Part One of this column described the hardships suffered by families in Rye and other parts of Westchester County during the Revolution that are collectively called the “Neutral Ground.” Among those families were the Jays in Rye and the DeLanceys in Mamaroneck.
In 1811, James Fenimore Cooper and Susan DeLancey were wed at her family’s home, called Heathcote Hall. They were married by the Rev. Samuel Haskell, who had recently become Rector of Christ’s Church in Rye, where the DeLanceys and Jays were prominent parishioners.
In a memoir written after Cooper’s death, his daughter, Susan Fenimore Cooper, included a description of the DeLancey home: “The house stood on the brow of a low hill, immediately above the highway to Boston and facing a broad bay of the Sound…. There was … a row of locusts along the fence, and some noble weeping willows in different positions. Cherry trees and peach trees, apricots and nectarines were planted near the house… and beyond all these orchards there rose a beautiful wood, the remains of the ancient forest.”
Susan also described a visit by her father to John Jay at his home in northern Westchester. An anecdote Jay told Cooper during that visit led her father to write his famous novel: “The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground.” Cooper based the story loosely on the exploits of actual American counterintelligence agents who were used by John Jay to spy on Tory Loyalists during the Revolutionary War.
As she describes her father’s plans: “It was to be … laid in West Chester County, during the Revolution. An anecdote which Governor Jay had told him relating to a spy, who performed his dangerous services out of pure patriotism, was the foundation of the new book. My father never knew the name of the Spy; Governor Jay felt himself bound to secrecy on that point.”
Jay’s counterintelligence activities began in 1776 when he was a member of the New York legislature. After the Battle of White Plains, the British held New York City while the Americans held territory to the north. Between them lay the Neutral Ground in southern Westchester, which was rife with spies infiltrating Loyalist groups and gathering key intelligence.
Jay used numerous agents, but after publication of “The Spy” in 1821, it was widely believed that the model for the protagonist in the novel was a man named Enoch Crosby. His exploits, which were widely publicized before and after Cooper’s novel was published, closely resembled those in “The Spy”; both operated in Westchester and posed as Loyalists while passing intelligence to the Americans.
Although Cooper and his family lived for many years in Cooperstown, N.Y. (founded by his father), they kept in close touch with their family and friends in Westchester through visits and correspondence. In “The Spy,” Cooper described the site of a residence very like the Jay home in Rye: “the fall of the land to the level of the tide water, afforded a view of the Sound over the distant woods at its margin. The surface of the water, which had so lately been lashing the shores with boisterous fury, was already losing its ruffled darkness in the long and regular undulations that succeeded a tempest.”
Keep this description in mind when you next visit the Jay Heritage Center, and remember James Fenimore Cooper when you are driving on Fenimore Road.
