Hooker Island, or rather in Dutch: Hoereneiland.
And not one, but there were two. One in what is now Connecticut, the other in Delaware.
Hoeren Eylant. Or Hoeren Kil, because kil is an old Dutch word for creek, ditch, stream. Simply because there was satisfaction to be achieved in those places. The early Dutch in America were reliable businessmen – you paid for what you bought. Supply and demand kept each other in satisfactory balance, and that included paid sex.
But there were plenty of Dutchmen who didn’t like it, they saw it as a sin against their religion. In Delaware they found a willing ear: literally. The governor spoke Dutch.
William Penn is known as the founder of Pennsylvania, the place where many Anabaptists, Mennonites and Amish, found a home. Son of an English admiral, but also of a Dutch mother. Margreet Jasper hailed from Rotterdam. Hoeren Eylant and Delaware were then still under Penn’s rule, and he said, get rid of that name.
His grateful subjects told their children that Hoeren had nothing to do with whores, but with a town in the old motherland, Hoorn. The new name became Zwaanendael, after an original Dutch settlement on the same spot. Now it is called Lewes there, but there is a museum Zwaanendael. It is modeled after Hoorn’s old town hall. In reality, it secretly recalls what the place originally was: a Dutch whorehouse.
Museum Zwaanendael in Delaware (left), next to the old Hoorn town hall that served as its example.
