Far Rockaway, NY news and local guide

After decades of trade and conflict, including Kieft's War, the Lenape were gradually displaced through land agreements, which they understood as granting use of the land while the colonists treated them as permanent sales. The Dutch secured claims from Lenape sachems by 1639, the English took over in 1664, and in 1685 the chief Tackapoucha and Governor Thomas Dongan agreed to sell the Rockaways to a Captain Palmer for 31 pounds. The peninsula was then part of the Town of Hempstead in Queens County. After a dispute with the town over ownership, Palmer sold the land in 1687 to Richard Cornell, an ironmaster from Flushing, who in 1690 established the first European homestead on what is now Central Avenue near the ocean, a self-sufficient estate of more than 1,000 acres worked by enslaved African Americans, raising cattle and sheep and growing corn, wheat and rye. Sources Wikipedia: Far Rockaway, Queens