Shawangunk, the name of a town, a stream of water, and a range of hills in Ulster County, was that of a specific place from which it was extended. It is of record in many orthographies, the first in 1684, of a place called _Chauwanghungh,_ [FN-1] in deed from the Indians to Governor Dongan, in the same year, _Chawangon,_ [FN-2] and _Chanwangung_ in 1686, [FN-3] later forms running to variants of _Shawangunk._ The locative is made specific in a grant to Thomas Lloyd in 1687; [FN-4] in a grant to Severeign Tenhout in 1702, [FN-5] and in a description in 1709, "Adjoining Shawangung, Nescotack and the Palze." [FN-6] In several other patent descriptions the locative is further identified by "near to" or "adjoining," and finally (1723) by "near the village of Showangunck," at which time the "village" consisted of the dwellings of Thomas Lloyd, on the north side of Shawangunk Kill; Severeign Tenhout on the south side; and Jacobus Bruyn, Benjamin Smedes, and others, with a mill, at and around what was known later as the village of Tuthiltown. In 1744, Jacobus Bruyn was the owner of the Lloyd tract. [FN-7] The distribution of the name over the district as a general locative is distinctly traceable from this center. It was never the name of the mountain, nor of the stream, and it should be distinctly understood that it does not appear in Kregier's Journal of the Second Esopus War, nor in any record prior to 1684, and could not have been that of any place other than that distinctly named in Governor Dongan's deed and in Lloyd's Patent.
Topographically, the tract was at and on the side of a hill running north from the fiats on the stream to a point of which Nescotack was the summit, the Lloyd grant lying in part on the hill-side and in part on the low lands on the stream. The mountain is eight miles distant. Without knowledge of the precise location of the name several interpretations of it have been made, generally from _Shawan,_ "South"--South Mountain, South Water, South Place. [FN-8] The latter is possible, _i. e._ a place lying south of Nescotack, as in the sentence: "Schawangung, Nescotack, and the Paltz." From the topography of the locative, however, Mr. William R. Gerard suggests that the derivatives are _Scha_ (or _Shaw_), "Side," _-ong,_ "hill," and _-unk,_ locative, the combination reading, "At (or on) the hill-side." [FN-9] This reading is literally sustained by the locative.