BIOGRAPHY: Silas B. Dutcher; Brooklyn, Kings co., NY
surname: Dutcher, Frink, Knickerbocker, Beardsley, Bressie, Duyster, Low, Ten
Eyck, Ten Eycke, Alwaise, Bishop

submitted by W. David Samuelsen
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A HISTORY OF LONG ISLAND FROM ITS EARLIEST SETTLEMENT TO THE PRESENT TIME 
BY PETER ROSS, LL. D. 
THE LEWIS PUBLISHING COMPANY NEW YORK AND CHICAGO
COPYRIGHT. 1902

SILAS B. DUTCHER

     "Those who have attained the age of seventy years, as a rule, attest the
fact of a sound constitution and a well spent life," said the Brooklyn Eagle
editorially. July 12, 1899. !The one is a fine inheritance. The other is a
fine record. Inheritance and record are both the possession of the well-known
Brooklynite, President Silas B. Dutcher, who was born seventy years ago
to-day. He at once becomes a hope and a vindication. A hope he is to those who
would equal his claim to respect and regard, who would match him in mentality
and bodily vigor, when they reach his present years. A vindication he is to
those who seek for examples to prove that three score years and ten may be
really the best period of a man's life Mr. Dutcher very likely never thought
of himself either as a hope or as a vindication. He has been too busy to do
so. That fact is one of the reasons why he is both. Life takes cart of the
fame of those who are more concerned with duty than with distinction, for
distinction is a consequence best following from fidelity, energy and wisdom.
It is the aroma of a career, when the career is what it ought to be."

     Silas B. Dutcher was born July 12, 1829, on his father's farm on the
shore of Otsego lake, in the town of Springfield, Otsego county, New York He
is a descendant of an old and highly respected family. His parents were
Parcefor Carr and Johanna Low (Frink) Dutcher. His paternal grandparents were
John and Silvey (Beardsley) Dutcher. His grandmother's ancestor was William
Beardsley, who was born at Stratford, England, in 1605, and came to America in
1635, settling at Stratford, Connecticut, four years later. His
great-grandparents were Gabriel and Elizabeth (Knickerbocker) Dutcher.
Elizabeth Knickerbocker was a granddaughter of Harman Janse Van Wye
Knickerbocker, of Dutchess county. New York His great-great-grandparents
were Ruloff and Janettie (Bressie) Dutcher, who were married at Kingston, New
York, in 1700 and in 1720 removed to Lichfield county, Connecticut.

     Ruloff Dutcher is believed to have been a grandson of Dierck Cornelison
Duyster under commissary at Fort Orange in 1630, whose name appears in deeds
of two large tracts of land to Killian Van Rensselaer.

     Mr. Dutcher's maternal grandparents were Stephen and Ann (Low) Frink,
and maternal great-grandparents were Captain Peter and Johanna (Ten Eyck) Low,
and his great-grandfather was an officer in the Continental army. Johanna Ten
Eyck was a descendant of Conrad Ten Eycke, who came from Amsterdam, Holland,
to New York in 1650, and owned what is now known as Coenties Slip, New York
city.

     Mr. Dutcher attended the public schools near his father's farm each
summer and winter, from the age of four until the age of seven years. After
that he bad a little more schooling in the winter season and one term at
Cazenovia Seminary. He began teaching school winters at the age of sixteen and
taught every winter until he was twenty-two, working on his father's farm
during the balance of each year. In the fall of 1851, owing to a temporary
loss of his voice, which prevented him from teaching, he found employment at
railroad construction, but soon became a station agent and subsequently a
conductor and for more than three years was employed on the old Erie Railway
from Elmira to Niagara Falls, New York. He then went to New York and entered
mercantile business, to which he devoted his energies through the terrible
panics of 1857 and 1860 without severe misfortune. In 1868 he was appointed
supervisor of internal revenue, a position which he at first declined, but was
urged to accept by William Orton and other friends. Against his own judgment,
and, as events proved, greatly to the detriment of his financial interests, he
took the office. He was unable to give attention to business, his partner was
not equal to its management, and he soon discovered that all he had
accumulated by twelve years of hard work was scattered and gone, and he was
obliged to sell the real estate be owned to meet his liabilities.

     Even as a boy he had been more or less interested in politics. His
grandfather was a Democrat, and Silas was often called upon to read his
Democratic newspaper to him; his father was a Whig and the result was that he
had an opportunity to learn something of the claims of both parties at an
early age. Before he was twenty-one he became interested in the question of
freedom or the extension of slavery in the territories, - the most vital
question of that day, - and while yet little more than a boy, in 1848, did
some effective campaign speaking for General Taylor.

     When he went to New York Mr. Dutcher resolved to have nothing to do with
active politics, but the breaking up of a Republican meeting in the Bleaker
building in the ninth ward brought him out most decisively and he was quite
active politically from 1856 to 1861. In 1857 he was president of the Ninth
Ward Republican Association; 1858-39 he was chairman of the Young Men's
Republican Committee, and in 1860 he was president of the Wide-Awakes
Association. During the year last mentioned he became a member of the board of
supervisors of the county of New York. His business demanded his attention and
there were other reasons why; in the fall of 1861, he moved to Brooklyn in
order to sever his relations with that body. William M. Tweed was a member of
the board at that time and began to develop some of the schemes which
eventually caused his downfall. Mr. Dutcher was not willing to vote ignorantly
on any question or to act upon the representations of other members, who he
believed held their personal interests above the interests of the county. As a
resident of Brooklyn be again resolved to keep out of politics but the riots
of 1863 brought him in close relations with active Republicans and he found
himself again in political harness. He held the office of supervisor of
internal revenue from 1868 until 1872, a period of four years, at first under
appointment of Hugh McCullough, the secretary of the treasury, and later under
appointment of President Grant. In November, 1872, he was appointed United
States pension agent, resigning that office in 1875 to accept a position in
the employ of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, which he held until
appointed United States appraiser of the port of New York, by President Grant,
which latter position he held until 1880. He was superintendent of public
works of the state of New York from 1880 until 1883, appointed by Governor
Cornell. At the close of his term in the last named office, President Arthur
requested him to accept the office of commissioner of internal revenue, to
which he replied that he had held office fourteen years and that all he had to
show for that service was a few old clothes; that if he accepted the position
tendered him and held it one or more years. he would retire with about the
same quantity of old clothes as he had at the beginning and so much cider and
less available for other business, and that the remainder of his life must be
devoted to making some provision for his wife and children and consequently he
must decline further office-holding.

     He was a member of the charter commission which framed the charter of
Greater New York, appointed by Governor Morton, and was appointed a manager of
the Long Island State Hospital by Governor Black and re-appointed by Governor
Roosevelt. He was a Whig from 1850 to 1833 and became a Republican at the
organization of that patty. After locating in Brooklyn he was the chairman of
the Kings county Republican committee for four years, a member of the
Republican state committee fur many years, and was the chairman of the
Republican executive committee of the state in 1876. He served as a delegate
to several Republican national conventions and was on the stump in every
presidential campaign from 1848 to 1888.

     From the time he became a resident of Brooklyn until the consolidation
was consummated. Mr. Dutcher was an advocate of the consolidation of Brooklyn
and New York. As a member for four years of the Brooklyn hoard of education,
he exerted all his influence for the advancement of the public schools. As a
member of the charter commission for Greater New York. he labored earnestly to
secure equal taxation and home rule for the public school, believing that the
system and management were better than in Manhattan and better than any other
submitted to the community. No work of his life has given him more
satisfaction than the results in the charter on these two points. He has also
taken an active interest in Sunday-school affairs and was superintendent for
ten years of the Twelfth Street Reformed church Sunday-school. at a time when
it was one of the largest schools in the state.

     Mr. Dutcher resumed business to some extent in 1885, when he formed a
co-partnership with W. E. Edmister in a fire and marine insurance agency,
which still exists. He was one of the charter trustees of the Union Dime
Savings Institution, of New York city, organized in 1859, and became president
of that institution in 1885 and is now the only one of the charter trustees
remaining on the board. In the spring of 1901 he was invited to and accepted
the presidency of the Hamilton Trust Company. He has been for twenty years a
director in the Metropolitan Life Insurance company, is a director in the
Garfield Safe Deposit Company and the Goodwin Car Company. He is a member of
the Dutch Reformed church, treasurer of the Brooklyn Bible Society, one of the
managers of the Society for Improving the Condition of the Poor, a member of
the Brooklyn and Hamilton Clubs and of the Masonic fraternity, and he was
president of the Association of the Brooklyn Masonic Veterans in 1896.

     When Mr. Dutcher took up his residence in Brooklyn the population of the
city was about two hundred and seventy-five thousand. What is now the Park
Slope was then open fields. The small settlement known as Gowanus was all
there was south of Flatbush avenue. He has seen the city grow from a little
more than a quarter of a million souls to a million and a quarter. He has seen
the Park Slope transformed into one of the finest residential sections of the
city, and he has seen the three or four churches in that part of Brooklyn
increase to more than twenty. When he came the prominent Republicans of
Brooklyn were Charles W. Goddard, James Humphrey, William Wall and J. S. T.
Stranahan. He soon made the acquaintance of that good old Dutch mayor, Martin
Kalbfleisch, whom he regarded as one of the sturdiest men he ever met. He has
known every one of Brooklyn's mayors from George Hall, the first executive,
down to the present incumbent of the office. Mr. Dutcher has lived in Third
street since 1872, and his present home is at No. 496.

     His family consists of his wife and six children. He married Rebecca J.
Alwaise, February 10, 1839. Mrs. Dutcher is a descendant of John Alwaise, a
French Huguenot. who came to Philadelphia in 1740. Her grandmother was a
descendant of John Bishop, who came from England in 1645, and settled at
Woodbridge, New Jersey. The children of Silas B. and Rebecca J. (Alwaise)
Dutcher are DeWitt P., Edith May. Elsie Rebecca, Malcomb B., Jessie Ruth and
Eva Olive. Two of Mr Dutcher's daughters are members of the Colonial Daughters
of the Seventeenth Century.

     The first visit Mr. Dutcher ever made to Brooklyn was to hear Henry Ward
Beecher preach in Plymouth church. He has stated that he was directed. as
others were, at the usual hour of church service to cross Fulton Ferry and
follow the crowd. "I arrived at the church a little late," he said, "and found
only standing room and but little of that. When I entered the church the
congregation was singing the hymn All Hail the Power of Jesus Name to the good
old tune of Coronation, and I do not recollect of ever hearing in any other
church such a volume of music. My first impression was that Henry Ward Beecher
was the strongest preacher to whom I had ever listened and that first
impression has never been removed." Mr. Dutcher has known personally every
governor of the state of New York. from William H. Seward to Benjamin B.
Odell. except Governor William C. Bouch and Governor Silas Wright. When he
went to New York, he was brought in contact in both business and politics with
men much older than himself among wham were Edwin D. Morgan. William M.
Evarts, William Curtis Noyes, David Dudley Field, Luther R. Marsh, Abram
Wakeman, John A. Kennedy, Washington Smith, William Orton, George Briggs,
General James Bowen and Thomas C. Acton, very few of whom are now living. He
believes the day is not far distant when the borough of Brooklyn will have the
largest population, the greatest number of voters and be the most important
factor in Greater New York. He predicts that the year 1910 will show Brooklyn
with a larger population than the borough of Manhattan at that date, and a
population that for intelligence, independence and a desire to secure the best
possible local government. will not be surpassed by any people in the world.
Mr. Dutcher owes nothing to favor. He "hewed his own path" and found his
opportunities and improved them; but he did not neglect the better things than
success, such as education. culture and other refining and strengthening aids.
His political career has been one to note with respect. lie has never been an
applicant for any office that he has filled, and he has never become a
dependent on a political office Every public employment to which he has been
called has been a business employment and he has fulfilled its duties in a way
to prove his fitness for private employment and his life exhibits a union of
public and private service which is creditable citizenship.