Catheryna Rombout Brett (1687–1764) (also Catherina, Catherine, and Catharyna) was the daughter of 12th New York City mayor and land baron Francis Rombouts and Helena Teller Bogardus Van Ball. She inherited a one-third interest in the sprawling Rombout Patent in today's southern Dutchess County, New York, at just four years old. At 16 she married a formal British naval lieutenant, Roger Brett, and the two relocated afterwards from the family home in New York City to their land upstate, reportedly the first permanent White settlers there.
Widowed at 31, Catheryna went on to manager her own affairs and her nearly 30,000-acre estate, unusual in that day and the more so on a frontier. Unlike the families that held the remaining two-thirds of the Rombout Patent, the van Cortlands and Verplanck/Kips, Catheryna not only rented but sold off parcels of her land over the years.
She hosted Daniel Ninham, the last sachem of the Wappinger. Catheryna is credited with teaching him English, which enabled him to argue for Wappinger land rights before the royal Lords of Trade of Great Britain, and allowing him to stay at his pleasure on ancestral lands on her estate in today's hamlet of Wiccopee.
Her legacy is memorialized at the Madam Brett Homestead she and Roger built in today's Beacon, New York.