Beverwijck ( ; ), often written using the pre-reform orthography Beverwyck, was a fur-trading community north of

Fort Orange Fort Orange ( nl, Fort Oranje) was the first permanent Dutch settlement in New Netherland; the present-day city of Albany, New York developed at this site. It was built in 1624 as a replacement for Fort Nassau, which had been built on nearb ...

on the

Hudson River The Hudson River is a river that flows from north to south primarily through eastern New York. It originates in the Adirondack Mountains of Upstate New York and flows southward through the Hudson Valley to the New York Harbor between N ...

New Netherland New Netherland ( nl, Nieuw Nederland; la, Novum Belgium or ) was a 17th-century colonial province of the Dutch Republic that was located on the east coast of what is now the United States. The claimed territories extended from the Delmarva P ...

that was renamed and developed as

Albany, New York Albany ( ) is the capital of the U.S. state of New York, also the seat and largest city of Albany County. Albany is on the west bank of the Hudson River, about south of its confluence with the Mohawk River, and about north of New York C ...

, after the English took control of the colony in 1664.

History

During the 1640s, the name ''Beverwijck'' began to be used informally by the Dutch for their settlement of fur traders north of the fort. The village of Beverwijck arose out of a jurisdictional dispute between the patroonship of Rensselaerswijck and the Dutch West India Company (WIC) over the legal status of the community of some two hundred colonists living in the vicinity of the WIC Fort Orange on the west bank of the Upper North River. In 1652, Peter Stuyvesant, director general of New Netherland, extended WIC jurisdiction over the settlers who lived near Fort Orange.Meuwese, Mark. Review of Venema, Janny, ''Beverwijck: A Dutch Village on the American Frontier, 1652-1664''. H-Low-Countries, H-Net Reviews. February, 2007
/ref> In the late 1650s, colonists built a palisade around Beverwijck, and it had become economically and politically successful, with large families living in the community. Despite its isolation on the frontier, a sign of Beverwijck's success was that it was never attacked by Native Americans. The Dutch built a collaborative relationship with both the Algonquian-speaking

Mahican The Mohican ( or , alternate spelling: Mahican) are an Eastern Algonquian Native American tribe that historically spoke an Algonquian language. As part of the Eastern Algonquian family of tribes, they are related to the neighboring Lenape, w ...

of the Hudson Valley and the

Iroquoian The Iroquoian languages are a language family of indigenous peoples of North America. They are known for their general lack of labial consonants. The Iroquoian languages are polysynthetic and head-marking. As of 2020, all surviving Iroquoian ...

-speaking Mohawk people to the west through the Mohawk Valley.James W. Bradley, ''Before Albany: An Archaeology of Native-Dutch Relations in the Capital Region, 1600–1664''
, Albany: University of the State of New York, 2007, full text online, p.2 By 1660, the Dutch relations with these two different Native nations had taken on differing characteristics, reflecting their different patterns of settlement and culture. A large percentage of the Beverwijck population consisted of Europeans born outside of the Dutch Republic. Despite the ethnically mixed population which included Dutch, Scandinavian, German, and English individuals, institutions transplanted from the Republic gave the town a decisively Dutch character. The fur trade was very lucrative and, when the village of

Schenectady Schenectady () is a city in Schenectady County, New York, United States, of which it is the county seat. As of the 2020 census, the city's population of 67,047 made it the state's ninth-largest city by population. The city is in eastern New Y ...

was founded in 1661 beyond

Rensselaerwyck The Manor of Rensselaerswyck, Manor Rensselaerswyck, Van Rensselaer Manor, or just simply Rensselaerswyck ( nl, Rensselaerswijck ), was the name of a colonial estate—specifically, a Dutch patroonship and later an English manor—owned by the va ...

, the traders of Beverwijck were successful in getting governor Peter Stuyvesant to declare that they had a monopoly on trade. The settlers in Schenectady were forbidden to trade. This prohibition was affirmed by orders of Governor Nicholls through 1670 and later after the English took over the colony of New Netherland. Although ''Beverwijck'' literally means ''beaver district'', its name might be of different origin than related to the fur trade. It could have been named for the Dutch city of

Beverwijk Beverwijk () is a municipality and a city in the Netherlands, in the province of North Holland. The town is located about northwest of Amsterdam in the Randstad metropolitan area, north of the North Sea Canal very close to the North Sea coast. A ...

History

See also

References

Further reading