Finding · May 29, 2026 · Cartographic primary source

The 1874 farm-line map of Windsor Terrace

Henry Fulton's 1874 “Farm Line Map of the City of Brooklyn,” published by J.B. Beers & Co. of New York, documented Brooklyn property lines in ten numbered sections drawn at a property-survey level of detail. Section 10 covers the area between Prospect Park (north) and Greenwood Cemetery (south) — what we now call Windsor Terrace, but which in 1874 was a patchwork of streets newly cut through still-active Flatbush farmland, partly inside the City of Brooklyn and partly in the Town of Flatbush. The Henry Fulton map captured the property owners and street names of that exact transitional moment.

What the map shows

The street grid is already laid out and clearly labeled. Of the streets we now know:

BRAXTON ST is on the map. It is what the street is called in 1874, fourteen years before the Aldermen rename it Windsor Place. (The 1888 Rebrand finding)
SHERMAN STis already labeled by this name — confirming the 1854 founding deed's “continuation of 18th Street” was given the name Sherman by 1874. (The 1854 founding finding)
VANDERBILT AV is labeled — the street that bears the name of the Vanderbilt family who held farmland here. Several other 1854-deed grid streets — Seeley, the continuation of 18th — are visible.
The numbered streets First through Tenth (predecessors of 1st Avenue / 2nd Avenue / etc.), and named streets Montgomery, President, Union, Sackett, Lincoln Place, Macomb.

What the map does NOT show: a label that reads “Windsor Terrace.” The 1854 newspaper auction notices called the subdivision “Windsor Terrace,” the 1900 Riegel deed called it the “Windsor Terrace District,” but the 1874 Fulton property map does not transcribe that area name on the map itself. The neighborhood name lived in newspaper advertisements and conveyance forms, not in cartographic ink. This is the kind of thing it takes a primary-source layer like this map to reveal — a place can be talked about as a unit by its residents and advertised by its landlords, and still not appear as an official label on the city's property maps.

The 28 farm-line owners

A “farm line” map shows not only the new street grid but the old property boundaries, the rectangular farm parcels that existed before the lots were subdivided. Henry Fulton labeled each farm parcel with its owner's name. Twenty-eight separate owner names appear in Section 10:

Peter Wyckoff — Dutch Brooklyn original family; the Pieter Claesen Wyckoff House (1652) is the oldest building in NYC

John Wyckoff — Wyckoff family

John Vanderbilt — Vanderbilt family — the street commemorates them; ancestor of the Manhattan dynasty traces here

Jeremiah Vanderbilt — Vanderbilt family

Adrian V. Cortelyou — Cortelyou family; the name traces to Jacques Cortelyou the 1652 Dutch Brooklyn surveyor

Isaac Cortelyou — Cortelyou family

Jacques Cortelyou — Cortelyou family

Timothy Cortelyou — Cortelyou family

Simon Cortelyou — Cortelyou family

Joseph A. Perry — Perry family

Cornelius I. Bergen — Bergen family — another deep-rooted Flatbush surname

Heirs of John C. Bergen — Bergen family heirs

J. S. & G. Martense — Martense family — Flatbush Reformed Church name

Cornelius Martenus — Martense / Martenus family

Rem Adriance — Adriance family — Flatbush Dutch lineage

Theodorus Polhemus — Polhemus family

Thomas Talmage — Talmage family

Litchfield — Edwin C. Litchfield — the major mid-19th-century landowner; his Italianate Villa (now Prospect Park HQ) was built 1854-57. Mentioned in the 1865 Graef Prospect Park plan.

Van Brunt — Van Brunt family

Henry L. Clarke — Clarke family. A Mrs George Clarke is documented at Greenwood Avenue Windsor Terrace in 1906; possibly the same family three decades on.

L. Clarke — Clarke family

Richard Berry — Berry family

Joseph Berry — Berry family

Rachel Berry — Berry family — note this is a woman holding land in her own name in 1874, unusual for the period

Bennet — Bennet family

John Johnson — Johnson family

J. Cornell — Cornell family

Five Cortelyous, two Wyckoffs, two Vanderbilts, three Berrys, three Clarkes

The Cortelyou family appears five times: Adrian V., Isaac, Jacques, Timothy, and Simon all hold separate farm parcels in 1874. The Cortelyous trace back to Jacques Cortelyou, the 1652 Dutch Brooklyn surveyor whose original land grants in Brooklyn and New Utrecht were divided and re-divided over six generations. By 1874 there were still five branches of the family holding ancestral land in the Windsor Terrace area alone.

The Wyckoff family — descendants of Pieter Claesen Wyckoff, whose 1652 Flatbush house is the oldest extant building in New York City — appears twice: Peter Wyckoff and John Wyckoff. The Vanderbilts (John and Jeremiah) hold separate parcels; this is the same Brooklyn-Flatbush Vanderbilt family that produced the Manhattan shipping dynasty.

The Berry family appears three times, with one woman — Rachel Berry — listed holding land in her own name. Married-women property rights had been legal in New York since the 1848 Married Women's Property Act, but the appearance of a single named woman on a Brooklyn farm-line map alongside 27 men is still notable.

The Clarke family appears three times: Henry L. Clarke and another L. Clarke hold land in 1874. The May 28 2026 mining of the LoC chronam corpus surfaced a Mrs George Clarke at Greenwood Avenue, Windsor Terrace, in December 1906 (the bigamy case in our Lives at Windsor Place finding). Whether the 1906 Mrs George Clarke is connected to the 1874 Henry L. Clarke and L. Clarke is unverified, but the chronological and geographic adjacency is striking — same surname, same neighborhood, 32 years apart.

The Litchfield connection

Edwin C. Litchfield was the dominant pre-Prospect-Park landowner on the west side of the future park. His 1854-57 Italianate Villa on what is now Prospect Park West, designed by Alexander Jackson Davis, became the Prospect Park Headquarters in the 1880s. The 1865 Graef “Explanatory remarks to a sectional plan of Prospect Park” mentions “the property of Edwin C[. Litchfield]” at the park's western edge. The 1874 Fulton map confirms a Litchfield parcel adjacent to the Windsor Terrace tract. The Litchfield property bordered the 1854 Bleecker subdivision on the north, which is why Litchfield's mansion and the Windsor Terrace row-house lots developed in conversation with each other through the 1860s-1870s — Prospect Park between them.

Methodology

The Fulton 1874 map is hosted by the David Rumsey Map Collection and mirrored on Internet Archive as a JPG (~500KB). It has no embedded text layer. The map was passed to Gemini 2.5 Pro on Vertex AI with a structured-JSON prompt requesting verbatim transcription of all visible street names, farm-line owner labels, named buildings/landmarks, and boundary features. Gemini self-rated transcription confidence as “high” with no individual-owner uncertainty noted. The pipeline is at research/ocr_fulton_section10.py. The same map is at davidrumsey.com (zoomable) for hand-verification of any specific owner name.

Source: David Rumsey Map Collection 2395.011 — Henry Fulton, “Section 10 (Farm line map of the city of Brooklyn).” Published by J.B. Beers & Co., 36 Vesey Street, New York, 1874. Mirrored on Internet Archive as dr_section-10-farm-line-map-of-the-city-of-brooklyn-compiled-and-drawn-by-he-2395011. OCR via Gemini 2.5 Pro on Vertex AI; pipeline at research/ocr_fulton_section10.py; structured fields at research/fulton-1874-section10-extraction.json.