Van Guilder, John (Jan)

John Van Guilder (Toanuck/Tawanut) (1690s- b. May 1758) was a Mohican with extensive Mohican and Wappinger kin networks in the Housatonic River (Massachusetts) and Dutchess County (New York) regions.  He may have been related to Tataemshatt, sachem of Tachkanick (Taconic)

Van Guilder married Anna Maria Karner, a German Palatine immigrant, and had several children, among them, Nicholas, Joseph, John, Matthew, Catharine, Jacob, Andrew, Henry, and Magdalena. The family lived in what today is Egremont, Massachusetts,  located on the eastern side of the Taconic mountains.  Van Guilder supported them by farming and operating a sawmill in partnership with his brother-in-law, Andreas Karner.  He was a Christian and attended services at Stockbridge and the Moravian missions

His name appears on a 1724 Mohican deed for the area of land called Westenhook (Sheffield, Great Barrington, and parts of Stockbridge and Lee).  In the summer of 1744, Mohican leaders Konkapot, Skannop, and Poniote of Housatonic gave him land west of the Sheffield line, for “the love & Esteem we have of our friend John Van Guilder." 

During the controversies with Robert Livingston over tenants on the borderlands, Van Guilder sided with the tenants and fought off encroachments on the land.  In one incident in 1756, he and his son were jailed for killing one of a sheriff's posse who attempted to evict tenants on disputed property.  His subsequent confinement to jail was a concern of William Johnson, the British Crown's Indian agent in North America.  Van Guilder died sometime before early summer 1758.

Deborah Winchell, "John Van Gilder, Mohican, Husbandman and Historical Figure" in Shirley W. Dunn, ed., Mohican Seminar III: The Journey, An Algonquian Peoples Seminar (Albany, NY: The University of the State of New York, 2009), 127-144.