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| Midwout
(Flatbush)
In the 1640s, New Amsterdammers began dividing the western portion
of Long Island into farms and farming communities. Throughout the
decade they avoided one area because it was heavily wooded, and
thus would be difficult to clear for farming. The forests finally
succumbed to Dutch axes, however, and by 1652 the village of Midwout,
or Middle Woods, came into being. The name it eventually received
under the English—Flatbush—is not of English origin,
as is often thought, but a corruption of the Dutch "vlackebos,"
or wooded plain, and thus also refers to the thick forests that
once covered the region. |
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| The Peter Lefferts House, built in 1777 in Flatbush, is a fine example of Dutch farmhouse architecture. See the Peter Lefferts Homestead Museum. Take a tour of Victorian Flatbush. |
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The
area that became famous in the first half of the twentieth century
as the home of the Brooklyn Dodgers (and for the highly localized
accent that would become synonymous with Brooklyn) was renowned
in the seventeenth century as the home of the first Dutch church
in the region outside of New Amsterdam. The church came into being
a few years after the town itself. In December 1654, Petrus Stuyvesant,
director-general of New Netherland, together with his council,
resolved "to prepare and build in the village of Midwout
a house of about sixty or sixty five feet in length, twenty eight
feet in width and twelve or fourteen feet high under the crossbeams,
with an extension in the rear, where a chamber may be partitioned
off for the preacher." But taverns must have appeared sometime
before the church, for in that same month the council appointed
Warnaer Wessels to the job of collecting "the excise on wine
and beer to be consumed by the tavernkeepers and tapsters on Long
Island in the villages of Breuckelen, Midwout, Amersfoort and
the adjacent places under their jurisdiction during the next coming
year."