Opening from On This Site - Native Long Island

Jamaica

Jamaica is a Queens placename preserved through early town and purchase records. Jamaica is an Indigenous place name in Queens, preserved in written forms including Jemaica and Yemacah. An April 15, 1662 deed confirmation names Waumitumpacke and associates as participants in an agreement with Jamaica proprietors. [1. John A. Strong, The Algonquian Peoples of Long Island from Earliest Times to 1700 ; Records of Jamaica ; William Wallace Tooker, Indian Place-Names on Long Island and Islands Adjacent (1911).] No interpreter is named in the reviewed accounts of that confirmation. Jamaica may derive from Algonquian-language words connected with beaver, an interpretation consistent with the nearby Beaver Pond landscape. The published comparison draws on Lenape/Delaware, Abenaki, Narragansett, Massachusett, and Mohegan forms, but it remains a later scholarly interpretation rather than the...