How did Wall Street get its name?

The simple story is the true one. Wall Street is named for a wall. The popular rival to it is the one that is wrong.

On March 13, 1653, according to the NYC Department of Records and Information Services, Director General Petrus Stuyvesant and his council resolved to surround much of New Amsterdam with a high stockade and a small breastwork. The cause was the First Anglo-Dutch War and rumors of English troops in New England. Wikipedia describes a ditch and wooden palisade, about 2,340 feet long and 9 feet tall, built by colonists and enslaved Africans.

The Dutch did not call the street Wall Street. The city archives say they called it Het Cingel, "the Belt," a word often used for a city's fortifications and the path beside them. The archives note that the Singel in Amsterdam once ran along that city's own wall. A 1665 tax record, after the English takeover, still reads "Het Cingel ofte Stadt Wall." Governor Thomas Dongan may have made the first official use of "Wall Street," in 1685 according to the archives and 1686 according to Wikipedia. Either way, the English name predates the wall's removal in 1699.

Now the rival. A modern claim says the name comes from the Walloons, French-speaking people of what is now Belgium. The city archives call it an "even more absurd" myth that is currently gaining traction. It rests on the idea that the Dutch word waal means wall. Wikipedia says some 19th and early 20th century historians believed the Dutch name was de Waal Straat, which sounds like Walloon Street. That name in fact belonged to a riverfront wharf street. The archives point out that the Dutch word for wall is wal, not waal, which meant a wharf in New Amsterdam.

One more correction concerns purpose. The archives say the March 1653 minutes do not mention Native Americans, and that the wall was extended in 1655 after the Peach Tree War. So the common line that it was built mainly against Native raids does not match the founding record.

The wall is gone, but the name stuck. Wikipedia says traders met under a buttonwood tree at the foot of the street, and in 1792 their Buttonwood Agreement became the origin of the New York Stock Exchange. By then the wall had given the street a name that eventually meant the whole financial industry.