Boiler Installation in Brooklyn, NY

The history of European settlement in Brooklyn spans more than 350 years. The settlement began in the 17th century as the small Dutch-founded town of “Breuckelen” on the East River shore of Long Island, grew to be a sizeable city in the 19th century and was consolidated in 1898 with New York City (then confined to Manhattan and the Bronx), the remaining rural areas of Brooklyn, and the largely rural areas of Queens and Staten Island, to form the modern City of New York.

New Netherland[edit]

The Dutch were the first Europeans to settle Long Island’s western edge, which was then largely inhabited by the Lenape, an Algonquian-speaking American Indian tribe often referred to in European documents by a variation of the place name “Canarsie”. Bands were associated with place names, but the colonists thought their names represented different tribes. The Breuckelen settlement was named after Breukelen in the Netherlands; it was part of New Netherland. The Dutch West India Company lost little time in chartering the six original parishes (listed here by their later English town names):

• Gravesend: in 1645, settled under Dutch patent by English followers of Anabaptist Deborah Moody, named for ‘s-Gravenzande, Netherlands, or Gravesend, England;
• Brooklyn Heights: chartered as Breuckelen in 1646, after the town now spelled Breukelen, Netherlands. Breuckelen was along Fulton Street (now Fulton Mall) between Hoyt Street and Smith Street (according to H. Stiles and P. Ross). Brooklyn Heights, or Clover Hill, is where the village of Brooklyn was founded in 1816;
• Flatlands: chartered as Nieuw Amersfoort in 1647;
• Flatbush: chartered as Midwout in 1652;
• Nieuw Utrecht in 1652, named after the city of Utrecht, Netherlands; and
• Bushwick: chartered as Boswijck in 1661.

The colony’s capital of New Amsterdam, across the East River, obtained its charter in 1653. The neighborhood of Marine Park was home to North America’s first tide mill. It was built by the Dutch, and the foundation can be seen today. But the area was not formally settled as a town. Many incidents and documents relating to this period are in Gabriel Furman’s 1824 compilation.