By The Red Hook WaterStories team
December 5, 1860, the slave ship ERIE was sold at government auction in Atlantic Basin, Red Hook, Brooklyn. One month prior, the ship had been condemned and ordered to be sold by the United States District Court. This was news of national note...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Four years before the American Civil War, a legal battle emerged from a situation that occurred aboard a steamship from Savannah to New York. One of the passengers, Thomas Steele, a light skinned man, was accused of being a fugitive slave by another...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
A pivotal event in the ending of slavery occurred on December 5, 1860, in Atlantic Basin, Red Hook when the slave ship ERIE was sold at government auction. Its captain and owner, Nathaniel Gordon, was then executed for engaging in the slave...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
In the summer of 1850, an African-American woman was abducted and brought to Red Hook Point - just below the Atlantic Dock - to be put on a schooner and brought to a Southern slave state. The captors told suspicious workers in the area that the...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Blacks were one of the first groups to arrive in Brooklyn during the Dutch colonial period, usually as enslaved people, though there were also freemen. To provide an overview of some early Black history, PortSide commissioned this article by Charles...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Henry R Stiles in his 1867 history of Brooklyn references a 1755 census of slaves in Brooklyn: “ from which we learn that there were then in Brooklyn 133 slaves (53 of whom were females), owned by sixty-two persons, among whom John Bargay and...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
The Van Brunt family was a well-established early Dutch family who settled in New Utrecht. This street may be named for Rutgert Van Brunt who was a member of the NYS Assembly from Kings County from 1783-1784. In 2017 the New York Times wrote an...
