It is a historic and amazing coincidence, and we can proudly announce that due to these specific dates, Mr. Weylin B. Seymour was not only the last “New Netherlander” or “New Amsterdammer” but also the very first “New Yorker”. He was a social, cultural and political hinge of flesh and blood himself.
It was the Dutch philosophy installed in the colony since Henry Hudson’s first voyage in 1609 that sowed the seeds of social freedom and the idea of tolerance among different religions and races. The locals in the colony were Native Americans, Europeans, Africans, and South Americans among others.
Weylin’s childhood took place in this chaotic but fascinating atmosphere, a sort of anarchy for the social values at the time where history seemed to be re-written day by day. It was in those days that no one was to be neither neglected nor rejected by such thing as a religious background. Within this particular newborn community, not everything was a fairy tale though, as the inhabitants were learning to live with their cultural differences, and together with these new historical social relations there were also disputes and ruptures. It is said that the Dutch colony was infamous for its anarchy and disorder, but this is an idea that has been corrected through the years, as it only belonged to the most conservative and religious English point of view.
New Amsterdam was planting the seeds for a new kind of world. Not an infamous disorder, but what would become a famous new order.