Brooklyn, until after the organization of the township of that name by
the British Colonial Government. Those of our citizens who remember
the lands on Fulton Avenue near Nevins Street and De Kalb Avenue
before the changes which were produced by the filling-in of those
streets, will recollect that their original character was marshy and
springy, being in fact the bed of the valley which received the drain
of the hills extending on either side of it from the Waalebought to
Gowanus Bay. This would lead to the conclusion that the name was given
on account of the locality; but though we have very imperfect accounts
as to who were the first settlers of Brooklyn proper, still, reasoning
from analogy in the cases of New Utrecht and New Amersfoort, we cannot
probably err in supposing that Brooklyn owes its name to the
circumstance that its first settlers wished to preserve in it a
memento of their homes in Fatherland. After the English conquest,
there was a continual struggle between the Dutch and English
orthography.... Thus it is spelled Breucklyn, Breuckland, Brucklyn,
Broucklyn, Brookland, Brookline, and several other ways. At the end of
the last century it settled down into the present Brooklyn. In this
form it still retains sufficiently its original signification of the
_marsh_ or _brook land_."--_Stiles' History of Brooklyn_, vol. i.,
App. 4.]

[Footnote 17: Part II., Document 33. On the other hand, some later
English descriptions are not as pleasant; but the wretchedness the
writers saw during the war was what the war had caused.]

The topography of this section of Long Island was peculiar, presenting
strong contrasts of high and low land. Originally, and indeed within
the memory of citizens still living, that part of Brooklyn lying
south and west of the line of Nevins Street was practically a
peninsula, with the Wallabout Bay or present Navy Yard on one side of
the neck, and on the other, a mile across, the extensive Gowanus creek
and marsh, over which now run Second, Third, and Fourth Avenues. The
creek set in from the bay where the Gowanus Canal is retained, and
rendered the marsh impassable at high-water as far as the line of
Baltic Street. Blocks of buildings now stand on the site of mills that
were once worked by the ebb and flow of the tides. The lower part of
what is known as South Brooklyn was largely swamp land in 1776. Here
the peninsula terminated in a nearly isolated triangular piece of
ground jutting o