"Light on New Netherland" Is Like a Homecoming at Federal Hall

NEW YORK, NY (08/11/2009)(readMedia)-- The "Light on New Netherland" exhibit, now in the Federal Hall National Memorial in lower Manhattan, is like a homecoming. Significant events in early Dutch Colonial history took place not far from Federal Hall, right in the heart of New Netherland

The exhibit will be on view until Sept. 15, as it continues its schedule of presentations in a number of locations once part of the 17th-century New Netherland province. New Netherland included New York state and parts of Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

The exhibit was produced by the New Netherland Institute (NNI), to celebrate the Quadricentennial of Henry Hudson's exploration in 1609. The NNI, organized with the encouragement and financial support of The Netherlands to promote awareness of the Dutch history of colonial America, has also produced other quadricentennial projects including "Explorers, Fortunes, and Love Letters: A Window on New Netherland," a collection of essays by noted historians, and "Uncovering America's Forgotten Colony: the New Netherland Project," a documentary DVD about the New Netherland Project and its connection with modern times.

Federal Hall National Memorial, a U.S. National Park Service site, may be best known for being the first capitol of the United States of America and the location at which President George Washington took the oath of office in 1789.

However, a century and a half and just a few blocks away, opposite Coenties Slip, the colony was being governed in a tavern used as the first city hall of New Amsterdam. Life in that first community of New Netherland is explained in the 28 panels of the "Light on New Netherland" exhibit. Each contains text and illustrations, including many by Len Tantillo, the preeminent artist in depicting early colonial New York.

Topics include information about the fur trade that initially brought settlers to the colony and also tell about such aspects of life in New Netherland as the establishment of government, the practice of religion, and the interactions between settlers and native peoples, as families from the Netherlands relocated to the New World.

Raw material for the exhibit comes from the New Netherland Project (NNP), located in the New York State Library in Albany. Under its founding director Charles T. Gehring, Ph.D., the project continues its mission of transcribing, translating and publishing some 12,000 pages of correspondence, court cases, legal contracts and reports from the Dutch colonial period, 1636 to 1674.

The NNI is the supporting organization of the translation project.

Sponsors of the "Light on New Netherland" exhibit at Federal Hall include the New Netherland Institute, the New Amsterdam History Center (NAHC) and the National Park Service.

The artist Tantillo has also created 3D imagery of a part of New Amsterdam's Stone Street area in 1660, now the Stone Street Historic District of Lower Manhattan, for the NAHC On-Line Exhibition, which is funded by a $300,000 grant from the New York Empire State Development Corporation.

More information about the New Netherland Institute and the New Netherland Project is available at the website http://www.nnp.org.