B'stoner: Walkabout with Montrose: The Road to Prospect Hts

raulism

Subject: B'stoner: Walkabout with Montrose: The Road to Prospect Hts

There's a great post by Montrose Morris on Brownstoner at

http://www.brownstoner.com/brownstoner/archives/2009/10/walkabout_with_26.php

Montrose Morris wrote: The hills of central Brooklyn have long been battle grounds of one kind or another. At the start of the Revolutionary War, in 1776, the Battle of Brooklyn was fought along Brooklyn’s terminal moraine, the glacial hills that included the famous Battle Pass, now in Prospect Park, where the American forces were almost overwhelmed. Part of that battleground was also Mount Prospect, the second highest point in Brooklyn, near the present day intersection of Flatbush and Eastern Parkway, a hilly wooded area used as a lookout post by George Washington that would later give rise to the neighborhood of Prospect Heights. The entire area had been settled by Dutch farmers, including several branches of Bergen’s, since the 1630’s, and was mostly tenant farms and fields worked by slave labor. Located between the towns of Bedford and Brooklyn, the area was bisected by the Ferry Road to Flatbush, an expansion of an old Indian trail, which eventually became the Flatbush Road, east of present day Flatbush Ave. (Many of the original roads and streets in PH were moved in the 1850’s, resulting in some of the diagonal and off-grid placement of buildings that intrigue Prospect Heights residents today.) The Flatbush Road was a major thoroughfare, the main road between the town of Flatbush and the town of Brooklyn, and the ferries to Manhattan. In 1809, the Brooklyn, Jamaica, and Flatbush Turnpike Company incorporated, and toll booths were erected along their routes, including Flatbush. Part of the old Flatbush Road went through parts of what is now Prospect Park, land made uninhabitable by fevers and malarial diseases caused by stagnant ponds located in the thick undergrowth. When Brooklyn was incorporated as a city in 1834, the Prospect Heights area was the least populated of Brooklyn’s nine wards.