BROOKLYN THE TOWN ON FREEDOM'S BATTLE-FIELD THE BY HARRINGTON PUTNAM HE earliest Dutch settlements within the present borough limits are not so old as the first hamlets on Manhattan. More than a score of years after the houses and forts of New Amsterdam looked out across the East River, the forest-crested heights of the west end of Long Island remained in undisturbed Indian occupation. The Dutch settlers were deterred, rather than attracted, by this magnificent stretch of green woodlands extending along the high shore. The Holland people were not accustomed to timber clearing and therefore sought access to the island by the smoother meadow-lands of Gowanus, and afterwards to the north where the slooping grasslands about the Waalboght invited the settler to essay gardening without too much preparation with the axe. The early Long Island farmers advanced on the territory of Brooklyn by flank attacks, seeking to turn the wings of the extended forest, rather than boldly to engage in the struggle with the densely wooded heights in front. These pioneers were thrifty, energetic Hollanders and Huguenots whose farms soon required regular communication with Manhattan. In 1642 a public ferry was established between the present foot of Fulton Street and a landing in Peck's Slip. The houses clustered about this Long Island landing constituted a little settlement called The Ferry. As the Indians were dispossessed from their maize-fields, the colonists found sites for a small village a mile or so inland. The modern visitor who comes up Fulton Street should stop about the corner of Hoyt and Smith Streets to locate this settlement and picture a primitive hamlet of small one-story frame cottages, sometimes surrounded by palisades for protection against attacks. The open lands were of small extent, with forest to the east and west, and streams running south into a wide morass, where is now Gowanus Canal. Undoubtedly the undrained land of this settle ment, receiving copious moisture from the surrounding forests, contained many a marsh and fen like the homelands of Holland. So the settlers called it the brookland, or Breuckelen, after an ancient village of that name on the river Vecht in the Province of Utrecht. The records of old Breuckelen are traced by local antiquarians of Utrecht to the time of Tacitus. In its variant forms, Bracola, Broccke, Brocckede, Broicklede and Brocklandia, it describes a moist meadow-land. Or, as a Dutch writer declares, the town on the Vecht was called Breuckelen from the marshes (a paludibus). Its beautiful gardens and quaint castles, as the emigrants had beheld them when starting out from home, perhaps remained in the imagination of the Long Island settlers as an ideal of what their western home should some day become. Just as Utrecht and Amersfoort are near-by towns to Breuckelen in the Lowlands, so New Utrecht towards the south-near the present Fort Hamilton-and Amersfoort (Flatlands) attested the determination of these Netherlanders to preserve the associations of their origin between the Rhine and the Zuyder Zee. The life of these hard-working settlers was |