Before Europeans arrived, the northern end of Manhattan was part of the homeland of the Lenape, who farmed, fished and moved along the rivers with the seasons. In 1658 the Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant founded a village here, Nieuw Haarlem, named after the city of Haarlem in the Netherlands.
The name survived every change of flag: Dutch, then English, then American. Many details of this early period are thinly documented, so popular retellings should be checked against museum and archive sources.