Pictured here is “the House of Lady Moody.” Despite the name, Lady Deborah Moody never lived in this building. Instead, the dedication is indicative of how Lady Moody shaped the Gravesend of today.

Lady Moody was a widowed noblewoman who fled England to practice her Anabaptist beliefs in peace at the age of fifty-four. She eventually settled in a Salem, Massachusetts farm of more than 1,000 acres. Unfortunately, she met the same fate as Anne Hutchinson who had been successfully prosecuted and excommunicated from Salem just two years earlier for her “heretic” Anabaptist beliefs.

At the time of Lady Moody’s excommunication, Director William Kieft of the Dutch West India Company aimed to recruit settlers in New Amsterdam, in order to bolster their numbers against Native American attacks. Lady Moody was a woman of means who had followers willing to help settle a new community. Kieft granted her 7,000 acres of the southwestern tip of Long Island to create a settlement, which Lady Moody called “Gravesend” and granted her settlers religious freedom. Gravesend was the first New World settlement founded by a woman. The land encompassed what is today Gravesend Bay, Bensonhurst, Coney Island, Brighton Beach, and Sheepshead Bay. Gravesend Bay retains the original street plan adopted by Lady Moody.

Despite attacks from Native Americans, the small town of Gravesend grew - and with it Lady Moody’s political influence. For example, Director-General Peter Stuyvesant called on Lady Moody to mediate a tax dispute in 1654.

Lady Moody passed away at the age of 73 in 1659, leaving behind a legacy of persevering in the face of religious persecution as well as paving the physical and social development of New Amsterdam. You can still walk on some of the streets Lady Moody laid out in 1643 – most famously Mill Road.