16 Facts About Gravesend Brooklyn

Gravesend Brooklyn was one of the original towns in the Dutch colony of New Netherland.

Gravesend Brooklyn was the only English chartered town in what became Kings County, and is notable as being one of the first towns founded by a woman, Lady Deborah Moody.

The first known European believed to set foot in the area that would become Gravesend Brooklyn was Henry Hudson, whose ship, the Half Moon, landed at Coney Island in the fall of 1609.

Gravesend Brooklyn is notable as the only colonial town founded by a woman, Lady Deborah Moody.

Moody, along with John Tilton and wife Mary Pearsall Tilton, came to Gravesend Brooklyn after choosing excommunication, following religious persecution in Lynn, Massachusetts.

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John Tilton became the first town clerk of Gravesend Brooklyn and owned part of what later would become Coney Island.

The town was bisected by two main roads, Gravesend Brooklyn Road running from north to south, and Gravesend Brooklyn Neck Road, running from east to west.

Religious freedom of early Gravesend Brooklyn made it a destination for ostracized or controversial groups, Nonconformists or Dissenters such as the Quakers, who briefly made their home in the town before being chased out by the succeeding New Netherland director general Peter Stuyvesant, who arrived in 1647.

Gravesend Brooklyn was wary of Gravesend's open acceptance of "heretical" sects.

In 1654 the people of Gravesend Brooklyn purchased Coney Island from the local Lenape band for about $15 worth of seashells, guns, and gunpowder.

Gravesend Brooklyn was released near the end of the century and died of a stroke in his Sheepshead Bay home in 1899.

Around the same time, Gravesend Brooklyn was the site of testing for the Boynton Bicycle Railroad, the earliest forerunner of the monorail.

In 1889, the BBR began running a short route between the Gravesend Brooklyn stop of the Sea Beach Railroad and Brighton Beach in Coney Island, a distance of just over a mile.

Brooklyn Public Library's Gravesend branch is located at 303 Avenue X near West 2nd Street.

The New York Times reported that in the 2012 presidential election, a precinct in Gravesend Brooklyn was one of the few parts of New York City carried by Mitt Romney, with 133 votes to just 3 for Barack Obama.

Gravesend Brooklyn is patrolled by the New York City Police Department's 60th, 61st, and 62nd Precincts.