Calvinist denomination, holding to the Three Forms of Unity (Belgic Confession, Heidelberg Catechism, Canons of Dordt). The English were Anglicans, holding to the 39 Articles, a Protestant confession, with bishops. In 1665, Stuyvesant went to the Netherlands to report on his term as governor. On his return to the colony, he spent the remainder of his life on his farm, Stuyvesant Farm, of sixty-two acres outside the city, called the Great Bouwerie, beyond which stretched the woods and swamps of the village of Nieuw Haarlem. A pear tree that he reputedly brought from the Netherlands in 1647 remained at the corner of Thirteenth Street and Third Avenue until 1867 when it was destroyed by a storm, bearing fruit almost to the last. The house was destroyed by fire in 1777. He also built an executive mansion of stone called Whitehall. Personal life In 1645, Stuyvesant married Judith Bayard (–1687) of the Bayard family. Her brother, Samuel Bayard, was the husband of Stuyvesant's sister, Anna Stuyvesant. Petrus and Judith had two sons together: Balthasar Lazarus Stuyvesant (1647–1678), who settled in the West Indies and married Maria Lucas Raapzaat Nicolaes Willem Stuyvesant (1648–1698), who first married Maria Beekman (1650–1679), daughter of Wilhelmus Beekman, and after her death, Elisabeth Slechtenhorst. He died in August 1672 and his body was entombed in the east wall of St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery, which sits on the site of Stuyvesant's family chapel. Descendants The last acknowledged descendant of Peter Stuyvesant to bear his surname was Augustus van Horne Stuyvesant, Jr., who died a bachelor in 1953 at the age of 83 in his mansion at 2 East 79th Street. Rutherfurd Stuyvesant, the 19th-century New York developer, and his descendants are also descended from Peter Stuyvesant; however, Rutherford Stuyvesant's name was changed from Stuyvesant Rutherford in 1863 to satisfy the terms of the 1847 will of Peter Gerard Stuyvesant. His descendants include: Hamilton Fish (1808–1893), the 16th Governor of New York, a United States senator and United States Secretary of State John Winthrop Chanler (1826–1877), a lawyer and a U.S. Representative from New York Stuyvesant Fish Morris (1843–1928), a prominent physician. Stuyvesant Fish (1851–1923), a President of the Illinois Central Railroad who was prominent in the U.S. Gilded Age Lewis Stuyvesant Chanler (1869–1942), a Lieutenant Governor of New York Edith Stuyvesant Gerry (1873–1958), an American philanthropist who was married to George Washington Vanderbilt II and Peter Goelet Gerry