The village of Gravesend was founded by Lady Deborah Moody, the wealthy widow of an English baronet and an Anabaptist who fiercely opposed infant baptism. After initially settling in Massachusetts, Lady Deborah fled from the Puritan-led colony where her proselytizing wasn’t welcome, and headed for New Amsterdam, where the Dutch colonizer and director-general William Kieft, glad to have settlers, granted her a land patent. (Kieft had seized control of this land by carrying out numerous genocides of the indigenous people who’d been living in the region for thousands of years…
