What and where was Wawayanda? The early settlers on the patent seem to have been able to answer. Mr. Samuel Vantz, who then had been on the patent for fifty-five years, gave testimony in 1785, that Wawayanda was "Within a musket-shot of where DeKay lived." The reference was to the homestead house of Col. Thomas DeKay, who was then dead since 1758. The foundation of the house remains and its site is well known. In adjusting the boundary line between New York and New Jersey it was cut off from Orange County and is now in Vernon, New Jersey, where it is still known as the "Wawayanda Homestead." Within a musket-shot of the site of the ancient dwelling flows Wawayanda Creek, and with the exception of the meadows through which it flows in a remarkably sinuous course, is the only object in proximity to the place where DeKay lived, except the meadow and the valley in which it flows. The locative of the name at that point seems to be established with reasonable certainty as well as the object to which it was applied--the creek. The meaning of the name remains to be considered. Its first two syllables are surely from the root _Wai_ or _Wae;_ iterative and frequentive _Wawai,_ or _Waway,_ meaning "Winding around many times." It is a generic combination met in several forms--_Wawau,_ Lenape; _Wohwayen,_ Moh.; [FN] _Wawai,_ Shawano; _Wawy, Wawi, Wawei,_ etc., on the North-central-Hudson, as in _Waweiqate-pek-ook,_ Greene County, and _Wawayachton-ock,_ Dutchess County. Dr. Albert S. Gatschet, of the Bureau of Ethnology, wrote me: "_Wawayanda_, as a name formed by syllabic reduplication, presupposes a simple form, _Wayanda,_ 'Winding around.' The reduplication is _Wawai,_ or _Waway-anda,_ 'many' or 'several' windings, as a complex of river bends." As the name stands it is a participial or verbal noun. _Waway,_ "Winding around many times";--_-anda,_ "action, motion" (radical _-an,_ "to move, to go"), and, inferentially, the place where the action of the verb is performed, as in _Guttanda,_ "Taste it," the action of the throat in tasting being referred to, and in _Popachándamen,_ "To beat; to strike." As the verb termination of _Waway,_ "Round about many times," it is entirely proper. The uniformity of the orthography leaves little room for presuming that any other word was used by the grantors, or that any letters were lost or dropped by the scribe in recording. It stands simply as the name of an object without telling what that object was, but what was it that could have had action, motion--that had many windings--except Wawayanda Creek? * * * * * [FN] "_Wohwayen_ (Moh.), where the brook 'winds about,' turning to the west and then to the east." (Trumbull.) _Wowoaushin,_ "It winds about." (Eliot.) _Woweeyouchwan._ "It flows circuitously, winds about." (Ib.)