The Ferry and the Ferry Road. Settlement of Flatlands. Flatbush. Lady Deborah Moody and the Settlement of Gravesend. Early Settlements. The Name of Breuckelen. Henry C. Murphy's Comments. First Schepens and Schout. Commission from the Colonial Council. The Removal of Kieft. Arrival of Stuyvesant.
Near the site of the present Peck Slip, New York, there lay, in 1642, a farm owned by Cornelis Dircksen, who kept an inn, and conducted a ferry between a point of land at Peck Slip and a point on the Long Island shore represented by the present location of Fulton Ferry. Dircksen owned land on the Long Island side also, close to the ferry. When he sold this tract in 1643 to William Thomasen, he sold with it the right to run the ferry.
Clustered about the ferry on the Long Island shore were a number of cabins, and the little settlement which grew up there became known in popular parlance as "the Ferry." Crossing the river in the small and rudely built boats of the period was no easy matter, particularly when the tide was in full motion; and the place of crossing was naturally chosen, as at a later time in the building of the great bridge, at the narrowest part.
The irregular road, which wound its way from the ferry on the Long Island side, straggled to the east of the rising ground called by the Indians "Iphetanga," and now known as the Heights, and reached the little settlement of Breuckelen lying at a point closely corresponding to the present City Hall. In fact, the old road followed the general direction of busy Fulton Street of later days.
Before the Indian war of 1643 there were only one or two cabins in this region. To the south lay the first settlement within the limits of Kings County—Amersfoort, or Flatlands. The first recorded purchase of land in this region was by Andries Hudde and Wolphert Gerretsen in 1636. The first plantation here was called Achtervelt, and the house which marked the first settlement is described by Teunis G. Bergen as being twenty-six feet long, twenty-two feet wide, and forty feet high, with a roof "covered above and around with plank; two lofts, one above another, and a small chamber on their side;" while adjoining was "one barn forty feet long, eighteen feet wide, and twenty-four feet deep; and one bergh with five posts, forty feet long," the whole surrounded with "long, round palisades."
The road running to Amersfoort turned off at an angle corresponding to the present line of Flatbush Avenue. The road made another turn a short time later, and reached the settlement of Midwout or Flatbush (called by the Dutch 't Vlaacke Bos). The actual first settlement of Flatbush, as of the other towns within Kings County, is frequently estimated to have been as early as 1624; but as in the other cases we are obliged to depend for definite knowledge upon records of purchase, which, although they undoubtedly follow, sometimes by a period of several years, the planting of the first habitation, give indication of the time when permanent settlement had begun to be a fact. The town patent from the Director was not secured until 1651.
The ferry road ultimately found its way to the then far town of Jamaica.
Meanwhile, upon that part of Long Island first trodden by the feet of white men had begun the town of Gravesend. The region of Gravesend, including Coney Island (called by the Dutch 't Conijnen Eylant) and much of the Bay coast, differed from other regions of the county in being first settled by English people.
Among those who were driven from Connecticut by Puritan intolerance was Lady Deborah Moody. Lady Moody was a daughter of Walter Dunch, a member of the English Parliament in the time of Elizabeth, and widow of Sir Henry Moody of Garsden, in Wiltshire, who had been knighted by King James in 1622. She emigrated to America in 1640, and settled at Swampscott, near Lynn. In her expectation of religious liberty she was disappointed, for the authorities were not long in discovering that she did not regard infant baptism as an ordinance of Divine origin. In those days children a few days old were baptized at church fonts in which the ice had sometimes to be broken before the function could proceed, and the ceremony was regarded as absolutely essential to salvation. Lady Moody was first "admonished," and afterward "presented" to the Quarterly Court for sinfully doubting the wisdom of infant baptism. Excommunicated from the church, and thereby placed in an ostracized position, the distressed English gentlewoman, accompanied by her son, Sir Henry, John Tilton and his wife, and by a few other friends, came to New Amsterdam.[12]
Here she was agreeably surprised to find a few English people who had been living some distance above the Fort, opposite the lower end of Blackwell's Island, but who were at the time of her coming huddled under the walls of the Fort under the terror of the prevailing Indian wars.