The Bronx Tutors Come To You

The Bronx, one of the oldest communities in the United States, is one of the five boroughs of New York City. In fact, the Bronx has been around so long that most of us have probably never asked ourselves where this unusual name comes from.

The credit goes to Jonas Bronck, an immigrant to the Dutch colony of New Netherland in 1639, who established a farmstead on the island of Manhattan that is now part of the present-day Bronx borough, and for whom the Bronx River is also named. He and his wife carved out a homestead in the wilderness in just four years prior to his death in 1643.

Despite Bronck having lived there for a relatively short time, the area continued to be known as “Broncksland” through the end of the 17th century. The adjacent river was named Bronck’s River, and over time, the spelling became corrupted, giving us Bronx. This name stuck, and it was adopted as the name of the entire borough.

Despite Bronck’s claim to enduring fame, not much is known about where he came from or how old he was, and historians disagree as to his national origin and even the correct spelling of his name.

Several spellings of his name exist, but most authorities go with Jonas Jonasson Bronck. He may have been of Danish or Swedish descent, although that, too, is uncertain, and no one is sure what year he was born, although it is thought to be around 1600. What is known is that he married a Dutch woman, Teuntje Joriaens, in Amsterdam in 1638. The following year, they struck out for the New World, reaching New Netherland by ship with a group of other immigrants.

The Broncks’ farmstead, which they named Emmaus, consisted of about 680 acres. There, they built a stone house with a tile roof as well as two barracks for employees and a tobacco house, and raised a variety of animals. Today, the former farmstead is part of the Bronx neighborhood of Mott Haven.

Another unusual aspect of Jonas Bronck is that he was an extremely educated man for his day. Not long after his death in 1643, a formal inventory of his farm revealed that he kept a personal library with books in four different languages, suggested that he was literate in all four, and that his education may have been as high as university level — something that was probably accomplished with considerable tutoring, and was quite remarkable for that time and place.

After many years and many owners, the Bronks land was absorbed into the rapidly growing city of New York. In 1898, New York’s five boroughs—Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island—were officially consolidated as part of the plan for Greater New York, paving the way for the city that exists today.

Just as Jonas Bronck saw the promise of life in the New World, tutors in the Bronx can help students recognize the possibilities of their own futures by working with them to achieve academic excellence from elementary school through college.