Opening from On This Site - Native Long Island

Rockaway: Native Homeland, English Patent and Private Transfers

Rockaway was a Native coastal homeland before John Palmer’s 1685 deed and English governor Thomas Dongan’s patent. Follow the named parties, Hempstead’s competing claim and Palmer’s later transfer to Richard Cornell, without mistaking colonial title for Native disappearance. Naming Palmer, Dongan, Cornell and the Native signers makes colonial land claims concrete. A recorded deed, an English patent and a later private transfer were different steps in asserting control; none is evidence that Native people or their relationships to the homeland disappeared. A Native homeland before a colonial title Rockaway is the peninsula between Jamaica Bay and the Atlantic Ocean in southern Queens. Its Native place name predates the English ownership documents. William Wallace Tooker's historical compilation records seventeenth-century spellings and an account of a Rockaway village in 1643. These...