The 1862 Flushing Town Hall is a Romanesque Revival style building. Popular during the Civil War, this style can be seen in hundreds of other buildings throughout the city. The two story building has a grand triple-arched portico for an entrance. It served as the seat of government of the village of Flushing until the consolidation of Greater New York City in 1898. Early photographs of the building, including this one from 1922, show a light colored building. The building facade had long been painted— layer upon layer—with white paint. During the 1990s renovation, the original brown and beige stone and brick were revealed and deemed safer for continued preservation.

The first European settlers arrived in modern-day New York in 1614. Twelve years later, the Dutch West India Company brought over eleven enslaved people from Africa. From the settlement of New Netherland, African Americans have played a critical role in the development of New York. In the early portion of New Netherland's history, the Dutch divided Black people into two groups: those who were enslaved, and those who were not. This division persisted until the Civil War in 1861. To southerners, a portion of this period from the 18th century to the start of the Civil War was called the "Antebellum" which means the pre-Civil War era. In the south, these years were marked by economic growth due to the reliance on slavery in the region. This period also marked the beginning of a divide between two schools of thought, those who were against slavery, the abolitionists, and those in support of slavery. This story teaches us about what that period was like for Black people in the North and specifically, in New York City. NYS Social Studies Scope and Sequence Standards: 4.7, 7.7, & 11.3. For Teachers: African American in Antebellum New York Lesson Plan

Queens is such an integral part of the metropolis that is hard for us to think of it as rural and agricultural. But when New York was New Amsterdam, Queens was no more than a series of remote villages scattered between the Dutch Brooklyn (Breukelen) and the English eastern Long Island settlements. As Dutch and English settlers moved closer to one another, they began to assimilate in what would later become Queens County. The Dutch colonial government of New Amsterdam exercised political and military control of this area, but permitted, even welcomed English settlement. The Dutch chartered Hempstead (Heemstede) in 1644, Flushing (Vlissingen) in 1645, Newtown (Middelburgh) in 1652, and Jamaica (Rustdorp) in 1656. These were predominately English towns, but they differed from the settlements at the eastern end of Long Island, not only in their recognition of the Dutch government and their accommodation of Dutch settlers but also in harboring many religious dissenters. These towns proved to be a comfortable place for Quakers in particular. Nowhere more so than Flushing was this religious welcoming evident. When the colonial government forbade the entertaining of Quakers, thirty inhabitants issued the Flushing Remonstrance objecting to the order on December 27, 1657. Today this document is considered instrumental to the concept of religious liberty. The tradition of acceptance and diversity is continued in Flushing, which is one of the most diverse neighborhoods in Queens County with Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, Pakistani, Afghan, and Indonesian communities.