British Revolutionary War map of New Brunswick, New Jersey, c.1777. A pen-and-ink and watercolor drawing, showing topographic relief by shading of an area crossed by the Raritan River. Roads, troop positions, and military emplacements are shown and numbered, with a key at the bottom identifying them.
29 June 2021
Brunswick is a city in Lower Saxony whose name comes from the Middle Low German Burnswik, from Brun (Bruno) + wik (settlement). The city was legendarily founded by Bruno, Duke of Saxony, in 861. The modern name is Braunschweig,
The North American New Brunswicks, a province in Canada and a city in New Jersey, United States, are named after the Hanoverian English kings George III and George I, respectively, who also held the title of Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg.
Of course, there were people living in the places that are called New Brunswick before Europeans settled there and renamed them. The inhabitants of the province of New Brunswick at the time of European contact were the Mi'kmaq, the Maliseet, and the Passamaquoddy. Since the province is a settler-colonist construct, I don’t know of an indigenous name that corresponds to the province as a whole, but the capital, Fredericton is located near the site of the Maliseet settlement of Ekwpahak (end of the tide) and the largest city in the province, Moncton, is located at a place known to the Mi’kmaq as Amalamgog (the delta where the multicolored rivers meet).
The indigenous inhabitants of the area containing the New Jersey city of New Brunswick were the Lenape or Delaware, who refer to their land as Lenapehoking (land of the Lenape). Lenapehoking encompassed all of what is called by settler-colonists New Jersey and the surrounding parts of New York (including all of New York City), Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware.
Of the two, the city in New Jersey has borne the name New Brunswick for longer, since at least 1735, when this advertisement appeared in the New-York Weekly Journal on 9 February:
To be Sold,
The Real Estate in the Provinces of New-York and New-Jersey, whereof Major General Hunter, deceased, died seized, consisting of the following Particulars, viz.
1. The House and Lott on the Dock near the Ferry Stars of New-York, in which Coll. Lurting, late Mayor of this City lived.
[...]
5. A 500 Acre Lott of Land on the South Side of the Raritan River, about 3 Miles above New-Brunswick, formerly Richard Jones’s, lying between Governour Barclay’s Lott and Clement’s Lott.
The Canadian province was separated from Nova Scotia in 1784, and a notice of the appointment of the province’s first governor is recorded on 28 July of that year:
28. The hon. William Wesley Pole, appointed by the lord lieutenant of Ireland to be governor of the Queen’s county.
—. Colonel Thomas Carleton, to be captain-general and governor in chief of the province of New Brunswick.
Sources:
“Advertisement.” New-York Weekly Journal, 9 February 1735, 4.
Brookes, Alan and William W. Thorpe. “Fredericton.” The Canadian Encyclopedia, 6 March 2019.
Everett-Heath, John. Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names, sixth ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020. Oxfordreference.com.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2020, s.v. Brunswick, n.
Pearce, Margaret Wickens. Coming Home to Indigenous Place Names in Canada (map). Canadian-American Center, University of Maine, 2017.
“Principal Occurrences in the Year 1784.” The New Annual Register or General Repository of History, Politics, and Literature, for the Year 1784. London: G.G.J. and J. Robinson, 1785, 117. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Rayburn, Alan. Oxford Dictionary of Canadian Place Names. Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford UP Canada, 1999.
Image credit: Alexander Sutherland and John Hills, c.1777. Library of Congress. Public domain image.