300th anniversary of Flatbush proclamation

The Town of Flatbush was founded in 1636 when Dutch settlers purchased land from the Native Americans of the region, known as the Lenape (people), and began to populate what they designated as Vlacke Bos ("flatlands covered with bushes"). In 1652, the governor of New Amsterdam (later New York), Peter Stuyvesant, granted the inhabitants of Vlacke Bos a patent, and the town was officially chartered, becoming one of the original six villages to comprise what would eventually become the borough of Brooklyn, along with Brooklyn, Flatlands, New Utrecht, Bushwick, and Gravesend. In little time, Vlacke Bos began flourishing as a farming community. When the British took long-term control over New Amsterdam from the Dutch in 1674 and renamed the island New York, they also Anglicized the names of the surrounding area's smaller towns and villages; hence, Vlacke Bos became Flatbush. Later in 1683, when the English consolidated the six original towns of Brooklyn under the jurisdiction of Kings County, they designated Flatbush as the county's judicial center, a designation it held for the next 150 years. Still, very little else in Flatbush changed; despite a period of hardship during the Revolutionary War, it largely remained a prosperous rural farming community well into the nineteenth century. Only in the latter half of the nineteenth century, with the advent of a system of roads and advances in transportation, did Flatbush begin to expand and show signs of commercial influence. With the completion of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883 and Brooklyn's consolidation as a borough of New York City in 1898, the character of Flatbush changed profoundly as waves of New York residents and new immigrants came flooding in to settle in the developing area, transforming it into a thriving suburb. As of 2010, Flatbush is one of the most multicultural neighborhoods of the borough of Brooklyn.