Kingston’s courthouse and surrounding community played a central role in the founding of New York State and the broader early history of the United States. At the courthouse in Kingston, John Jay was the principal author of the New York State Constitution, later served as the first Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1789 after holding that role in New York, and as governor of New York from 1795 to 1801 signed the Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery, though his earlier efforts to abolish slavery in the state had failed. Jay was also a chief negotiator of the Treaty of Paris with John Adams and Benjamin Franklin and wrote five of the 85 Federalist Papers essays with Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. Gouverneur Morris helped secure passage of the state constitution, later went to Pennsylvania after being denied selection by New York leaders for the Constitutional Convention, became one of the convention’s most vocal participants, supported a strong central government, and brought principles developed in Kingston into the U.S. Constitution, including the opening words “We the People.” Founded in 1661, Ulster County’s courthouse evolved from an early stockade community center to a wooden building after the county’s incorporation in 1683 and then a stone courthouse built from 1732 to 1737. After the British captured New York City in 1776, constitution drafters including John Jay, Robert Livingston, and Gouverneur Morris fled to White Plains and Fishkill before settling at the courthouse in February 1777, where despite the unbearable stench from British soldiers and loyalists held in the basement jail, they approved the constitution in April and read it aloud from the front steps. The New York State Supreme Court held its first session there in September with Chief Justice John Jay presiding. In October 1777, British troops under General Vaughan attacked Kingston as part of a plan to divide the colonies, marched from Kingston Point to the Stockade, and in three hours burned more than 300 houses, barns, and other structures, destroying the homes and livelihoods of the town’s 3,000 to 4,000 inhabitants though no one was killed or injured. The courthouse was repaired and remained in use until 1816, then was demolished and rebuilt in 1818, later enlarged in the 19th century, and continues in service as the oldest property in the U.S. to continuously house a public building. Nearby, a limestone house believed built circa 1676 by Pieter Cornelius Louw, one of the earliest surviving colonial buildings in North America, was partially burned in 1777, later altered by subsequent owners, and saved from destruction in 1975 when its original street name, Frog Alley, was restored. The courthouse was also the site of Sojourner Truth’s successful effort to free her son after he was illegally sold out of state. Born enslaved as Isabella in Ulster County circa 1797, she escaped from John Dumont in 1826 with her infant daughter, became the first Black woman to defeat a white man in court, renamed herself Sojourner Truth in 1843 after a religious conversion, traveled as an abolitionist and women’s rights activist, met Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Susan B. Anthony, and died in 1883. In later years the courthouse grounds gained monuments to George Clinton and Sojourner Truth, and in 1978 Anthony Provenzano was tried there for a 1961 murder and sentenced to life in prison.

Photo: Cosmos Mariner

Photo: Anonymous

Photo: Anonymous

Photo: Cosmos Mariner

Hillside, New York · USA