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

auspices, but after conflict between the Dutch and English the name was changed to New Town or, as we know it, Newtown. It embraced the southwestern half of present-day Queens County.
    Shortly after the founding of New Amsterdam a Dutchman, named Jorissen, bought property at Hunter’s Point in middle Queens near the mouth of Newtown Creek in present-day Long Island City. Many fine farms soon sprang up in the area.
    About 1645 other Hollanders paid the Matinecock Indians an ax for every 50 acres of land in the northern section of Queens now called Whitestone. It took its name from a big white rock at an East River landing. Another part of northern Queens, Astoria, was settled in 1654 by William Hallett, who obtained a patent of 1,500 acres from the Dutch West India Company and the Indians. For the next 150 years this property belonged to his family.
    English settlers, in 1650, founded a settlement, called Rustdorp, in middle Queens and were given a charter the same year by Stuyvesant. Soon the name was changed to Jamaica, for the Jameco Indians who first lived there. About two years later another section of middle Queens was bought from the Indians. At first the region was known as Whitepot, from the legend that the land had been bought with three white pots. Today it is called Forest Hills.
    The Bronx was known to the Indians as Keskeskeck. In 1639 it was bought by the Dutch West India Company, but at first no one settled there. Then, as we have seen, a Danish immigrant, named Jonas Bronck, became the first white colonist when he purchased fifty acres between the Harlem and Aquahung Rivers. The latter stream became known as Bronck’s River and now, of course, is the Bronx River.
    Religious dissenters trickled into the Bronx from New England. In 1643 John Throgmorton settled on the skinny peninsula we call Throgs Neck. The next year Anne Hutchinson, exiled from Massachusetts, took up residence on the banks of the stream now known as the Hutchinson River. Her family was wiped out by an Indian massacre. In 1654 Thomas Pell bought a large tract of land near Pelham Bay Park.
    The upper reach of the Bronx constituting Van Cortlandt Park was originally a hunting ground for Mohican Indians. In 1646 it was included in a patroonship granted by the company to Adriaen Cornelissen Van der Donck. He was New Netherland’s first lawyer and historian and served as one of Stuyvesant’s Nine Men. Because of his wealth and social position, he was popularly known as jonkheer, meaning his young lordship. In time the name of the area was corrupted to Yonkers.
    The story of Staten Island, lying south of Manhattan, started in 1630, when Michael Paauw was granted a patroonship that included the isle. At least three attempts were made to colonize the island, but each time the settlements were wiped out by Indians. The Dutch bought Staten Island a total of five times. In 1661 nineteen Dutch and French settlers established the first permanent colony on the island near the present site of Fort Wadsworth. They called it Oude Dorp, or Old Town.
    The city of New Amsterdam and the colony of New Netherland had one and the same government until 1653, when the city got its own separate government. This happened because of a chain of circumstances forged in the year 1649.
    The Nine Men had been emboldened by Kuyter’s and Melyn’s victory over Peter Stuyvesant. Disgruntled by his treatment of them and disheartened because his reforms had failed, they decided to go over his head, bypass the company, and appeal directly to the Dutch government at The Hague. Despite the governor’s angry protests, the Nine Men drew up and sent to the homeland the famous Petition and Remonstrance of New Netherland.
    Both papers were written by Van der Donck and were signed in July, 1649. The petition was a short report on the condition of the colony, with suggested remedies. The remonstrance was a lengthy explanation of the detailed history of the facts on