Before Europeans arrived, western Long Island was home to Lenape-speaking peoples, including the Canarsee. In the 1600s Dutch settlers founded farming villages here, among them Breuckelen, named after a town in the Netherlands.
The Lenape-speaking communities of western Long Island lived by seasonal rhythms, fishing and gathering shellfish along the bays, growing corn, beans and squash, and hunting inland. The names Canarsie and Gowanus come from this heritage, and several of the borough’s main roads follow old Native footpaths. Dutch settlers started arriving in the 1620s and 1630s, and the village of Breuckelen was chartered in 1646.
Farming dominated the colonial period, and the Dutch and later British landowners relied heavily on enslaved labour; Brooklyn’s early prosperity is inseparable from that history. Slavery was abolished in New York State in stages, with full emancipation in 1827, and free Black communities such as Weeksville formed in the following decades.