Hackensack: Chief Oratam's Town

The land beneath modern Hackensack was the domain of a Lenape chief named Oratam, born around fifteen seventy-seven, one of the most consequential Native leaders in early colonial New Jersey. For decades Oratam mediated between Dutch settlers and the Lenape peoples, negotiating land deeds and protecting his people from the violence that consumed so many other communities. In sixteen sixty-five he formally deeded the territory to European settlers, and the name the Dutch recorded, Achkinheshcky, was eventually anglicized to Hackensack. Historians believe the word meant something close to "mouth of a river" in the Lenape language.

The Dutch established the first European settlement here in sixteen ninety-three, and Hackensack grew steadily as Bergen County's commercial and legal hub. By seventeen ten it was designated the county seat, and in seventeen sixteen a combined courthouse and jail was completed on the town green, the same green that still anchors the downtown today.

During the Revolutionary War, Hackensack sat in contested territory. British and Continental forces traded control of the town multiple times, and the local population was deeply divided between loyalists and patriots. Washington's retreat across New Jersey in the fall of seventeen seventy-six passed directly through here.

In the twentieth century Hackensack made a quieter kind of history. In nineteen thirty-three it adopted the council-manager form of government, a Progressive Era reform that placed daily administration in the hands of a professional manager rather than elected politicians. New Jersey's Municipal Manager Law of nineteen twenty-three is the statute behind that form of government. The principle of separating policy-making from administration is now the norm in hundreds of American cities.