1603-1671
Jan Evertsen Bout was born in the Province of Gelderland in 1603, and arrived in New Netherland on board the ship Eendracht in 1634. He was employed by patroon Michiel Paauw to superintend his colonies at Pavonia, a position Bout held until the summer of 1636, when he was succeeded by Cornelis Van Vorst. Bout continued to reside at Communipaw, where he was probably the first white settler, and in 1645 he was selected as an interpreter for the Algonquin. That same year, he was appointed to the Director’s Council.
Jan Evertsen Bout was a member of all of the representative assemblies in New Netherland – he was one of the Twelve Men in 1641, of the Eight Men in 1643 (replacing Jan Jansen Damen, whose presence was unacceptable to the other members of the assembly), and of the Nine Men in 1647 and 1650. In 1649, Bout was selected to accompany Adriaen van der Donck to the Netherlands to present the Great Remonstrance of New Netherland to the Dutch parliament. The remonstrance detailed the mismanagement of the New Netherland colony by the Dutch West India Company.
On July 6, 1645, Jan Evertsen Bout received a patent for land at “Matckawick on Gouwanus Kil” (Brooklyn), and on February 9, 1647, he obtained a patent for a lot in New Amsterdam. Bout was elected a Schepen (Magistrate) of Brooklyn in the years 1646-1654. Although reelected in 1654, he declined to serve again, but Director-General Pieter Stuyvesant ordered the Sheriff to formally notify Bout: “If you will not accept to serve as Schepen with others, your fellow-residents, then you must prepare yourself to sail in the ship King Solomon for Holland, agreeably to your utterance” and Bout continued to serve the community as directed. In 1657, he became a small Burgher of New Amsterdam and in 1660, he was appointed to a committee of three men to lay out and make a map of the new plantations in Brooklyn.
In 1665, New Netherland had become New York, and Jan Evertsen Bout represented Brooklyn at the Hempstead Convention.
Jan Evertsen Bout died in 1671.