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

Fort Orange Fort Orange () was the first permanent Dutch settlement in New Netherland; the present-day city and state capital Albany, New York developed near this site. It was built in 1624 as a replacement for Fort Nassau, which had been built on n ...

on the

Hudson River The Hudson River, historically the North River, is a river that flows from north to south largely through eastern New York (state), New York state. It originates in the Adirondack Mountains at Henderson Lake (New York), Henderson Lake in the ...

within Rensselaerwyck in

New Netherland New Netherland () was a colony of the Dutch Republic located on the East Coast of what is now the United States. The claimed territories extended from the Delmarva Peninsula to Cape Cod. Settlements were established in what became the states ...

that was renamed and developed as

Albany, New York Albany ( ) is the List of capitals in the United States, capital city of the U.S. state of New York (state), New York. It is located on the west bank of the Hudson River, about south of its confluence with the Mohawk River. Albany is the oldes ...

, 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 The Dutch West India Company () was a Dutch chartered company that was founded in 1621 and went defunct in 1792. Among its founders were Reynier Pauw, Willem Usselincx (1567–1647), and Jessé de Forest (1576–1624). On 3 June 1621, it was gra ...

(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 Peter Stuyvesant ( – August 1672)Mooney, James E. "Stuyvesant, Peter" in p.1256 was a Dutch colonial administrator who served as the Directors of New Netherland, director-general of New Netherland from 1647 to 1664, when the colony was pro ...

, 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 A palisade, sometimes called a stakewall or a paling, is typically a row of closely placed, high vertical standing tree trunks or wooden or iron stakes used as a fence for enclosure or as a defensive wall. Palisades can form a stockade. Etymo ...

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 Mohicans ( or ) 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, whose indigenous territory was ...

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, almost all surviving I ...

-speaking

Mohawk people The Mohawk, also known by their own name, (), are an Indigenous peoples of the Americas, Indigenous people of North America and the easternmost nation of the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois Confederacy (also known as the Five Nations or later the ...

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 (New York), city in Schenectady County, New York, United States, of which it is the county seat. As of the United States Census 2020, 2020 census, the city's population of 67,047 made it the state's ninth-most populo ...

was founded in 1661 beyond Rensselaerwyck, the traders of Beverwijck were successful in getting governor

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.

History

See also

References

Further reading