Bergen Square

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Bergen Square, at the intersection of Bergen Avenue and Academy Streets in Jersey City, is part of the much larger Journal Square district, with an eclectic array of architectural styles including 19th row houses, Art Deco retail and office buildings, and the Academy High School, which stands on the longest continually-used school site in the USA. Just off the square is the Apple Tree House, a colonial stone farmhouse, where General Lafayette held audience during the American Revolutionary War.

Dutch Governor Peter Stuyvesant in delegation with the Lenape. (see seal of Bergen County).
Dutch Governor Peter Stuyvesant in delegation with the Lenape. (see seal of Bergen County).
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The square and the streets around it are the site of what is considered to be the longest continually inhabited European settlement in the state of New Jersey, established in 1660 as Bergen, in the colony of New Netherland. Permission to settle there was granted by the governor, Peter Stuyvesant, a statue of whom sits on the square to commemorate the event. The square was surveyed and designed by Jacques Cortelyou and is the first example of what was to become known as a Philadelphia square in the United States. Though there no buildings from the period still standing, the names of streets (such as Vroom, Vanreypen, Newkirk, Tuers, Dekalb) and the grid they form still remain to mark the origins of the earlier village. In the immediate vicinity, there are cemeteries and a Dutch Reformed Church which were founded by the settlers and their ancestors.

Pavonia, an earlier settlement on the west bank of the Hudson River was abandoned after a series of raids and retaliations between the Dutch and the Lenape, the Native Americans who lived there at the time. Kieft's War began on February 25, 1643, when the then governor, William Kieft, allowed an attack in which 129 Dutch soldiers killed 120 Indians, including women and children [1][2] Those who survived the counter attack were ordered back to the relative safety of New Amsterdam, on the tip of Manhattan.

Wishing to re-establish a presence in the area, Governor Peter Stuyvesant of New Amsterdam negotiated a deal in 1658 with the Lenape for the larger area named Bergen, "by the great rock above Wiehacken," then taking in the sweep of land on the peninsula west of the Hudson and east of the Hackensack River extending down to the Kill Van Kull in Bayonne.[3] A stipulation for the settlement was that a garrison be built so that homesteaders, whose farms spread out around the village, could retreat there in the event of an attack. The charter for the town gave it a semi-autonomous government, and it became the seat of government for the region.

In 1664, a negotiated surrender gave control of New Netherland to the English on and September 22, 1668, the original town charter was confirmed [4] In 1674, the village at Bergen became part of the proprietary colony of East Jersey, and the "capital" of one four newly established administrative districts, Bergen County, where it remained until 1710, when the government moved to Hackensack.

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[edit] References

  1. ^ Winkler, David F. (1998). Revisiting the Attack on Pavonia. New Jersey Historical Society. 
  2. ^ Beck, Sanderson (2006). New Netherland and Stuyvesant 1642-64.
  3. ^ History of the County of Hudson, New Jersey, from Its Earliest Settlement to the Present Time, p. 62, accessed March 29, 2007.
  4. ^ "The Story of New Jersey's Civil Boundaries: 1606-1968", John P. Snyder, Bureau of Geology and Topography; Trenton, New Jersey; 1969. p. 145.