Deck Builder in Rhinebeck, NY

The Sepasco band of Native Americans lived in the area of today’s Rhinebeck at the time white colonists arrived. Sepasco/Sepascot is derived from the word sepuus, which means little river or stream, and refers to the Landman’s Kill stream whose cot or coot, meaning mouth, opens onto the southwestern shoreline of present-day Rhinebeck. This was the watershed of the Sepascos.

The Sepasco tribe had established a fertile stretch of land as a trail or tract leading from what is currently White School House Road to what later became the Rock City Community, east of where the village of Rhinebeck is now. A stopping point on the trail must have been a spring located there, that then led to the Landman’s Kill stream and followed it to the east, along the north bank. The trail continued to a native village at what is currently known as Lake Sepasco, close in proximity to the cave later called Welch’s Cave.

European settlement in the Rhinebeck area dates to 1686, when a group of Dutch crossed the river from Kingston and bought 2,200 acres (890 ha) of land from three members of the local Sepasco tribe. Later, Henry Beekman obtained a patent for the land and saw a need for development to begin. He brought into the area Casper Landsman, a miller, and William Traphagen, a builder. In 1703, the New York colonial assembly approved money for the construction of the King’s Highway, later known as the Albany Post Road and today most of Route 9. Three years later Traphagen bought a tract of land in Beekman’s patent where the King’s Highway intersected the Sepasco Indian Trail, the route today followed by Market Street. He built a house and tavern on the trail a short distance west of the King’s Highway. This was the beginning of Rhinebeck.