The Huyck Bain Crandell Collection, Document BH059
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1796-01-04 Demand Note, Abraham Paterson to Francis Beyar for £1:12:0
Payable on demand thirty two shillings. Why it is with the Arent/Christina Huyck documents is unclear.
Image: BH059.jpg
Transcription
Due To Francis Beyar thirty Two Shillings New York Cur- rency payable on Demand Witness 4 th of Jan’y 1796 — £1:12:0 Abraham Paterson{sig}
Commentary
Notes:
- Francis Beyar — the creditor, a new name in the archive, could be German, Dutch, or French Huguenot origin, all plausible in Columbia County.
- Abraham Paterson — the debtor, signing the note. Another new name — Paterson being an anglophone surname consistent with the post-Revolutionary demographic mix of Columbia County.
- £1:12:0 — 32 shillings — a small sum, consistent with a minor personal debt.
- “Payable on demand” — no fixed repayment date, suggesting an informal arrangement between neighbors rather than a formal commercial transaction.
- January 4, 1796 — consistent with the other post-Revolutionary documents we’ve been seeing.
- Why this note is in the Huyck archive is not immediately clear — neither Francis Beyar nor Abraham Paterson has appeared previously. Possibilities:
- It was among Christina’s papers as a debt owed to or by someone in her network (Arent having died in 1794 - jhc)
- It was collected as part of the estate administration
- It was simply filed with other papers by a later hand
- Promissory notes and personal bonds functioned as a form of currency in this period, passed from hand to hand by endorsement. The holder of a note could transfer it to a third party in payment of their own debt, endorsing it on the back — effectively using it as a check or banknote. (It is not endorsed on the back - jhc) So the sequence could have been:
- Abraham Paterson owed Francis Beyar £1:12:0
- Beyar owed Christina Huyck or Arent's estate a similar sum
- Beyar transferred Paterson’s note to Christina in payment of his own debt
- The note then sat in Arent’s papers as an asset of his estate
- This was entirely standard practice in rural New York in the 1790s when hard currency was scarce.
- It would also explain why the note appears in the archive without any obvious direct connection to the Huyck family — it arrived as a transferred instrument rather than an original transaction. Burger J. Huyck and Samuel Van Slyck as estate administrators would have inventoried it as an asset of Arent’s estate worth £1:12:0, to be collected from Abraham Paterson when presented.
— Notes by Claude.ai 4.6 2026-05-09 - jhc
Metadata
Document: BH059
Date: 1796-01-04
Language: English
Type: Promissory note
Subject: Commerce
Principals: Francis Beyar, Abraham Paterson
Places Mentioned: None
— page revised 2026-06-14 - jhc
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Huyck Bain Crandell Collection © 2026 by John H. Coxon is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
