Hoboken, New Jersey: Tobacco Pipe or Dutch Village?

Nobody has settled where the name Hoboken, New Jersey, comes from: a Lenape word for a tobacco pipe, or a Dutch village down the river from Antwerp. Both ideas have real scholars behind them, and the oldest paper with the name on it gets read both ways.

The 1630 deed

The name first shows up in a deed dated July 12, 1630. It was signed at Fort Amsterdam, on Manhattan, when Native owners sold land on the west bank of the Hudson to Michael Pauw, a burgomaster of Amsterdam. Charles H. Winfield, in his 1874 History of the County of Hudson, calls these the first deeds for any land in East Jersey.

The spelling never sat still. E. M. Ruttenber, who studied Native place names along the Hudson and the Delaware, tracked it from “Hobocan-Hacking” in 1630 to “Hobokina” in 1635, “Hobocken” in 1643 and “Hoboken” in 1647. In the 1650s you’ll also find “Hobuck” and “Harboken.” At first it meant only the low point of land below Castle Point, and you can find Castle Point marked on the map above.

The tobacco pipe

The pipe story is the one most of the old books tell. Winfield calls Hoboken “an Indian word” that “is said to mean tobacco pipe.” Add “Hackingh,” which he says meant land, and you get “the land of the tobacco pipe.” He adds that the Native people came here for a stone they carved into pipes.

Others line up behind it. A list of Native names at the back of the 1844 Historical Collections by John W. Barber and Henry Howe, sent in by Thomas Gordon of Trenton, gives “a tobacco-pipe” and says the word was used in a symbolic sense for crookedness, here meaning the shape of the riverbank. William Nelson’s 1894 Indians of New Jersey says the name comes “probably from hopoacan, a pipe.” Gannett’s 1905 bulletin for the U.S. Geological Survey gives “hopocan, meaning ‘tobacco pipe,’ or ‘pipe country.’”

There’s a real word underneath this. A Lenape-English dictionary published in 1888 by Daniel G. Brinton and Albert Seqaqkind Anthony lists “Hopoakan, a pipe for smoking.” That proves the word exists in the language. It doesn’t prove the place was named for it.

The Dutch village

That’s where it gets interesting. Ruttenber looked at the same 1630 deed and focused on one phrase: the Dutch officials wrote that the land was “by us called Hobocan-Hacking.” To him, that “obviously implies that the terms in the name were Dutch and not Indian, and Dutch they surely were.”

He backed it up with a letter from A. S. Gatschet of the Bureau of Ethnology, who wrote that Hoboken was “called after a village on the river Scheldt, a few miles below Antwerp.” Gatschet broke it down as “high” plus a word for “elevation” or “hump,” a place “distinguished by a hill.” The doubt is older than Ruttenber, too. Winfield noted back in 1874 that “Judge Benson thought that Hoboken was a Dutch name.”

Which one weighs more?

On paper, the pipe has more behind it: four old books and a matching Lenape word, so it’s the version we’d lean toward. But those books mostly state the meaning without showing where it came from, and Winfield himself only says “is said to mean.” The Dutch case leans on the deed’s wording and on Gatschet’s village near Antwerp. Neither side has a document that settles it, so the question stays open.

Whichever you believe, the spelling took a while to land. On August 7, 1776, Winfield says, orders went out from headquarters in New York City to post “a subaltern and twenty men” at “the Hoebuck ferry” to examine the passengers crossing there.

Sources & further reading

• E. M. Ruttenber, Footprints of the Red Men: Indian Geographical Names (1906), pp. 107-108. The deed to Michael Pauw of July 12, 1630; the spellings from 1630 to 1655-56; “by us called Hobocan-Hacking”; the Dutch argument; Gatschet’s letter about the village on the Scheldt.
• Charles H. Winfield, History of the County of Hudson, New Jersey (1874), pp. 13-14, 262. The 1630 deeds as the first in East Jersey; “said to mean tobacco pipe,” “the land of the tobacco pipe” and Judge Benson’s view (pp. 13-14). The guard at “the Hoebuck ferry,” August 7, 1776 (p. 262).
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States, 2nd ed. (USGS Bulletin 258, 1905), p. 158. “Derived from the Indian word hopocan, meaning ‘tobacco pipe,’ or ‘pipe country.’”
• William Nelson, The Indians of New Jersey (1894), p. 124. Hoboken “probably from hopoacan, a pipe.”
• Daniel G. Brinton and Albert Seqaqkind Anthony, A Lenâpé-English Dictionary (1888), p. 49. “Hopoakan, a pipe for smoking.”
• John W. Barber and Henry Howe, Historical Collections of the State of New Jersey (1844). The Hudson County chapter (“supposed anciently to be called Hoebuck”) and the closing list of Indian names, which reads “a tobacco-pipe” with the note about the river shore.
• GNIS feature 877147 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for Hoboken.