Free The Epic of New York City by Edward Robb Ellis Page A

in Haarlem, which ultimately dropped one a from its name.
    The present five boroughs of New York City resulted from the coalescence of many individual hamlets, villages, towns, and cities. On Long Island the Dutch settled the western part, while the English gathered in communities farther east. The present boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens are located on the western end of Long Island.
    Brooklyn got its start in 1634, when the Dutch founded Midwout, or Middle Woods, in the ’t Vlacke Bos, or Wooded Plain. Later ’t Vlacke Bos was anglicized to Flatbush. Today it lies in central Brooklyn. By 1652 this hamlet had received a patent of township from Stuyvesant, and two years afterward the original Flatbush Reformed Protestant Church was erected at Flatbush and Church avenues under the governor’s direction. He raised a stockade around it as protection from Indians.
    In 1636 William Adriaense Bennett and Jacques Bentyn bought 930 acres of land from a Mohawk chief, named Gouwane, in the southeastern part of Brooklyn now called Gowanus. The purchase included the area known today as Red Hook. There are two theories on why the Dutch called it Roode Hoeck: Either it described the color of the soil, or the area was covered with ripe cranberries.
    In 1637 a Walloon, named Joris De Rapelje, purchased 335 acres near an East River inlet, later the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Because of him the Dutch called it Waelenbogt, or Walloon Bay. This term later was corrupted to Wallabout Bay. In 1638 the Dutch West India Company bought land east of the bay and founded a hamlet called Boswijck, or Bushwick. The Greenpoint section of Brooklyn was part of the original purchase of Bushwick.
    Gowanus and Wallabout Bay were absorbed in 1646 by the village of Breuckelen, or Broken Land, named for a village in Holland of similar topography. This village had been started about four years earlier at the present intersection of Fulton and Smith streets. Breuckelen was granted a municipal form of government on November 26, 1646, or four years earlier than New Amsterdam itself. The name evolved from Breuckelen to Brockland to Brocklin to Brookline and finally to Brooklyn.
    South of Flatbush another place, called Gravesend, was established in 1643 by Lady Deborah Moody, a cultured and tough-fibered Englishwoman. With the consent of the Dutch she bought the property from the Canarsie Indians for one blanket, one kettle, some wampum, three guns, and three pounds of gunpowder. Her colony included Coney Island, which the Indians called Narrioch. Born in England,Lady Moody had left her homeland because she had been denied freedom of conscience, had removed to New England, where she had encountered further intolerance, and had then made her way to the more liberal New Netherland. Until her death in 1659 she was an active leader in her community. Even the testy Stuyvesant sought her opinion from time to time.
    In 1652 Cornelis Van Werckhoven of the Dutch West India Company heard that the English were claiming some Dutch possessions on Long Island. He went there, inspected land in what is now west Brooklyn, decided to establish a colony, and went back to Holland to recruit settlers. Upon returning to Long Island, he bought property from the Indians between Bay Ridge and Gravesend, paying them in shirts, shoes, stockings, knives, combs and scissors. Then he erected a house and mill. In 1657 his town took the name of New Utrecht, for his native city in Holland.
    The borough of Queens was first settled by the Dutch in about 1635. Colonization began at Flushing Bay, a shallow inlet of the East River in the northern section of Queens. Mespat, now Maspeth, was founded in 1642 at the head of Newtown Creek. The next year brought the establishment of Vlissingen, or Flushing, located in northern Queens and named for a town in Holland. It received its formal charter in 1645.
    Between Maspeth and Flushing the town of Middleburg was created in 1652 by English Puritans under Dutch