HISTORY OF BROOKLYN 377

CHAPTER X.

FROM THE CLOSE OF THE REVOLUTION TO THE WAR OF 1819.

FOR the first few years succeeding the war, but little of interest can be gleaned concerning the progress of the town, or the doings of its inhabitants. They doubtless found plenty of work for their hands to do in repairing the ravages which their property had suffered during a seven years’ hostile occupation. Yet the spirit of improvement was astir; and, in 1785, the staid old Dutchmen who worshipped in the ancient edifice in the middle of the road at “Brooklyn Church,” as well as the few but loyal Episcopalians, who had set up their Ebenezer in John Middagh's barn, on the corner of present Henry and Poplar streets, found a denominational rival in the little handful of stout-hearted “Independents,” who erected a small place of worship on the ground now occupied by “St. Anne’s Buildings,” on Fulton street.1 In this year, also, were the beginnings of the “Brooklyn Fire Department.”2 In the fall of 1786, advertisements of races and fox-hunts on Ascot Heath, Flatbush, and a fox-chase Òfrom Mr. Dawson’s, at Brooklyn Ferry,” give evidence that there was still in the county a lingering taste for the gay sports with which, in days bygone, the British officers had so often whiled away their hours of leisure. The erection of that excellent institution, “Erasmus Hall,” at Flatbush, in 1787, proved that the higher interests of education and morality were properly appreciated by the inhabitants of Kings County; while the celebration of the Fourth of July, in the same year, by a number of gentlemen, at Dawson’s, in Brooklyn—with toasts and the firing of rockets—may be accepted as gratifying testimony to their patriotism.

1 See Hist. of Churches, in second volume.

2 The history of the Department will be found in the second volume.