Where oh Where Wednesday: Manhattan

As we were traveling from Muscatine, Iowa up to Minneapolis, Minnesota where we would take our last continental flight, we saw all sorts of familiar names. Iowa was full of place names which had clearly originated in Europe: Klein Quarry, Waterloo, Waverly (with Wartburg College), and Geneva. But we also passed places who had clearly taken their names from the native people living there: Owatonna, Nashua, or Hiawatha. 

We fly out today to New York City and will be staying on the island of Manhattan. This is one of the 5 boroughs of New York and has a population of 1.7 million. The name is said to have come from the Manna-Hatta tribe who had lived on the island. It is also said that this could come from the dialect of the Lenape Indians, meaning “island with the hills”. Others say that it comes from the Delaware or Mohican tribes. In any case the name comes from the native tribes. 

It was however Henry Hudson who in 1609 came to map out this area for the VOC (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie) - the Dutch company which was traveling all over the world. Hudson has a river named after him. In 1624 the first permanent dwellings came on the land and the area, after a purchase of 60 guilders, was called New Amsterdam. You may have heard of the various places that have a Dutch background: Wall Street, Broadway, Brooklyn, Harlem. 

Of course this all changed when later in the century the city and area came into the hands of the English. They promptly renamed it New York. The English were only finally pushed out of New York by George Washington during the Revolutionary War (the war of independence) in 1783. Since then the names have taken on all forms and backgrounds. We will look forward to discovering some of them while we are visiting there.