Esopus

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A place name for a town in Ulster County, New York, and the creek that flows through the area ; a Munsee-speaking Native American people who lived along the Hudson River valley
2. A river and town in the Hudson Valley region of New York ; an Indigenous people of the Hudson Valley whose language belonged to the Munsee branch of Algonquian
3. The name of a community and waterway in upstate New York ; a historic tribe of Lenape-related Algonquian speakers who inhabited the Hudson River area

Etymology: Esopus names a people, a creek, and a type of pottery. The Esopus were a band of Munsee-speaking Lenape who lived along the Hudson River in what is now New York State. Dutch colonists applied the name to the creek that ran through their lands, and the Esopus Creek still carries it, flowing into the Hudson near Kingston. The meaning of the name is uncertain. It is generally thought to be a Dutch rendering of a Lenape place name, but the original word is not reliably recorded. The same name also attaches to Esopus ware, a kind of earthenware made in the Kingston area during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The pottery takes its name from the district where it was produced.