Arent van Curler
American settler
Arent van Curler, later van Corlaer, (1619 or 1620 - 1667) was the grandnephew of Kiliaen van Rensselaer. In 1637 Rensselaer commissioned him as his secretary and accountant at Rensselaer's patroonship Rensselaerswyck in the Dutch colony of New Netherland.
Life
As time went on, Rensselaer began to suspect that Van Curler was neglecting his management duties to engage in the fur trade. Dominie Johannes Megapolensis reported that van Curler had built a fine house and was drinking more than occasionally. In the summer of 1642, Van Curler began to develop a large farm, located on the west side of the Hudson, four miles above Fort Orange, in an area called "de Vlackte".
In August 1642, French Jesuit missionary Isaac Jogues was captured by the Mohawk and brought to their village of Ossernenon. Hearing of this, Van Curler visited the "first castle" and attempted to ransom Jogues, but without success as the Mohawk were not inclined to release him at that time. In the autumn of 1643, the Mohawk were persuaded to bring the priest with them when they came to Beverwijck to trade. Once there, van Curler helped Jogues to escape, hiding him his barn until a deal could be reached and the Frenchman put on a ship to take him downriver to New Amsterdam. In 2011 the Colonie Historical Society and the town historian were working on an interpretive sign for Schuyler Flatts Park to commemorate this.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Arent van Curler” as american settler. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as american settler. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 8, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q1967194. VIAF identifies the subject as 51620587. The Library of Congress control number is nr2001034132. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1619, 1620, 1667 and 1637.
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This entry incorporates text from “Arent van Curler” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.