.
Export quality was checked. Furthermore,
all outgoing and incoming ships had to
stop at New York for cargo inspection.
Long Island farmers, East River tide mills,
warehousemen, ship builders, coopers and
merchants were suddenly inundated with
more business than they could handle.
Within a generation, the city’s economy and
housing grew threefold, ship building fivefold
and cattle tenfold. New York launched on
a trajectory of growth enjoyed to this day.
The landscape of Long Island was
transformed. Sleepy hamlets along New-town
Creek witnessed a steady stream of
incoming barges full of corn and wheat, and
outgoing casks of flour and meal. Tide mills
on English Kills and Dutch Kills ran 24/7
with an inexhaustible source of energy
from the tides which dutifully raised and
lowered millponds each day.
Photo courtesy of the Greater Astoria Historical Society
Former malarial marshland was drained
and dug out to increase the size and power
of the tide mill ponds. The gentle curve of
Northern Boulevard between Queens Plaza
and Woodside traces “Burger’s Sluice” — a
ditch dug to supply water power to the
Queens Plaza tide mill. Tide mills spread
across Long Island and Brooklyn (most
notably in Red Hook). In Queens they were
built at Halletts Cove, near LaGuardia Air-port,
further out to Flushing, Alley Pond, and
perhaps within the Flushing Meadow valley.
The primordial forest in Queens was
cut down as farmers began to expand
crop acreage destined for a transnational
market. New York was now firmly plugged
into the international trading network. The
semitropical climate of Queens made for
a long growing season. Soils of rich loam
gave it the title “The Granary of America.”
Neighboring Flushing was dubbed the
“Birthplace of American Horticulture.”
Meanwhile, in Newtown (Elmhurst), the
legendary Newtown Pippen apple, which
could withstand the Atlantic crossing in
casks, became America’s first high-value
fruit export.
So what about those millstones in Dutch
Kills Green? Everyone who is a business
person, or a New Yorker, should make a
pilgrimage to see them, for here, the New
York that we know started. The millers were
known as a tough and shrewd group: it was
they who bequeathed us our legendary
“New York attitude.” And the source of the
gesture “show me the money” by rubbing
the thumb and forefingers together? That
was how the miller tested a batch of flour
for quality.
/www.qns.com
