[5] The Sepasco tribe had established a fertile stretch of land as a trail or tract leading from what is currently White School House Road to what later became the Rock City Community,[3][6] east of where the village of Rhinebeck is now.[5] European settlement in the Rhinebeck area dates to 1686, when a group of Dutch crossed the river from Kingston and bought 2,200 acres (890 ha) of land from three members of the local Sepasco tribe.In 1703, the New York colonial assembly approved money for the construction of the King's Highway, later known as the Albany Post Road and today most of Route 9.Three years later Traphagen bought a tract of land in Beekman's patent where the King's Highway intersected the Sepasco Indian Trail, the route today followed by Market Street.A decade later, in 1715, Beekman's son brought in 35 German Palatines who had fled religious persecution at home and had just concluded an attempt to produce naval stores for the British government on the lands of Robert Livingston to the north in what is now Columbia County.In the mid-1770s, a former soldier named Richard Montgomery moved from Knight's Bridge (now the Bronx) into the Rhinebeck village with his new wife, a member of the Livingston family.The area was also acquiring a cachet as a location for the country estates of the Gilded Age wealthy, and those people could frequently be seen in town during the summer and on weekends.Roughly 20% of the village's population during the Gay Nineties was in this business in some way, and the total crop was later estimated to have exceeded a million dollars in value some years.A third president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, himself a native of nearby Hyde Park, would play a role in the town's history during the later years of the Great Depression when he oversaw the design process for the new post office.He had long promoted Dutch-style fieldstone as a material for public buildings in the area, and told the architects to use Henry Beekman's house (burned in a 1910 fire) as their model and some of its remaining stones for the post office.The Wilderstein mansion, a current historical site on the Hudson River, features both colonial and archaeological history dating from June 1853.[8] "Wilderstein", named by Thomas Suckley and his wife Catherine Murray Bowne and which translates to "wild man's stone", references a petroglyph from local Sepasco or Esopus peoples on the property, serving as a historical reminder of pre-European settlement.