Lady Deborah Moody, her baronetcy inherited from her husband, was a 43-year-old widow when she immigrated from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1639. She had left England because she felt she could not live there as an Anabaptist. But that religion was not acceptable in the Puritan New England settlements either, and she was forced to leave there, too.
Lady Moody and some of her followers moved to the more religiously tolerant New Netherland and settled on unoccupied land in south Brooklyn in 1643. In late 1645, William Kieft, the governor-general of New Netherland, granted her a charter that not only allowed freedom of religion but also established the land as a self-governing town. She became the first woman to charter land in the New World.
Legend says the name Gravesend may have come from the Dutch words “grafes” and “ende,” which together would mean “end of the grove,” but “grafes” is not actually a Dutch word.
Some accounts suggest Moody called it Gravesend after Gravesend in Kent, England, on the River Thames, which is supposed to mean “at the end of the grove” in Anglo-Saxon or Old English.
The most likely theory is that Kieft named it for Gravesande, a town in Holland that had been the seat of the Counts of Holland, and means “count’s beach.”
Lady Moody made Gravesend a home for many religious dissenters, especially the peace-loving Quakers, who were also banned from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
