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Jamaica had its glory days in the early 1700s, when it was the capital of the British colony of New York, the seat of the British royal governor. It also was the cow capital of the colony, with 600 head of cattle supply- ing a large portion of New York City's meat.
Along with Flushing and Newtown (now called Elmhurst), it was one of the three colonial towns in Queens before Queens became a county, before there was a United States. The Dutch came first, in 1655, negotiating with the Canarsie and Rockaway Indians, who both claimed the area around Jamaica Bay. The Indians settled for guns, blankets, kettles and "8 bottles of licker" - a hard bargain. The Dutch called the settlement Rustdorp, meaning "peaceful village."
The English came from Hempstead in 1656, negotiating with New Netherlands Gov. Peter Stuyvesant for the land around the long-vanished Beaver Pond. The settlers, Daniel Denton, Rodger Linas, Robert Jackson and others, petitioned Stuyvesant for the "place called Conorasset," which "lies from a river which divideth it from Conarie see to the bounds of heemstead and may contain about twentie families." The name Jamaica came in the 1700s, probably deriving from the Jameco Indians who lived at the head of the bay.
After the British forcefully displaced the Dutch, they created Queens County in 1683 and chartered the land to Gov. Thomas Dongan. Fishing, farming and cattle-raising flourished until 1776, when British troops routed Gen. George Washington's army in the Battle of Long Island and occupied the area for the next seven years. Though Queens was a hotbed of Toryism before...