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New Amsterdam, c. 1650-53, copied so often that it has become known as the “Prototype View.” On the far left, just east of what is now Bowling Green, stands the company gristmill, while to its right the twin gables of the Reformed church rise above the walls of the fort. At Schreyers Hook in the foreground—just below what is now the intersection of Whitehall and Pearl streets—are the company’s wooden wharf, crane, and a beam for weighing merchandise (which may also have served the burgeoning community as a gallows). At the extreme right, the City Tavern faces the East River shore on present-day Pearl Street, near the head of Coenties Slip. (© Museum of the City of New York)

From the outset, the company had supplied New Amsterdam with a succession of midwives and zieckentroosters (comforters of the sick)—lay pastors who assisted ordained clergymen by reading Scripture and prayers to the ill. A year before the arrival of Governor Kieft, it sent over the first formally trained physician, Dr. Johannes La Montagne, a Huguenot refugee and graduate of the University of Leyden. The company balked at the expense of a proper hospital, however, until Stuyvesant decided that unsanitary conditions impeded the recovery of sick slaves and soldiers billeted in private homes. In 1658, as a result, New Amsterdam got its first hospital under the direction of matron Hilletje Wilbruch (in the Netherlands such charitable institutions were often run by women).

In 1649 and again in 1653, on the other hand, Stuyvesant refused requests to build an orphan asylum and appoint orphanmasters, claiming that the idea was inconsistent with “the weak state of this just beginning city.” Let the deacons of the church “keep their eyes open,” he said, and look after any destitute children they saw. Matters changed only after 1654, when company officials arranged with the burgomasters of Amsterdam to send children from that city’s orphan asylum to New Amsterdam, there to be bound out as apprentices and servants. Now Stuyvesant not only rented a house to lodge the first group—the town’s first public home for orphans—but, in 1656, established an Orphan Masters’ Court.

The company likewise resisted appeals to provide for the relief of the poor—a responsibility, it said with some justice, that properly lay with religious institutions. In 1653, accordingly, New Amsterdam’s Reformed Church opened an almshouse or “deacons’ house” for the aged poor on what is now Beaver Street. For funding, the deacons relied on contributions collected in church and at weddings, where guests dropped offerings in a poor box. In time, the system acquired a public character as the deacons began to assist the needy in general and were assigned revenues raised from municipal fines. In 1655 the first lottery took place in New Amsterdam as a fund-raising device for the almshouse.

Company involvement expanded in 1661, after the deacons complained that needy people from outlying villages had begun drifting into town for help, diminishing their ability to care for New Amsterdam’s own poor. Stuyvesant and his council enacted the colony’s first poor law, “to the end that the Lazy and Vagabond may as much as possible be rebuked, and the really Poor the more assisted and cared for.” The law required every village to take up weekly collections for its own poor. It also specifically relieved the New Amsterdam Church from caring for nonresidents who could not present a certificate of character and poverty from the deacon at their place of residence.

So, too, the company responded grudgingly when New Amsterdam’s residents asked for schools comparable to those in the Netherlands, where publicly funded education was widely available, even to the poor. The company had launched a common school in 1638, but it refused to build a schoolhouse, forcing teacher and pupils to find temporary quarters. Residents complained repeatedly—in 1649 they appealed again for construction of a “public school, with at least two good teachers”—but the company