William W Sackett

314. William W. Sacket,* 1765–1833, of Newtown, Hunting Grove, Monticello and Lumberland, all in the State of New York, son of (97) William and Sarah Fish Sackett, was educated in Columbia College, and was married in 1790 to Susan Smith, 1771, daughter of Hon. Nathan Smith and his wife Susan Mackintosh, of Hunting Grove, now Burnside, in the present County of Orange, N. Y. Mr. Sacket was by education and profession a civil engineer and surveyor. On leaving school he read law for a short time in the office of his stepfather, John Woods, Esq., of New York City. On reaching his majority and coming into possession of some property located within the bounds of the present County of Orange, which he had inherited for his grandfather's estate, he decided to locate in Newburgh, then the most promising village on the western bank of the central Hudson. The practice of his profession took him to all parts of the counties of Orange, Ulster and Sullivan, which were being at the time rapidly settled, mainly by former residents of Long Island. In 1793 Mr. Sacket became interested in the general store and fulling, grist and saw mills, which were being conducted by his father-in-law at Hunting Grove, and removed his family to that place, but about 1796, having been appointed Revenue Collector for the ninth division of the New York District, he re-transferred his residence to the village of Newburgh. In 1797 he was employed to survey and make a map of the town of Newburgh. This map was filed in the office of the Secretary of State at Albany, and has ever since been regarded an unimpeachable authority in all matters appertaining to boundaries of original land grants within that town, as well as of the dividing line between the present counties of Orange and Ulster. When in 1801 the Newburgh & Cochecton Turnpike Company was organized, Mr. Sacket became one of its board of directors and was employed to survey and lay out the route to be traversed. This road was of great value to Newburgh, increasing its importance as a commercial centre. While making this survey Mr. Sacket became interested in several extensive tracts of timber land in Sullivan County, on one of which the closing years of his life was spent.
     During the greater part of the time from 1800 to 1813, Mr. Sacket was associated with one of his brothers-in-law in a general store at Newburgh. But in the year last named he removed to Monticello, Sullivan County, where for a considerable period he had been engaged professionally in the construction of the Narrowsburgh and Sullivan Turnpike, and in the making of numerous surveys of timber lands. While residing at Monticello he erected on an extensive and heavily timbered tract he had purchased in the adjoining town of Lumberland, a commodious dwelling, with all necessary out-buildings, to which he removed with his family in 1818. After he became settled there he constructed near his house a saw mill, and engaged quite extensively in the manufacture of lumber. This with the continued practice of his profession absorbed his time, energies and attention up to within a short period of his death, in 1833. Two pocket receipt books carried by him from 1788 to 1813 have been preserved and are now (1907) the property of his grandson, William W. Sackett, who for many years was a resident of Wilkesbarre, Penn. These old receipt books contain the signatures of several hundred residents of Ulster, Orange and Sullivan Counties who were men of prominence a hundred years ago. They also contain minute genealogical tables of several generations of his ancestors and their families. These receipt books, together with available official records, the files of old Newburgh newspapers, and published histories of the counties mentioned, furnish abundant and interesting data for a more extended history of his life than available space in this volume will admit of publishing. A few extracts from the authorities mentioned, given chronologically, must of necessity suffice.
     Mr. Smith, the paternal grandfather of Sarah, wife of William W. Sacket, was, according to family tradition, a Presbyterian minister who left England on account of religious persecution, and after being in America a short time settled on Long Island, where he married a Miss Mowbray.
     Hon. Nathan Smith, son of above and father of Mrs. Susan Sacket, was born in town of Huntington, L. I., and married Susan Mackintosh, of Paramus, N. J., whose grandfather, Thomas Mackintosh, came into possession of 2, 000 acres of land in the western portion of the old town of New Windsor, then within the boundary line of Ulster County, N. Y. This tract was Patgented to "Phineas McIntosh" in 1719. A short time after Nathan Smith and Susan Mackintosh were married they were induced to go to New Windsor and locate in the heart of this as yet but partially improved estate. There Mr. Smith built a house and on the stream called Otterkill erected a grist mill, a saw mill, and a fulling mill. He also opened and conducted a gereral store, and named the settlement Hunting Grove. The young couple "grew up with the country," and Mr. Smith speedily attained a prominence which for a time rivaled that of his ultimately more illustrious townsmen, the Clintions. At the breaking out of the Revolution Mr. Smith was one of the early signers of the Revolutionary Pledge, and in 1776 he was made a member of the New Windsor Committee of Safety and Observation. During the same year his name appears on the records as one of the associate justices of the Court of Common Pleas. From 1777 to 1793 he was almost continously a nember of the State Legislature. In the last year named he was appointed first judge of Ulster County Common Pleas and served as such untio his untimely death in 1798; the following account of which is given in a letter written by hes granddaughter Miss Mariah Hunter, of New York City, to E. M. Ruttenber, the historian, under date of Jan. 15, 1879:
     The year 1798 is known as one of New York City's fatal yellow fever years, and Judge Smith, like all other victims of the scourge, had hardly taken his last breath when his volunteer attendants were dismissed, and under the hospital rules his body was placed in a rough box and unceremonioulsly hurried to the potters' field and buried in an unmarked grave. The John Woods, Esq., referred to above was the stepfather of his daughter's husband, Wm. W. Sacket.
     Politically Judge Smith was an ardent Whig, and the close attention he gave to public affairs in the troublous times in which he lived evenrually interfered with his private business to such an extent that he disposed of all his interests at Hunting Grove and settled on a farm he had purchased of Selah Van Duser, some two miles west of the village of Newgurgh. It was there that the sad news of his death and hasty burial reached his family in 1798.
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*All of his immediate family wrote their names S-a-c-k-e-t-t.