Breuckelen Becomes Home

The Dutch in Manhattan find lots of land for farming on the long island across the harbor

By Steve Wick | Staff Writer

This map shows some early Dutch communities in Brooklyn. (Nassau County Museum Collection, Long Island Studies Institute / )

By the mid-1630s, the Dutch were ready to expand their base from the southern tip of Manhattan Island -- a collection of clapboard houses, a church, a tavern, a large storehouse, orchards and cow pastures -- to the unchartered wilds of Long Island.

Across the wide harbor east of New Amsterdam, as the Dutch called their tiny community, was a huge expanse of woods, open fields, salt marshes and bays filled with shells to make wampum, the coin of the new realm that could be used to buy furs from the Indians of the north. And more fertile open land for plantations than existed in all the countries of Europe combined.

Early in the summer of 1636, a decade after buying Manhattan Island, a group of Dutchmen began to make the first purchases of land on the place the Indians called Sewanhackey, the land of shells -- Long Island. Within a few weeks, a total of 15,000 acres had been bought along the eastern shore of what is today Jamaica Bay. The Dutch called their new village New Amersfoort. It is today called Flatlands.

Later that same month, the Dutch took a giant step toward expanding their Long Island holdings when two Dutchmen and a Frenchman bought two tracts totalling 1,265 acres. One of the tracts was in a place the Dutch, trying to understand the mysteries of the Algonquian language, called Gowanus; the second was nearby.

``The reason the Dutch crossed over from Manhattan to Long Island was because they needed good pasture land,'' said Charles Gehring, the director of the New Netherlands Project, in Albany. ``They needed land for their cattle, and Long Island had the space and Manhattan didn't. Long Island was cleared and flat, and Manhattan was rocky and hilly. Long Island represented the future.''

In a flurry of real-estate activity over the next two years, the Dutch acquired much of the eastern half of present-day Brooklyn. They purchased the land from the Indians for what amounted to throwaway trinkets and everyday household items -- duffel bags, knives, axes, awls, kettles and other cooking appliances. And they did not stop there. The increased demands for homesteads for new immigrants from the Netherlands pushed authorities to seek even more land, and as the decade of the 1630s ended, the Dutch had bought most of the land in present-day Queens County.

By the spring of 1639, as Dutch farmers began to plant their crops in western Long Island, there were only three other Europeans living to their east -- an Englishman named Lion Gardiner, who had just moved onto the island that now bears his name, his Dutch-born wife, and their daughter, Elizabeth. As small as it was, their grand island-manor north of East Hampton was the first English colony on Long Island. Far to the west, separated by a wilderness of forests and streams, the Dutch were not bothered by the Gardiner family. They could sit contentedly on Manhattan Island, and on western Long Island, and think everything around them would soon be theirs.

In 1640, as other Englishmen and their families began to move in small groups to the eastern end of Long Island, the Dutch continued to buy up the west end. Large purchases in the southern part of Brooklyn by homesteaders secured Gravesend for the Dutch. They now had the land that overlooked the narrows at the mouth of the harbor.

By the spring of that year, large tobacco plantations were thriving near Gravesend and along the wooded fringes of the East River. Also that spring, in an act as final as an execution, a Delaware-speaking Algonquian the Dutch called Penhawitz signed away rights to a huge expanse near the center of Brooklyn -- and thereafter became a refugee on his own land.

There were political reasons for the Dutch's aggressive land purchases, which displaced hundreds of Indians.

``In addition to finding pasture land, the Dutch needed to push settlements into Long Island as a counterbalance to the growing English presence on the East End,'' Gehring said. ``The Dutch could not allow the English to take it all, so they knew they had to claim as much of the west end of the island as they could. But the Dutch also knew they couldn't stop the English from setting up villages on the East End, so the island essentially became both Dutch and English at the same time.''

Six years later, as the Dutch population of western Long Island continued to grow, the director-general of the New Netherlands province, Willem Kieft, incorporated the area as Breuckelen, after the city of the same name in the old country.

Brooklyn was born.

Additional settlements followed, including a village called New Utrecht, which was just north of the entrance to New York Harbor. Dutch documents from the period say the first land owner in New Utrecht was a man named Cornelius Van Werckhoven, who divided the community into 50-acre lots. One of the first residents to live there, according to the documents, was a man named Jacob Swart, who was a carpenter. Swart built the first houses in New Utrecht.

``It's hard to imagine it today, but where these settlements were was very remote, a long way from other Dutch communities,'' Gehring said. ``They were used to very close-together communities back in the Netherlands, back-to-back farmland. Here, it was just the opposite. Of course, this made the settlements very vulnerable during times of unrest with the Indians.''

Unrest and bloodshed were to come.