Following is an article which appeared in the Middletown Times Herald on 
Saturday, October 2, 1943.

Historic House No. 287
Boyhood Home of America’s First Professional Detective

	New York’s first High Constable and America’s first professional detective, 
the fiercely upright Jacob Hays, grew to manhood on the Stitt homestead farm 
between Circleville and Bloomingburg, the Roy Tarbell farm of the present, and 
perchance it was here, under the high-minded influence of John and Nancy 
McCullough Stitt, that he acquired that uncompromising inclination toward 
righteousness which led him to try to make early Nineteenth Century New York 
not only law abiding but morally clean whether it wanted to be or not.  
Metropolitan bad men of his time jeered and feared him, because he was comical 
to observe but gifted, it seemed, with a sixth sense for the detection and 
prevention of crime.  He was determined that wrongdoing should not exist in his 
bailiwick.
	Though of Jewish parentage and living with the Stitts as a bound boy, 
young Jacob apparently lived as one of the family under circumstances that 
established bonds of affection that lasted throughout his life and redounded to 
the benefit of the Stitts as well as Jacob Hays.
	When young Stitts approached maturity and wanted to leave the farm, he 
founded places for them in New York, where a descendant now sits on the 
judicial bench.
	When Mother Stitt wanted to dispose of a season’s butter, “thirteen or 
sixteen firkens,” he wrote, “I believe I can find sale for it...When you come I will 
try to do the best for you that I can.  Remember m to all the family, from your 
Friend, Jacob Hays.”  The letter, directed to “Mr. John Stitt, Shawangunk, with 
care” but addressed to “Dear Madam” was dated November sixth, 1805.
	Born in Westchester  in 1772 and bound out to the Stitts from his twelfth to 
his twenty-first year, Jacob had been in the city for years when he offered to help 
market the Stitt butter.  He was then High Constable, a resounding title achieved 
in 1801 after service as a policeman.  Edward Davenport, writing in Collier’s in 
1929, said Hays was “without exception the best known man in New York,” when 
in 1813 he frustrated a plan to hold the Nation’s first prize fight in New York as a 
Fourth of July celebration and forced its postponement and transfer to Jersey 
City, where he himself got into the middle of and contributed to the melee  The 
fact that a taverner from his town was promoter of the disgraceful program and 
seamen from his town were the fighters was reason enough for him to take a 
hand, in the opinion of High Constable Hays.  They couldn’t escape him by 
crossing the river.
	High and mighty though he was as a New York law enforcer and comical 
as he was in his detective get-ups, the affection that had grown out of bonds of 
apprenticeship remained strong between him and the Stitts.  Moreover, though 
he resumed his ancestral religion in New York, tradition indicates he attended 
Covenanter meetings with them as a boy and it is said that on visits to 
Bloomingburg he always paused in the cemetery at the grave of the dominie he 
had known.  Since the Bloomingburg church and cemetery were not established 
until 1799, after Jacob had left, the latter story seems to lack confirmation, unless 
as an attendant with the Stitts at the Bruynswick church he knew the Rev. 
George Stewart, who in 1808 became the first assigned pastor of the 
Bloomingburg congregation, and who lies in the old cemetery there.  The Stitts 
named two sons for that cleric.
	Another Stitt tradition that has become confused with the passing of time 
is the story that the property was a gift from the Colden family in 
acknowledgment of Revolutionary service.  The title does trace back to Jane and 
Alice Colden, daughters of the Lieutenant-Governor.  They held patent rights to a 
triangular parcel of 3,000 acres on both sides of what was designated the 
Shawangunk River.  But the Coldens were a Tory family, and John Stitt is 
described as a Patriot militiaman.  The parallel believe that the Coldens forfeited 
the property during the war and he acquired it as a soldier bounty is likewise 
dispelled by a deed of purchase of one hundred acres in 1800.  Descriptions 
refer to Lots 1, 2 and 3 in the Jane and Alice Colden patent.  So whether or not 
the Stitts were in Shawangunk during the Revolution, they did occupy the present 
Tarbell farm at least from 1793 until executors of John Alexander Stitt sold to 
Arthur Noxon, descendant of another early patentee, in 1891.  Alex had bought 
out his brother, Thomas Jefferson, in 1853.  (The Stitt admiration for early 
American Statesman appears in several of the sons’ names).  Their father, John 
M., had acquired it from his father in 1833 and left it to the brothers jointly in 
1847.  For their brother Charles Howard, who had given up Ivanhoe and other 
“light reading’ to concentrate on theology, he provided funds for completion of “a 
course of professional studies.”  George Stewart, the father noted, had 
completed his professional studies.  Further, he charged Thomas and John to 
give “comfortable support and maintenance” to Thomas Gregg, “now and for a 
long time living in my family.”  The Stitts were never accused of inhospitality.
	The year 1833 was important in the career of John M. Stitt.  He took over 
the home farm, rebuilt or enlarged the house and stood by the old religion in a 
schism that finally extinguished the Covenanter church his father had helped 
organize with the blessing of the New Shawangunk (Bruynswick) church in 1799.  
None of the Stitts joined the new church in the village until 1843, but in the 
meantime, it seems, the old church in the cemetery had been dismantled and 
some of its woodwork used reverently in the new Stitt house.  A chimney stone 
bears the inscription:  John M. Stitt, 1833.  The living room fireplace is a curiosity 
of Nineteenth Century imitative art.  The entire facing and mantel are painted to 
simulate a delicately tinted marble.
	Stitts were among the early and most highly regarded families of the 
vaguely defined and extensive Orange, Sullivan and Ulster border area called 
Shawangunk.  But where they came from, or when or why  are facts no one 
seems able to supply today.  It is not just that the Stitts have forgotten or lost 
their family record.  The first generation Stitts in Shawangunk appear to have 
renounced all association with the land of their origin, and the only identification 
that curious Stitt children ever got from their mother, was the tantalizing 
statement that their forbears lived in “a part of Scotland where you could see 
clothes blowing on the lines in Ireland.”  Some have though it was intended to 
prevent them returning to the homeland to claim an inheritance, but it might just 
as well have been that early Stitts feared the consequences of religious and 
political beliefs even in this far country.
	After 1800 they preserved so many letters, documents and price lists as to 
make their dwelling a treasure house of information.  Many of the papers are still 
there, treasured by Mrs. Tarbell.  Meanwhile, Mr. Tarbell has opened on the Stitt 
farm a sand and gravel bank that has furnished material for two highways such 
as early Stitts never imagined.  Miles of Route Seventeen and Cochecton 
Turnpike were built from the Tarbell gravel pit. --Photo G.L. Seese; text by M.P. 
Seese.