Three Flags Over the Raritan, Dutch, Swedish, and English New Jersey

New Jersey passed through three European empires in under fifty years, and the marks of each are still visible if you know where to look. The Dutch were first to establish a permanent presence, building Fort Nassau on the Delaware River in sixteen twenty-four near the site of present-day Gloucester City. New Netherland stretched to cover both sides of the Hudson, and Dutch settlers pushed into what they called East Jersey and West Jersey, trading furs with Lenape bands along the Raritan and Hackensack rivers.

Dutch farmhouses with their distinctive gambrel roofs and stepped gable ends survive in Bergen County to this day, some of them among the oldest standing structures in the entire northeastern United States. The Swedes arrived on the lower Delaware in sixteen thirty-eight, establishing New Sweden as a thin ribbon of settlement on both the New Jersey and Pennsylvania banks. They built log cabins, a construction technique that would spread across the continent, and planted tobacco and grain while maintaining generally peaceable relations with the Lenape.

New Sweden lasted barely seventeen years before the Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant arrived with seven ships in sixteen fifty-five and forced the Swedish garrison to surrender. Then the Dutch themselves lost it. When the English seized New Netherland in sixteen sixty-four, the Duke of York granted the territory between the Hudson and the Delaware to his friends Sir George Carteret and Lord John Berkeley.

They called it New Jersey after Carteret's home island of Jersey in the English Channel, and they promised religious tolerance and a representative assembly to attract settlers. Both the tolerance and the assembly would be repeatedly tested in the decades that followed. By the time New Jersey became a royal colony in seventeen oh two, it was already a patchwork, Dutch farmers in the north, English Quakers in the west, Scottish settlers along the Raritan, and Swedish descendants in the south, a layered, contentious, plural society that prefigured the state New Jersey would become.