After Juriaen Thomassen from Ripen settled down with his wife Reyckje in the growing village of Bergen (now Jersey City), he was party to a contract that would significantly shape the future of what we know know as Clifton, New Jersey.
On March 28, 1679, a group of Dutch settlers purchased what was known as “Acquackanonk” (ah-QUACK-ah-nonk) from the Lenni Lenape Indians, located around what is now the Main Avenue Bridge in Passaic.
However, the transfer of Native land rights did not count under English law. This was relevant because the English had granted some rights to English settlers in the same area, and that conflicted with the Dutch settlers’ goals.
So, Juriaen Tomassen and 13 other heads of Dutch households negotiated and purchased from the Proprietors of East Jersey the land encompassed by a line drawn from where the Third River enters the Passaic to what is now the location of Montclair State University (“the first mountain”), then following the Passaic back to the beginning. This was memorialized in the Acquackanonk Patent, granted on March 15, 1684. The Dutch then began splitting up the tract into various lots shown on the maps below.
That area became Acquackanonk Township in 1693. After land was parceled out into Paterson, Little Falls, and Passaic, Acquackanonk became the City of Clifton on April 26, 1917.
Sources & further reading:
Lambert Castle
Passaic County
Gerrit Gerritszen van Wagenen
Acquackanonk Township, New Jersey
New York Public Library Digital Archives
THE STORY OF NEW JERSEY’S CIVIL BOUNDARIES