Sanctuary in the Wilderness: Deborah Moody and the Town Plan for Colonial Gravesend

Abstract

In 1643 an English noblewoman by the name of Deborah Moody led a contingent of settlers from Massachusetts to the wilds of New Netherlands. Her intention was to found a “city by the sea” where civil liberty and religious freedom would flourish. This year marks the 350th anniversary of that settlement, the little-known town of Gravesend. It remains the only documented colonial New World settlement to have been founded by a woman. Gravesend was located in what today is a neighborhood near Coney Island, in Brooklyn, New York. The plan conceived for the settlement was highly sophisticated, utilizing both a precise orthogonal grid and a regular distribution of open spaces. Gravesend was among the first examples of rational town planning in the non-Latin New World. The present essay begins with a sketch of Deborah Moody's life and the origins of the Gravesend settlement; it then examines the possible sources of the plan, its deeper ecclesiastical signifcance, and the influence it may have had on subsequent efforts in American town planning. The essay concludes with a survey of the transformations that have occurred to the early plan through the centuries.