Opening from On This Site - Native Long Island

Lusam / Lusum (Jericho)

Lusam is a recorded older name for Jericho. Its inclusion on Indigenous place-name maps deserves context: Tooker questioned whether the name was Indigenous at all. Not every unfamiliar historical name is necessarily Indigenous. Keeping the evidence and the uncertainty together helps prevent an old attribution from becoming an unquestioned fact. Lusam and Lusum are historical names associated with Jericho. Although nineteenth-century historian Benjamin F. Thompson described Lusam as an Indigenous name, Tooker questioned that attribution in 1911 and suggested it might instead be a shortened form of the English name Lewisham. That is a proposed explanation, not a proven origin. 1 Tooker cites a 1682 record of Indigenous people selling John Townsend fifty acres beside the cartway from Muskceta Cove to the farm called Lusam or Robert Williams’s plantation. He also cites a 1689 reference...