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Research Article

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

Thomas J. Campanella
Landscape Journal, September 1993, 12 (2) 107-130; DOI: https://doi.org/10.3368/lj.12.2.107
Thomas J. Campanella
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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.

  • © 1993 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

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Landscape Journal
Vol. 12, Issue 2
21 Sep 1993
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Sanctuary in the Wilderness: Deborah Moody and the Town Plan for Colonial Gravesend
Thomas J. Campanella
Landscape Journal Sep 1993, 12 (2) 107-130; DOI: 10.3368/lj.12.2.107

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Sanctuary in the Wilderness: Deborah Moody and the Town Plan for Colonial Gravesend
Thomas J. Campanella
Landscape Journal Sep 1993, 12 (2) 107-130; DOI: 10.3368/lj.12.2.107
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