Who Is It Named After? The Hutchinson Massacre

HUDSON VALLEY, NY — A Puritan, an accused witch and heretic, an exile to a Pelham settlement, a pioneer who was brutally murdered by a tribe at war, Anne Hutchinson blazed trails and eventually became the patron saint of Hudson Valley commuters.

Most of the rivers, bridges and highways in the region are named after long-dead white men, so it's refreshing to learn that the Hutchinson River, which gave birth to the moniker of the Hutchinson River Parkway, was named after a woman who did her level best to help a few of those long-dead white men learn their places.

Anne Marbury Hutchinson died at the age of 52 at the hands of Siwanoy Indians near what is now the Bay Plaza shopping center in the Bronx. According to a New York Times account of her life, Hutchinson and six of her 14 children died in a bloody massacre in 1643, but it wasn't Hutchinson's death that earned her lasting notoriety.

One must look carefully to find evidence of the Hutchinson River. (Shutterstock)

She managed to get so under the skin of church elders in her tight-knit Puritan Massachusetts community that she was accused of heresy and witchcraft before eventually being banished to Rhode Island. She once again wore out her welcome in Rhode Island before settling in the Hudson Valley.

The river named after Hutchinson has largely been displaced by the highway that would also bear her name, but a lasting legacy of open defiance of authority and rebelliousness still lives on in the fast lane of the nearly century-old throughway.