In 1775, John DeNoyelles, former supervisor of Haverstraw, died, leaving his wife Rachel a widow with a farm to run and four children to support. Only a year later, the Revolutionary War came to the shores of Rachel’s homestead on Haverstraw Bay. Haverstraw was strategically located, easily accessible to Washington’s headquarters in Newburgh and elsewhere in the Hudson Valley and the gateway to the Hudson Highlands and West Point. The war unfolded around Rachel and her family, and deeply impacted the next ten years of her life.
Women Spinning Homespun in Colonial Home, Westford Historical Society Archives
In her landmark study Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for American Independence, historian Carol Berkin explores the roles women played in the Revolutionary War. While not soldiers, officers, or politicians, these women nonetheless exerted sway over the outcome of the war, through their activities as protestors and demonstrators, as writers, as supporters and suppliers of the Army, and even as spies. They kept farms and shops running and children safe and fed, while their husbands and sons joined the fighting. The American Revolution blurred the distinction between the front lines and the home front, and the contributions of these women were essential to the success of the Revolutionary cause.
One of the most crucial roles women played were as suppliers of the Continental Army. The American colonists had a deep distrust of a standing army, and therefore, General George Washington regularly found himself in the position of begging the Continental Congress for more funds to provision the men under his command. In New York and elsewhere, the Continental Army relied on support from surrounding farms as they camped and skirmished along the Hudson River. Some homesteads were requisitioned as headquarters and crops taken forcibly to feed a hungry army. In other instances, farmers sold crops and other supplies to the Army, as a way to make money for their families in an uncertain time.
Rachel DeNoyelles, known by this point as the Widow DeNoyelles, supported the Continental Army by selling them goods. In a letter dated June 15, 1776, Commanding Officer Ann Hawkes Hay details accounts to be paid, including “3 bush. salt, of the widow Noyelles” and “To the Widow Noyelles for 10 lbs. candles.” These items were supplied to the ships of war docked in Haverstraw Bay in the summer of 1776. Rachel also negotiated a fee for pasturing a captain’s horses on her land, and hiring out her own horses for use by military officers.
How did Rachel decide to support the Continental Army with these goods and services? She appears to have been a patriot, supportive of the cause of liberty, and this was an opportunity to stand for her beliefs in a material way. Later in the war, in 1782, she married Colonel John Roberts, also of Haverstraw, who served in the Battle of Monmouth. It is also likely that she had few choices available to her, to keep her farm and provide for her family. We know the money was crucial, as she later petitioned George Washington to pay her what the Army owed. For the majority of women in this time period, their stories do not show up in the historical record. Rachel’s experience offers valuable insight into the choices women faced during the war.
No matter their motivations, Rachel, and other women like her, were putting themselves in harm’s way by supporting the Continental Army. The British, eager to dissuade colonists from supporting the Patriots, burned Rachel’s house to the ground in 1781. According to family reports, this destruction of her property, which included her warehouse and stores, was in part because Rachel refused to sell her hay to feed British horses.
After the war, Rachel and Colonel Roberts moved to Westchester. Her children, Peter and John Jacob, built new homes on the family property. They would go on to found the DeNoyelles Brickyards, one of the oldest and longest-running brickyards in Haverstraw.
Rachel DeNoyelles’s name is not on the historical markers, but her support of the Continental Army, and the support of others like her, was crucial to the success of the war.
~Meghan Gelardi Holmes, Public Historian