From the Mural by Howard Pyle, Hudson County Court House
years after Adrien Blok built the first four dwellings some New Amsterdammers moved over the river. They selected a lovely wooded ridge that looked down on a green, water-cut foreland and temptingly across at the little Dutch houses of Manhattan.
Unfortunately these settlers did not leave a precise record, for they did not realize that they were making history by establishing the first settlement in New Jersey. Therefore we know only that "sometime between 1617 and 1620 settlements were made at Bergen, in the vicinity of the Esopus Indians and at Schenectady." We cannot even be sure that these first settlers in New Jersey were Dutch. "It is believed," says another historian, "that the first European settlement within the limits of New Jersey was made at Bergen about 1618 by a number of Danes and Norwegians who accompanied the Dutch to the New Netherland."
