Jacques Cortelyou

Jacques Cortelyou (ca 1625–1693) was an influential early citizen of New Amsterdam (later New York City) who was Surveyor General of the early Dutch colony. Cortelyou's main accomplishment was the so-called Cortelyou Survey, the first map of New York City, commonly called the Castello Plan after the location in a Tuscan palace where it was rediscovered centuries later.

Cortelyou arrived in Nieuw Amsterdam from Utrecht, Holland, where he had been born to French Huguenot parents. Cortelyou had studied mathematics and land-surveying, and served first in Nieuw Amsterdam as tutor to the children of Cornelis van Werckhoven, to whom the Dutch West India Company had granted a tract of land called New Utrecht. Cortelyou was subsequently appointed Surveyor General of the province of Nieuw Netherlands, succeeding Andries Hudde, and in 1660 made his famous map of Nieuw Amsterdam. Cortelyou also founded two subsequent settlements himself, New Utrecht on Long Island. In 1660 he designed Bergen Square site of the first town within the present borders of the state of New Jersey to receive a municipal charter.

The town of Bergen was located on the bluff "on the west side of the North River in Pavonia," the present location of Bayonne, Jersey City, Hoboken and Weehawken. Cortelyou and his associates had a financial interest in the outcome of the new settlement: they had purchased some "12,000 morgens at Aquackanonk on the Passaic, purchased by himself and associates of the Indians." There is some debate about the origin of the Bergen name, which happens to be the name of one of the earliest settlers of New Amsterdam. (The Bergen and Cortelyou families subsequently intermarried several times, indicating some degree of familiarity.) In any case, the year 1660 was the first time the word "Bergen" was used to describe the new settlement. Sadly, the original map of the Bergen settlement by Cortelyou, as well as the list of patentees, have been lost to history.

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