Sluckup: The Legend of Paramus

Local lore says this part of Paramus once went by one of the stranger place names in New Jersey history: Sluckup. A local legend explains it. A Dutch farmer hung his shirt on a fence post while working his field.

He watched in disbelief as the shirt slipped into the open mouth of a passing ox and disappeared down the animal's throat. The farmer shouted that the ox had slucked up his shirt, and the name stuck to the neighborhood for generations. Paramus itself has a history that runs deeper than the story.

It was Lenape land before Dutch colonists arrived in the sixteen hundreds, and during the Revolution Washington made his headquarters here in seventeen seventy-eight. The odd name is gone now, replaced by shopping centers and parkways, but the legend survives on this marker.