Opening from On This Site - Native Long Island

Hohosboco / Spring Creek area

Hohosboco preserves an Indigenous waterway name from a 1662 meadow transaction. The boundary description points toward the Spring Creek landscape beside Jamaica Bay; the pin is approximate. A creek name can preserve evidence of Indigenous people and land relationships even where urban construction has transformed the shore. Reading the boundaries alongside the named participants brings more of that history into view. Hohosboco was a river named in the description of Plunder’s Neck, a salt-meadow tract on Long Island’s south shore. James Riker’s account of an October 3, 1662 transaction names the Indigenous participants Womatupa, Wonoxe and Powatahuman. Their names and the waterway survive in a record written around settlers’ acquisition of meadowland. 1 Riker places Hohosboco on the east of Plunder’s Neck and describes a smaller brook on its west flowing into that river. He explains that...