Hudson County, New Jersey
Hudson County is in New Jersey, United States. Its county seat is Jersey City
Hudson County was originally inhabited the Lenape or Lenni-Lenape (later named Delaware Indian), who practiced small-scale agriculture to augment a largely mobile hunter-gatherer society which likely, given the topography of the area, included much fishing and trapping. They were displaced by European settlers, whose purchase of their lands was misconstrued by both parties. Their Algonquian language can still be inferred in some local place names such as Communipaw, Hoboken, Weehawken, Secaucus.
Hudson County is called Oesters Eylandt, or Oyster IslandHenry Hudson, for whom the county and river on which it sits is named, established a claim for the area in 1609 when anchoring his ship the Halve Maen (Half Moon) at Harsimus Cove and Weehawken Cove. The west bank of the North River (as it was called) and the cliffs, hills, and marshlands abutting and beyond it, were settled by Europeans (Dutch, Flemish, Walloon, Huguenot) from the Lowlands around the same time as New Amsterdam, in the mid 1600s. After Micheal Pauw, whose Latin-ized name Pavonia gave the settlement its name, failed to populate his patroonship, or land-grant, homesteads were established at Communipaw (1633), Harisumus (1634), Hoebuck (1643), Constable Hook (1646), Awiehaken (1647), and other 'lands behind Kill van Kull' (1647). Relations were tenuous with the Lenape, with whom they engaged in a series of raids and reprisals, notably Kieft's War, which began as a raid on Pavonia and is considered to be the first genocide of Native Americans by Europeans. In 1658, Governor Peter Stuyvesant of New Netherland negotiated a deal with the Lenape to re-purchase the area named Bergen, "by the great rock above Wiehacken," then taking in the sweep of land on the peninsula west of the Hudson and east of the Hackensack River extending down to the Kill Van Kull in Bayonne. In 1660, a charter was granted to build a village/garrison at the site of present-day Bergen Square, establishing what is considered to be the oldest self-governing municipality in New Jersey. The Dutch ceded control of province to the English in 1664.
Jersey City (city)
Union City (city)
West New York (town)
East Newark (borough)
North Bergen (township)