Jamaica Queens

Etymology

Yameco is the name of the neighborhood; it is a corruption of the term yamecah, which means “beaver” in the language of the Lenape, the Native Americans who were residing in the area when European settlers first arrived. The Dutch language, which was spoken by the first people to write about the area, spelled the semivowel “y” sound in English as a “j.” The English kept this spelling, but substituted the affricate [dʒ] sound that the letter “j” normally denotes in English for the semivowel sound. A separate phrase, Xaymaca, which means “land of wood and water” or “land of springs” in Taíno, is used to refer to the island of Jamaica.

Precolonial and colonial periods

Tribes from as far away as the Ohio River and the Great Lakes used Jamaica Avenue as an old trading route to exchange skins and furs for wampum. The land between the old trail and “Beaver Pond” (now filled in; what is now Tuckerton Street north of Liberty Avenue runs through the site of the old pond, and Beaver Road was named for its western edge) was purchased by the first settlers in 1655 for two guns, a coat, some powder, and lead. When he granted the land patent in 1656, Dutch Director-General Peter Stuyvesant named the region Rustdorp, or “rest-town”.

When the English acquired control in 1664, they incorporated it into Yorkshire County. Jamaica became the county seat of Queens County, one of the original counties of New York, when the Crown split the province into counties in 1683.

A group of 56 minutemen from Colonial Jamaica participated actively in the Battle of Long Island, which resulted in the British possession of the New York City region for the majority of the American Revolutionary War. In 1805, Rufus King, one of the signers of the US Constitution, moved here.