Page:Historic towns of the middle states (IA historictownsofm02powe).pdf/258

 *ment, receiving copious moisture from the surrounding forests, contained many a marsh and fen like the homelands of Holland. So the settlers called it the brookland, or Breuckelen, after an ancient village of that name on the river Vecht in the Province of Utrecht. The records of old Breuckelen are traced by local antiquarians of Utrecht to the time of Tacitus. In its variant forms, Bracola, Broccke, Brocckede, Broicklede and Brocklandia, it describes a moist meadow-land. Or, as a Dutch writer declares, the town on the Vecht was called Breuckelen from the marshes (a paludibus). Its beautiful gardens and quaint castles, as the emigrants had beheld them when starting out from home, perhaps remained in the imagination of the Long Island settlers as an ideal of what their western home should some day become.

Just as Utrecht and Amersfoort are near-by towns to Breuckelen in the Lowlands, so New Utrecht towards the south—near the present Fort Hamilton—and Amersfoort (Flatlands) attested the determination of these Netherlanders to preserve the associations of their origin between the Rhine and the Zuyder Zee.

The life of these hard-working settlers was