[Robert S. Grumet (2014)] hospital, and a neighborhood in the City of Beacon. The name initially appeared in the August 8, 1683, Indian deed to land between present-day Fishkill and Wappinger creeks (see below) as a boundary point on “the south side of a creek called the Fresh Kill, and by the Indians Matteawan” (Hasbrouck 1909:35-37). Local residents had been casually applying the name to both the Fishkill Creek they sometimes called the Fresh Kill and the nearby Hudson Highland ridge they called Fishkill Mountain (today’s Beacon Mountains) when the directors of the newly formed Matteawan Manufacturing Company acquired land at Clay Mills at the falls of the Fishkill about a mile from the Hudson River in 1814. Factory owners soon named their new company town Matteawan. The locale grew large enough to support a post office of its own by 1849 (Kaiser 1965). The institution known today as the Matteawan (sometimes spelled Matawan) State Hospital for the Criminally Insane was built near the village in 1892. Use of Matteawan as a village name began to diminish after residents joined with those in neighboring communities to form the City of Beacon in 1913. Today, Matteawan survives in its original location as the name of the state hospital and the road that passes through the rapidly gentrifying Matteawan neighborhood at the site of the old village just east of downtown Beacon. MEAHAGH (Westchester County). The Knickerbocker Ice Company built and named Lake Meahagh in the Town of Cortlandt in 1855. Based in Rockland County, the company became the largest supplier of ice to the New York City market when ice blocks and crushed ice provided the only available refrigerant for ice boxes and ice chests. During its heyday in the 1880s, the company owned several lakes and used 1,000 horses to draw 500 wagons that annually hauled 40,000 tons of ice to the city. Adoption of electrified refrigeration gradually put the company out of business by 1924. Company officials selected the local Indian place name Meahagh as it was spelled in Robert Bolton’s (1881 1:86-87) published transcript of Stephanus van Cortlandt’s August 24, 1683, deed for their new lake. Examination of a manuscript copy of the deed on file in the New York State Library (Deed Book G:26-27) shows that the name originally appeared as Meanagh, a word that Whritenour thinks sounds much like a Munsee word, meenaxk, “fence or fort.” Recently, the Town of Cortlandt retained Bolton’s spelling when it gave the name Meahagh to the park established on land surrounding the lake. MERRICK (Nassau and Queens counties). Whritenour thinks that Merrick resembles a Munsee word, *muluk, “snow goose.” Today, Merrick is a municipal, road, park, and waterway name that adorns many places at the western end of Long Island’s south shore. The name first appeared when sachems from “Mesapeage, Merriack, or Rockaway” (see Massapequa above and Rockaway below) sold the Beyond Manhattan, Robert S. Grumet Great Meadows grasslands at Hempstead to colonists on November 13, 1643 (O’Callaghan and Fernow 1853-1887 14:53). Sachems representing the three communities appeared in other records selling or contesting sales of lands in what is now the southern half of Nassau County throughout the remainder of the seventeenth century. The complex maze of Merrick’s grassy inlets provided secure campsites for Indian travelers and concealed lairs for privateers sailing out into the Atlantic through the Merrick Gut up to the end of the War of 1812. Development in the area began only after the Long Island Railroad ran its mainline tracks across the center of the island during the mid-1860s. Methodists coming by wagon and train located their flow through neighboring Bedford into Connecticut. The name was first mentioned in several Indian deeds to lands in and around Bedford signed between 1700 and 1702 (in Robert Bolton 1881 1:29, 31). One of these, a 1701 conveyance backdated to 1686, referred to the Mianus River as a stream called Rechkawes or Kechkawes (Gehring 1980:62-63). The relatively late appearance of the stream’s current name in colonial records does nothing to detract from local traditions holding that it refers to the Indian warrior Mayane, who singlehandedly attacked three Dutch soldiers, killing two before being killed by the third during Governor Kieft’s War (Anonymous 1909:281). MINISCEONGO (Orange and Rockland counties). Minisceongo Creek and its branches drain a substantial area along the easternmost slopes of the Ramapo Mountain Ridge (see below). The name first appeared as Menisiakoungue Creek in an April 16, 1671, patent (State of New Jersey 1880-1949 21:17) to land at Haverstraw (see above). The South Branch of the Minisceongo Creek rises just across the low divide separating it from the headwaters of Pascack Brook (see below). The South Branch flows north past the Minisceongo Golf Course to its junction with the main branch of the Minisceongo Creek just east of Cheesecote Mountain