BIOGRAPHY: Wouter Van Twiller; New York co., NY
surname: Van Twiller

submitted by Elizabeth Burns (burns at asu.edu) 
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Submitted Date: June 1,2005
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Author: Walter Barrett

Wouter Van Twiller
Page 82
Old Merchants, 
Walter Barrett, 
Thomas R. Knox, 1885

Old Wouter Van Twiller, the first governor, was a merchant, or rather a 
merchant's clerk, being regularly brought up in the West Indian Company's 
counting-room and that fact ranked him as the equal of an ordinary merchant.  
Wouter was born in Nieuwkirk and probably when he ceased to be governor of our 
ancient New York he went back there. I do not know of any Van Twillers that 
have kept up the name and been engaged in mercantile employment in this city 
ever since.  Had they done so, they would have been regarded as aristocracy, 
and would have moved in the first circles as the Stuyvesant family has always 
done.

Old Van Twiller who used to get the people before the door of the fort in the 
spring of 1833, break in the head of a barrel of wine and get all hands drunk, 
drinking toasts "to the health of the Prince of Orange and me" may have been a 
left hand son of the old Prince or his father may have kept a dance house 
in "New Church" village. The Van Twiller family would in New York in 1861, 
only be allowed to date back to the 16th of April 1633, when their ancestors 
landed from the ship "DeZoutburg" the first vessel of war that ever entered 
this harbor. People here don't care what the ancestry was on the other side.