How Williamsburg got its name

Let’s see now, Williamsburg.

“Burg,” we know, means a town or village.

But who was the “William” who gave this neighborhood — once a town — his name?

To begin, this area was originally bought from the local Canarsee people by the Dutch West India Company in 1638 and became part of the town of Boswijck. After the English took New Netherland in 1664, the name of the town was Anglicized to Bushwick; the townspeople generally called it Bushwick Shore.

It was a rural area until in 1810 a real-estate speculator, Richard Woodhull, acquired 13 acres in the area where there was a ferry service from what is today Metropolitan Avenue to Corlear’s Hook in Manhattan. He named the area after Col. Jonathan Williams, a U.S. engineer who had originally surveyed the site.

It was incorporated as the Vil