Chimney Sweeps in Gravesend, NY

The island and its environs were first inhabited by bands of Lenape, an Algonquian-speaking tribe that occupied territory along both sides of Long Island Sound, and through coastal areas through present-day New Jersey and down to Delaware. The first known European believed to set foot in the area that would become Gravesend was Henry Hudson, whose ship, the Half Moon, landed at Coney Island in the fall of 1609. The Dutch claimed this land as part of their New Netherland Colony.

Gravesend is notable as the only colonial town founded by a woman, Lady Deborah Moody. In 1643, governor general Willem Kieft granted her and a group of English settlers a land patent on December 19, 1645. Moody, along with John Tilton and wife Mary Pearsall Tilton, came to Gravesend after choosing excommunication, following religious persecution in Lynn, Massachusetts. Moody and Mary Tilton had been tried because of their Anabaptist beliefs, accused of spreading religious dissent in the Puritan colony. Kieft was recruiting settlers to secure this land that his forces had taken from the Lenape. Some clashes continued, and the town organization was not completed until 1645. The signed town charter and grant was one of the first to ever be awarded to a woman in the New World. John Tilton became the first town clerk of Gravesend and owned part of what later would become Coney Island. Moody, the Tiltons, and other early English settlers were known to have paid the Lenape for their land. Another prominent early settler was Anthony Janszoon van Salee.

The Town of Gravesend encompassed 7,000 acres (2,800 ha) in southern Brooklyn, including the entire island of Coney Island. This was originally used as the town’s common lands on the Atlantic Ocean. It was divided, as was the town itself, into 41 parcels for the original patentees. When the town was first laid out, almost half of the area was made up of salt marsh wetlands and sandhill dunes along the shore of Gravesend Bay. It was one of the earliest planned communities in America. It consisted of a 16-acre (6.5 ha) square surrounded by a 20-foot-high wooden palisade. The town was bisected by two main roads, Gravesend Road (now McDonald Avenue) running from north to south, and Gravesend Neck Road, running from east to west. These roads divided the town into four quadrants, which were subdivided into ten plots of land each. This grid of the original town can still be seen on maps and aerial photographs of the area. At the center of town, where the two main roads met, a town hall was constructed where town meetings were held once a month.