A mysterious Native American tribe once roamed through the land where Newtown Creek empties its industrial waters into the East River. Today, concrete bulkheads have long since replaced the salt marshes that dominated the terrain. The people who lived there survive in name only, the indignity of their displacement captured in the corrupted spelling of a Queens neighborhood. 

The Mespat—also written as Mespeatches, Mespaechtes, or Maspeth in colonial records—inhabited the brackish waterways and tidal wetlands of what is now western Queens for centuries before any European ship appeared on the horizon. Their story is one of erasure so complete that even the meaning of their name has become a matter of scholarly debate, though most evidence points to a landscape description that became a community designation: “the bad water place.”

The Name and Its Origins

The earliest reliable explanation for the name comes from linguist William Wallace Tooker’s exhaustive nineteenth-century study of Long Island place names. Tooker traced Mespaetches to a phrase meaning “at the bad water place”—a description that fits the low, swampy terrain that once pooled at very high tides. The term first appears in an Indian deed of August 1, 1638, where colonial officials describe a boundary “to the Mespaechtes.” The name evolved through various Dutch and English spellings—Mespatchis Kil (1642), Mespachtes Kil (1646), Mespaat (1656)—each iteration moving further from its original pronunciation.

In Dutch, kil meant creek. Thus, the frequent references to “Mespat’s kil” in colonial documents literally meant “Mespat’s Creek,” referring to what we now call Maspeth Creek. A 1653 deed recorded by the New Netherland Council identifies a transfer of land “on Mespat’s kil,” one of several mid-seventeenth-century documents that fix the community to Newtown Creek’s headwaters.

What makes this toponymic history poignant is how it reveals the colonial process of appropriation: a Lenape description of their own landscape—perhaps warning of its challenging tidal conditions—became fixed in Dutch administrative language, then morphed through English usage into “Maspeth,” a name now associated with an industrial neighborhood whose original inhabitants have been entirely displaced.

Part of the Munsee Lenape World

Ethnographically, the Mespat were part of the Lenape—more specifically the Munsee-speaking Lenape whose homelands encompassed western Long Island, New York Bay, and the lower Hudson Valley. This broader cultural geography, known as Lenapehoking, connected the Mespat to an extensive network of related communities across the region. The Maspeth, who lived along Flushing Bay and Newtown Creek, were one of approximately thirteen Lenape groups inhabiting Long Island at the time of European contact.

The Mespat’s world was one of seasonal movement and sophisticated resource management. Native Americans lived in small groups mostly along the bays, creeks, and ponds, where they could fish (haddock, oysters), farm (maize, squash), gather (strawberries, chestnuts) and hunt (grouse, quail). Their location at the confluence of waterways made them natural participants in the extensive wampum trade networks that connected Long Island Sound to the Hudson Valley.

Archaeological evidence and colonial records suggest the Mespat village stood near what is now Mount Zion Cemetery, positioned to take advantage of both the creek’s resources and overland trails that connected to other Lenape settlements. These paths—including routes that would later become Jamaica Avenue and the Van Wyck Expressway—formed an indigenous infrastructure that colonists would appropriate and pave over, often without acknowledging their Native origins.

Colonial Catastrophe: 1642-1643

The Mespat’s first sustained encounter with European colonization came in 1642, a moment that would prove catastrophic. Director-general Willem Kieft offered English minister Francis Doughty the chance to start an English town on Long Island, under Dutch protection. In 1642 Doughty brought several families to his new community, called Maspeth. Kieft was rather generous, granting a “certain parcel of land situate on Long Island…containing…six thousand six hundred and sixty-six Dutch acres or thereabouts”—more or less the entire western half of the borough of Queens.

But this settlement was born into violence. Kieft had already initiated what historians now call Kieft’s War (1643-1645) through a series of provocative acts, including attempts to tax Native communities and brutal retaliation for minor disputes. The war exploded into full-scale conflict after the Pavonia Massacre of February 25, 1643, when Dutch forces slaughtered over 100 unarmed Lenape refugees, including women and children.

The newcomers had just begun their settlement in earnest when an Indian attack leveled the place in 1643. This destruction of Maspeth was part of a broader Indigenous response to Dutch aggression. The attacks united the Algonquian peoples in the surrounding areas against the Dutch. In late 1643, a force of 1,500 Indians invaded New Netherland and killed many, including Anne Hutchinson. The violence effectively cleared the immediate area of European settlement for nearly a decade.

Resettlement and Erasure

Nine years later, however, another group of English who had moved south from New England tried again on the same land. This time they named the place Middleburgh. Dutch authorities called it Middleburgh, but English settlers increasingly referred to it as Newtown—a name that explicitly marked a break from the earlier, destroyed settlement and implicitly erased the indigenous presence that preceded both.

Municipal histories put the formal founding of Newtown in 1652, with the area initially known as Middleburgh before “Newtown” took hold. This renaming represents more than administrative convenience; it marks a deliberate forgetting, a colonial fresh start that required no acknowledgment of either the failed 1642 settlement or the Mespat people who had lived there for generations.

The pattern continued into the modern era. The modern neighborhood name Elmhurst arrived in 1896, a developer-driven rebrand meant to distance the suburb from the polluted Newtown Creek. Each renaming moved further from indigenous memory, until only the corrupted toponym “Maspeth”—now designating a different neighborhood entirely—remained as an unconscious echo of the original inhabitants.

Understanding Colonial “Sales”

The colonial documents speak of land “purchases” and “deeds,” but these terms obscure a fundamental misunderstanding—or deliberate exploitation—of differing worldviews. The Lenape and the Dutch held very different ideas about land. Native peoples understood land as a shared relation with responsibilities, while Dutch settlers sought exclusive freehold ownership.

When Dutch officials recorded land transfers “by written deed,” they created a paper trail that appeared legitimate within European legal frameworks but often meant something entirely different to the Lenape participants. What colonists understood as permanent alienation of land, Native peoples often viewed as temporary use agreements or diplomatic gifts that established reciprocal obligations. Many transactions were contested in meaning and often exploitative in effect, even when written down.

The accelerating pace of these transactions in the 1640s and 1650s around Mespat territory reveals how quickly indigenous land changed hands once the colonial apparatus gained momentum. Each deed represented not just a transfer of acreage but a fundamental reordering of the landscape from a network of relationships to a commodity that could be owned, bounded, and excluded from its original inhabitants.

What Remains

Today, the Mespat persist primarily in corrupted place names and industrial waterways. Maspeth preserves a version of the old name; Newtown Creek and Maspeth Creek still trace the marshy geometry that shaped Mespat life, however altered by dredging and industry. The Creek once flowed through wetlands and marshes, today nearly the entire stretch of the creek is bulkheaded.

The waters that gave the Mespat their name have themselves been transformed beyond recognition. The creek became home to the country’s first kerosene refinery (1854) and first modern oil refinery (1867). By the late twentieth century, investigators discovered that a 1950s explosion at a Standard Oil refinery had created an underground oil plume of 17-30 million gallons beneath Greenpoint—one of the largest oil spills in US history. In 2010, the EPA declared Newtown Creek a Superfund site.

This industrial poisoning of the “bad water place” carries a bitter irony. The landscape that the Mespat knew as challenging but livable, that supported their community for generations through its fish, shellfish, and waterfowl, has become genuinely uninhabitable—bad water in a sense the original namers could never have imagined.

Memory and Responsibility

To say “every street and lot in Elmhurst stands on their homeland” is to acknowledge that the neighborhood lies within Lenapehoking, the Lenape world that included western Long Island. But such acknowledgment only begins the work of historical recovery. The Mespat’s story reveals how colonialism operates not just through violence—though violence was central—but through administrative procedures, legal fictions, and systematic renaming that makes indigenous presence increasingly difficult to perceive or remember.

The surveyors who drew property lines across Mespat territory, the clerks who recorded deeds in New Amsterdam, the developers who rebranded Newtown as Elmhurst—all participated in an erasure so thorough that recovering even basic facts about the Mespat requires painstaking archival archaeology. We know more about individual Dutch settlers’ property disputes than we do about the society they displaced.

Yet the Mespat’s story is not merely one of loss. Contemporary Lenape communities—now primarily in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Ontario—descend from survivors of colonial violence and removal. They maintain cultural traditions and languages that connect back to places like Mespat’s kil, even if they can no longer visit their ancestors’ fishing grounds or seasonal camps. Their survival itself refutes the completeness of colonial erasure.

Understanding the Mespat also means recognizing that Elmhurst, Maspeth, and the surrounding neighborhoods exist within indigenous geography that predates and underlies colonial settlement. Every street follows or cuts across older paths; every building stands on ground that held different meanings; every resident lives within a landscape shaped by centuries of Lenape land management before European arrival.

Remembering the Mespat is therefore not antiquarian. It corrects a historical erasure baked into the town’s very renaming and suburban marketing at the turn of the twentieth century. More than correction, it demands recognition that the industrial waterway we call Newtown Creek, with its Superfund status and bulkheaded banks, represents not progress but devastation—the transformation of a difficult but living landscape into a genuinely poisoned one.

The Mespat named their place honestly: it was bad water, challenging, tidal, brackish. But it was also home, and they made it work for generations. That we remember them now only through corrupted place names and scattered archival mentions measures not their insignificance but the thoroughness of their erasure—and the corresponding need to speak their name correctly, to restore their presence to the history of the place that was theirs before it was anyone else’s.

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Sources & Further Reading

• Primary archival sources: Tooker, William Wallace. The Indian Place-Names on Long Island (1911); New York State Archives deed records (1653); New Netherland Institute colonial document collections
• Lenape history and culture: National Museum of the American Indian; Hudson River Valley Institute Munsee Lenape materials
• Colonial period studies: New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of American Religious Liberty (Haefeli, 2012); Various treaty and deed collections at New York State Archives
• Environmental history: Newtown Creek Alliance historical resources; EPA Superfund site documentation
• Contemporary Lenape perspectives: Delaware Nation official histories; Lenape Center NYC programming and educational materials