BUSHWICK



	On 16 February 1660 a group of fourteen Huguenots living in New Amsterdam, with 
Pieter Jan De WITT as interpreter, went to Pieter STUYVESTANT and asked for land on 
which they might establish a town.

	Three days later, STUYVESTANT, his secretary VAN RUYVEN, Schout-Fiscal de SILLE 
and Surveyor-General CORTELYOU took them to Long Island, where they were granted a 
tract of land that ex­tended from Mespat Kill (Newtown Creek) to Norman's Kill 
(Bushwick Creek). On it, CORTELYOU laid out twenty-two house lots around a small pond.

	On 14 March 1661, STUYVESTANT revisited the spot. Houses had been erected and the 
little town enclosed by a palisade. He named the place Boswijck (Bos Wyck) or Town in 
the Woods. Its inhabitants then asked him for land on which they might pasture their 
cattle and he gave them the hay meadows of Mespat Kill "from the east side of SMITH's 
Island southward to the hills and along said hills westward to the heights of Merck's 
plantation, and from the said heights northerly, by Merck's plantation to Boswijck, 
being a four cornered plot of ground."

	The English settlers of Newtown had bought this very same land from the Indians in 1656. 
Later, Governor Francis LOVELACE confirmed their patent. In December 1671, the people of 
Bushwick and Newtown requested that the Governor appoint some "indifferent men" to layout 
the boundary line between the two towns because of disputes that were continually arising 
over this property. .

	On 28 June 1672, it was agreed that "all the valley or meadow ground on the westermost 
side of the creek of Mespat Kills, shall be and belong to the inhabitants of Boswyck" 
and that "all the valley or meadow ground on the east side of the creek shall be and remain 
to the inhabitants of Mespat Kills or Newtown, although expressly mentioned in the patent 
of Boswyck, for that seems more properly to be within the limits of Newtown."

	But this agreement did not end the dispute which by 1706 reached such proportions 
that Governor Edward Hyde CORNBURY declared that the disputed land belonged to neither 
town but to the province. He then proceeded to divide the 1,200 acres of so-called 
government land among his friends.

	But the ones to whom the "disputed land" was given do not seem to have ever actually 
owned it. Some time after 13 January 1768 a law was passed by the Colonial Assembly called 
"An Act, authorizing certain persons therein named to settle the division of land between 
the Counties of King's and Queen's, as far as the townships of Bushwick and Newtown extend."

	On 7 January 1769 a survey was made that coincided with the one of 1672. The decision 
that was then reached settled the question for all time. It is on this disputed land that 
the only Dutch houses of Bushwick now stand.

	It was the English who changed the name of Boswijck to Bushwick.

	In its earliest days, its inhabitants attended the Brooklyn Church but about 1708 they 
organized one of their own and erected the church building shown here.



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