Stephen Van Rensselaer III

A scion to one of New York’s richest families, Stephen Van Rensselaer was the eighth and last patroon of a vast estate between Rensselaer and Albany counties in upstate New York. At age twenty-one he inherited 1,200 square miles of land that he filled with tenant farmers, replicating a Dutch feudal pattern of land-ownership that his tenants challenged.