All On Four in Jamaica

The neighborhood was named Yameco, a corruption of the word yamecah, meaning “beaver”, in the language spoken by the Lenape, the Native Americans who lived in the area at the time of first European contact. The liquid “y” sound of English is spelled with a “j” in Dutch, the language of the first people to write about the area; the English retained this Dutch spelling, but, after repeated reading and speaking of “Jamaica”, slowly replaced the liquid sound with the hard “j” of the English pronunciation of the name today. (In the Caribbean, the aboriginal Arawaks named their island Xaymaca, “land of wood and water”, and the “x” spelling in Spanish was in time transformed to the hard “j” of the modern English name, “Jamaica”.)

Jamaica Avenue was an ancient trail for tribes from as far away as the Ohio River and the Great Lakes, coming to trade skins and furs for wampum. It was in 1655 that the first settlers paid the Native Americans with two guns, a coat, and some powder and lead, for the land lying between the old trail and “Beaver Pond” (now filled in; what is now Tuckerton Street north of Liberty Avenue runs through the site of the old pond, and Beaver Road was named for its western edge). Dutch Director-General Peter Stuyvesant dubbed the area Rustdorp (“rest-town”) in granting the 1656 land patent.

The English took over in 1664 and made it part of the county of Yorkshire. In 1683, when the Crown divided the colony of New York into counties, Jamaica became the county seat of Queens County, one of the original counties of New York.