Opening from On This Site - Native Long Island

Huntington to Babylon: A Sequence of Land Claims

The 1653 First Purchase was one step in a longer expansion toward the south shore. Later acquisitions, disputes and colonial patents helped turn Native homeland into town-held and privately allotted property. Land loss was a process involving agreements, contested claims, colonial institutions and restrictions on Native access. Read the actors, obligations and continuing communities together; a broad outline does not mean every Native right ended on one date. From the north shore toward the Great South Bay The first Huntington purchase in 1653 was one step in a much longer transformation of Native land. It concerned a north-shore landscape associated with Matinecock people, not the whole north-to-south area that colonists later called Huntington. That larger colonial town also encompassed land in today's Babylon. Vanishing Tidelands: Land Use and the Law in Suffolk County, NY 1650–1979...