Perth Amboy, New Jersey: A Scottish Earl Meets Ompoge

Perth Amboy, New Jersey, joins a Scottish earl’s title to a Native place name: “Perth” for the Earl of Perth, “Amboy” from Ompoge, the point’s old name. The two halves show up in the records about thirty years apart, and they ended up glued together because people kept naming the point along with the town.

Ompoge, Emboyle, Ambo

The Native half is the older one. William A. Whitehead, who wrote the town’s early history in 1856, says the point at the mouth of the Raritan River first appears in a deed “granted by the Indians December 8th, 1651,” to Augustine Herman, under the name Ompoge. In 1665, another deed called the whole area “Arthur Cull, or Emboyle,” and in 1666 it was written “Amboyle.” Whitehead thought “Ambo,” the name the point carried after settlers arrived, came “most probably from the first.”

By 1669 it was a fixed place name. When Woodbridge got its charter that June, the governor reserved “Ambo Point” for the proprietors. Whitehead reads that as a sign that Philip Carteret already had a town in mind for the spot.

The federal government tells the same story in shorter form. Henry Gannett’s place-names bulletin, and the GNIS record today, both say the name is “a combination of the name of the Earl of Perth and a corruption of the original Indian name of the town, Ompage.” You’ll notice the spelling differs from Whitehead’s Ompoge. Native names wandered a lot on their way into English records.

The earl in the name

The Scottish half came in 1684. In February of that year, Gawen Lawrie arrived as deputy governor of East Jersey, and “by him came from the proprietaries the name of Perth, for their new town, in honor of James, Earl of Perth, one of their associates.” Settlers’ letters from that time call it “New Perth.”

Whitehead’s notes fill in who the earl was. James was the fourth Earl of Perth, and in 1684 he became Lord High Chancellor of Scotland. He stuck with King James II, and when James fled in 1688, the earl tried to follow him to France. He was caught, robbed and held in Stirling Castle until 1693. Barber and Howe’s 1844 Historical Collections give his name as “John Drummond,” but Whitehead, who kept a manuscript from a lawsuit involving the earl, calls him James.

How Perth picked up Amboy

The plain “Perth” didn’t last. Whitehead says “its simple appellation of Perth was soon lost from joining with it the name of the point, Ambo.” People said “Perth Ambo” where they might have said Perth Point, and by 1718 the town’s first charter made it “the City of Perth Amboy.”

What “Amboy” means, if anything

Here the sources split. In a list of names sent to what Whitehead calls the “Philadelphia Philosophical Society” in 1822, Heckewelder traced “Amboy” to a word he spelled Emboli, meaning “hollow inside.” Barber and Howe’s list of Native names adds “like a bowl,” pointing to “a depression in the ground a little north of the city.” Gannett gives the same “hollow inside,” “like a bowl” for the Amboys in Illinois and Indiana. Whitehead didn’t buy it. He thought Ompoge was “the more probable derivation,” and noted that the “hollow inside” meaning, even if correct, fits the wider country in the old deeds better than Amboy Point itself. None of these writers shows a Lenape speaker’s own reading of the word, so treat the meaning as uncertain.

An Amboy out west, thanks to the oysters

Whitehead also chased the other Amboys in the country. The one in Lee County, Illinois, he wrote, came out of the work of commissioners appointed in 1845 to divide the county into townships. Someone proposed “Amoy,” which reminded one of them of a visit to Perth Amboy in 1842 “in his ‘clerical capacity,’” as a Mormon elder. Whitehead’s informant said the man remembered “fat oysters, good wives, and pretty women,” and pushed for Amboy instead. Gannett, for his part, files that Illinois town under the Native “hollow inside” meaning, so you can pick your favorite.

Sources & further reading

• William A. Whitehead, Contributions to the Early History of Perth Amboy and Adjoining Country (1856), pp. 2-16, 50, 415-416. Ompoge in the 1651 deed to Augustine Herman; “Arthur Cull, or Emboyle” (1665) and “Amboyle” (1666); “Ambo Point” in the Woodbridge charter of 1669; Heckewelder’s “Emboli” and Whitehead’s doubts (p. 2). Lawrie and the name Perth, 1684 (pp. 5-6); “New Perth” in letters of 1684 and 1685 (pp. 10, 16). “Perth” joined to “Ambo” and the 1718 charter (p. 50). Notes A and B: “Perth Ambo,” the Earl of Perth’s life, and the naming of Amboy, Illinois (pp. 415-416).
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States, 2nd ed. (USGS Bulletin 258, 1905), pp. 23, 243. Perth Amboy as “a combination of the name of the Earl of Perth and a corruption of the original Indian name of the town, Ompage” (p. 243); Amboy, Illinois and Indiana, “hollow inside,” “like a bowl” (p. 23).
• John W. Barber and Henry Howe, Historical Collections of the State of New Jersey (1844). The closing list of Indian names: “Amboy, from Emboli, hollow in the inside, like a bowl,” and Perth for the Earl of Perth, “(John Drummond.)”
• Edwin F. Hatfield, History of Elizabeth, New Jersey (1868), p. 51. The 1665 deed text with “Arthur Cull or Emboyle.”
• GNIS feature 879245 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record, with the same Earl of Perth and Ompage explanation as Gannett.