A hundred years have wrought a marvelous change in Brooklyn. Its four thousand inhabitants of 1776 have multiplied to half a million; the march of improvement has swept onward past 'Brooklyn Church' and 'Bedford Four Corners'... The three or four hamlets or neighborhoods comprising the old town were settled principally by Hollanders or their descendants, engaged in the peaceful and quiet pursuit of agriculture.
The wave of Revolutionary sentiment rolled over the community, but it created scarce a ripple on the phlegmatic placidity of the Dutch inhabitants... they relaxed naught of their outward seeming of indifference to the approach of the coming storm.
If they were disturbed at all it was by the fear of pecuniary loss and personal inconvenience. No thrill of patriotism animated their breasts, and though their farms and hillsides were destined to become the theater of the first essay of the new nation in behalf of its recently asserted independence.
Indeed, had the future of Kings County depended solely upon the efforts of her own citizens, Kings County would have had no future.
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