New Netherland
Not long after the settlement of Aquidneck Island, the Massachusetts Bay Colony made some serious threats to take over the island and the entire Narragansett Bay area, causing Hutchinson and other settlers much anxiety. This compelled her to move totally out of the reach of the Bay colony and its sister colonies in Connecticut, and New Haven and move into the jurisdiction of the Dutch. Sometime after the summer of 1642, Hutchinson, seven of her children, a son-in-law, and several servants, 16 total persons by several accounts, went to New Netherland. There they settled near an ancient landmark called Split Rock, not far from what would become the Hutchinson River in northern Bronx, New York City. Other Rhode Island families were in the area, including the Throckmortons and the Cornells. By one account Hutchinson bought her land from John Throckmorton (for whom Throggs Neck is named) who had earlier been a settler of Providence with Roger Williams, but was now living in New Netherland.
While staying temporarily in an abandoned house, the Hutchinson's permanent house was being built with the help of James Sands, who had married Katherine Walker, a granddaughter of William Hutchinson's brother Edward. Sands later became a settler of Block Island (later New Shoreham, Rhode Island), and the Reverend Samuel Niles, another early settler of Block Island, recorded the following about Sands' experience in New Netherland:
"Mrs. Hutchinson ... removed to Rhode Island, but making no long stay there, she went further westward to a place called Eastchester, now in the eastern part of the province of New York, where she prepared to settle herself; but not to the good liking of the Indians that lived back in the woods, as the sequel proves. In order to pursue her purpose, she agreed with Captain James Sands, then a young man, to build her house, and he took a partner with him in the business ... there came a company of Indians to the frame where he was at work, and made a great shout and sat down. After some time, they gathered up his tools, put his broad axe on his shoulders and his other tools into his hands, and made signs for him to go away. But he seemed to take no notice of them, but continued in his work."
Thus the natives gave overt clues that they were displeased with the settlement being formed there. While the property had supposedly been secured by an agent of the Dutch West India Company in 1640, the negotiation was transacted with members of the Siwanoy people in distant Norwalk, and the local natives likely had little to do with that transaction, if they even knew of it at all. Hutchinson was therefore taking a considerable risk in putting a permanent dwelling at this site.
The exact location of the Hutchinson house has been a source of great interest for several centuries. LaPlante, in her recent biography of Hutchinson, hints that the homestead was near the Indian Trail that went through modern-day Pelham Bay Park, on the east side of the Hutchinson River. Offering another hypothesis, Lockwood Barr, citing the extensive land title research of Otto Hufeland published by the Westchester Historical Society in 1929, concluded that the site of the homestead was on the west side of the Hutchinson River in Eastchester. A map in Barr's book that appeared in the 1929 work shows the property bordering the river in an area that is now called Baychester, between two creeks called Rattlesnake Brook and Black Dog Brook. This area of the Bronx is now highly developed, and while Rattlesnake Brook is extant, mostly in underground culverts, Black Dog Brook is defunct.
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