Beaver’s Path
Birth of a City: Nieuw Amsterdam & Old New York
BEAVER’S PATH
Location: Battery Place at Greenwich Street
Dutch Name: Bever Straet
Here, on a sandyshore, Lenape Indians beached their canoes to trade beaver and otter pelts for Dutch cloth, kettles, and metal tools. To the Lenape, this was Manahatt, a word perhaps meaning “island of many hills.” Native peoples had lived in the region for some ten thousand years. Here they camped, hunted, fished, and farmed. Their footpaths crisscrossed the island, and some became Dutch roads and streets.
Following Hudson’s voyage, the Dutch West India Company placed settlers here in 1625-26 to exploit the region’s bounty of furs. Skins trapped by the Lenape and Iroquois were shipped to Europe for the market in expensive fur hats and garments.
Despite trade, Europeans and Indians fought a series of bloody wars between 1640 and 1663, and the Lenape lost control of their land. But the natives influenced the Europeans. Colonists used Indian sewant (carved seashell bits) as money, adopted their fod sappaen (cornmeal porridge), and used Indian place names. Today, from Canarsie and Gowanus to Rockaway and Maspeth, the words of the Lenape people, recorded by Dutch settlers, still mark the cityscape.
Marker is at the intersection of Battery Place and State Street, on the right when traveling east on Battery Place.
Courtesy hmdb.org
