Toponymie | Canton de Potton | Place Names

To quote the following alone would be a disservice to this venerable name in Potton: “Col. Henry Ruiter moved to the eastern part of the Township of Potton in 1799.  The next year, he built a sawmill and later a gristmill.  They were the first erected in this part of the country.  Potton still preserves a lasting memento of Col. Ruiter in the name of the stream on which these mills were built; it is called Ruiter Brook.”^[1]  Ruiter, in fact, did not move to the eastern part of the Township, but rather to the southwestern portion of it, that area we call Dunkin. 

The source of a great deal of the research about Ruiter is the compilation of the History of Brome County by the Reverend E. M. Taylor.  Taylor informs of the life and times of Hendrick Ruyter, beginning with his own research of the Ruyter family in the United States.  Taylor quotes biographical information extracted from Munsell's Collection of the History of Albany, N.Y., Volume IV, p. 159, 1871, in Volume I of his own work.  Albany, New York was a fair distance from Taylor's residence in Knowlton, Quebec, but nonetheless, it seems he may have travelled there to find the information he needed, an indication that Taylor was aware of the importance of Hendrick Ruiter in this Township's history.  (Note that Colonel Ruiter's first name is spelled several different ways: Hendrik, Hendrick, Henrick, Henry, amongst others.  His surname is also spelled as Ruyter or Ruiter.)  For the most part, I refer to Ruiter as Hendrick Ruiter, the name which appears on his gravestone.

Research has revealed the following:

Ruiter was from a family known as Palantines, citizens who, in short, immigrated en masse in the early 1700's, from the Palantate of southwestern (Rhineland) Germany to England and some of these, thence to destinations in North America in about 1710.  Some came from the Netherlands as well.  The history of the Palantines is interesting though not pertinent here except to demonstrate that the Ruiter family, as with most immigrants to North America, were seeking freedom from dire religious and economic repression, in the early 1600's.  Most Palantines were of the Lutheran faith and they were persecuted mercilessly because of it.

Henrick Ruyter (or Hendrick Ruiter) was born September 26, 1742 of first generation “American-born” parents, Frederic Ruiter and Engeltie Vanderwerken, whose families had settled in Hoosic, New York, near Albany.  His grandfather was born in East Prussia and came in 1710 to America.  Ruiter's father was born in New York State and died there in 1746, when his son, Hendrick, was only four years old.

Hendrick Ruiter had one younger brother, Johannes, and three sisters.  Johannes (or John) settled in Philipsburg.  His son Jacob was the first settler of Nelsonville, now known as Cowansville, having built the first saw and gristmill on the banks of the Missisquoi River in the Township of Dunham, in 1798.^[2]

It is recorded that Ruiter spent a good deal of his early life with a General Schuyler, whom we presume to be General Philip Schuyler (1733-1804) of Albany, New York.  According to Taylor, “General Schuyler was riding along one day and saw him (Ruiter) in the employ of someone who was not treating him properly; the boy (Ruiter) chose him as his guardian and the General undertook to care for him.  He remained with General Schuyler until his marriage to Rebecca Dooth Staats (1763). ”^[3]

Although Schuyler joined the British forces in 1755, his loyalities changed in 1775 when he took command of the Northern Department of the Continental Army and planned the invasion of Canada.^[4]  He and the young man whom he had befriended then found themselves on opposite sides of the loyalty fence in the Revolutionary War.

Henry and his brother, John, remained loyal to the British side at the start of American Revolution, as did many Dutch and German families in the Albany area and the area of Vermont just to the east.  In 1777, Ruiter was forced to skulk in the woods outside his home in Pitts Town, N.Y., while revolutionists tried unsuccessfully to capture him for his political beliefs and loyalty to the British.  While they tormented his wife and nine children, he managed to join General John Burgoyne of the British forces.  He fought in the Battles of Bennington and Saratoga.  He escaped to Canada after General Benedict Arnold's defeat of Burgoyne at Saratoga, in 1777.

Ruiter later returned to the Albany area to recruit other Loyalists to join Major James Roger's Corps of Rangers (Roger's Rangers), a British militia group, where Ruiter received a Captain's Commission.  The Rangers fought with the British regular army and were headquartered in St. John's (Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu).  By 1780, Ruiter was leading his own Company of militia.  They fought at Fort Anne, N.Y. and Fort George (Lake George, N.Y.).  Captain Ruiter's company, one of three Roger's Rangers companies, helped the army considerably by spying, guarding, scouting and the movement of orders.  These units also helped in the escape of Loyalist families to Canada, including Ruiter's wife, Rebecca, and six of their nine children, who arrived in St. John's, nearly starving to death.  In fact, she died shortly after arriving in Quebec.

In May of 1780, Ruiter had beseeched General Halimand for permission to rescue his wife and family.  Ruiter's own words are powerful in his letter: “My wife is in greate Distress being oppressed in every way the rebels can invent.  She wants much to come to Canada this Spring if possible she can.  Above all that distresses me is she sends me word my two sons who is now of age will be forced into the Service of the Reables this Sumer inshuing, if I don't get them brought to Canada. (…)  I therefore beg his Excellency's leave to go down and conduct my poor boys in (…)”^[5]  It would appear that Ruiter was never granted such leave.

The Rangers were disbanded in 1783 and it was then that Ruiter first began petitioning the British for restitution.^[6]

Captain Ruiter paid dearly for his loyalty to the Crown.  On June 23, 1787 when he was renewing his claim for compensation, first made in the “Fall of '83”, his declaration of losses included his 260 acres of land, on which he had built a saw mill, cleared fifty acres and built a house and another small house in Pitts Town, New York.  It had been confiscated by the rebels as “his name was amongst the Persons indicted”, his property “taken possession of by several persons”.  It was valued at some £700.  “When he joined Burgoyne, he left 20 head of cattle, 13 horses, 10 sheep, farming utensils and furniture.”  Other properties to which he had claim were negated because he was unable to produce the deed, presumably because he had been unable to recuperate them from among his documents.  A witness for Ruiter claimed that Ruiter “had a good stock and seemed in good circumstances.”^[7]

It took Hendrick Ruiter twenty years before the British awarded any compensation.  His wife, Rebecca, died in 1784 at Caldwell's Manor, where they were living.  He remarried the same year to Katherine Friott, a lady from Pownal, Vt., near Bennington.  They had nine children of whom most remained in Canada.  Of his first family, one son, Philip, came to Canada and lived with his uncle, John Ruiter, at Philipsburg, on Missisquoi Bay.  One of his daughters came to Potton and married one of the earliest settlers, Henry Abel.

Ruiter petitioned constantly for the land he wanted.  Finally “he received the lots of land in the first four ranges in the Township of Potton excepting Clergy Reserves.”^[8]  In all “Henry Ruiter received in excess of 7000 acres which included 400 acres for each child; he had fourteen children.”^[9]  Taylor quotes from Bouchette's History, Vol. 1, page 483: “Sir R.S. Milnes granted 27,580 acres of land in Potton to Henry Ruiter on July 27, 1803.”^[10]  This may have been the intention, but due to duplications in the granting process, many of Ruiter's children received grants in Barford Township and near Roxton, in what became Shefford County.  In the War of 1812, Henry Ruiter had readied a defense, by organizing the Townships 2^nd Battalion of which he became Lt. Colonel.  After a lifetime of loyalty, struggle, loss and rebuilding, restitution was finally given to Henrik Ruyter, the loyal Colonel whose battles never ceased.  He maintained his loyalty to the end of his day.  He is Potton's true United Empire Loyalist, though it may be said that he never claimed the distinction.

Hendrick Ruiter died in August of 1819, at 77 years of age, and his second wife followed in December 1819.  They laid side by side in unmarked graves in the Ruiter's Settlement Cemetery, in what we now call Dunkin, until such time as great-great-grandson Edgar C. Barnett, from Highwater, and Frederick M. Woods, an American descendant, erected a marble gravestone to mark the approximate site of their graves nearly a century later, in 1909.

(Perhaps in reading this, you have noticed variances in dates.  They have been reproduced faithfully.  Some documents note Ruiter's birth in 1739, others place it in 1742.  His gravestone indicates his birth date as 1739.  Some note his arrival in Potton in 1796, while others say 1799.  Such are the perils of recorded history!)

History records Ruiter's first wife as being “High Dutch”, his second, as “Low Dutch” - which piqued my curiosity.  “ It is a fact that in the English of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, the word “Dutch” referred to anyone from a wide range of Germanic regions, places that we now distinguish as the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Austria and Switzerland.  At that time, “Dutch” was a broader term that meant what we today call Flemish, Dutch or German.  The terms “High Dutch” (German) and “Low Dutch” (Dutch, “nether” means “low”) were used to make a clearer distinction between what we now call German (from Latin) or Dutch (from old high German).  Germany (Deutschland) did not exist as a single nation state until 1871.  Prior to that time, Germany was more like a quiltwork of duchies, kingdoms, and states where various German dialects were spoken. »^[11]