BY SPECIAL REQUEST--- MAPPING CROTON 1797

Welcome to The New Everything Croton, a collection of all things Croton--our history, our homes, our issues, our businesses, our schools, our houses of worship--in short, EVERYTHING CROTON.

February 14 at 7:19 PM--FROM 2023

From the CROTON HIS. SOCIETY FB PAGE


MAPPING CROTON, circa 1797---CLICK ON THE PHOTO
This is the first in a series of posts we’ll be doing in the coming weeks as part of the celebration of Croton’s 125th anniversary.

Here is a detail of a much larger map of the entire Manor of Cortlandt in the collection of the New York State Archives (link in the comments below). That map, titled “Map of the Towns of Cortland, Yorktown and Stephentown in the County of Westchester” was copied from a survey by Phillip VerPlanck.

We’ve annotated the Croton section of the map to show:

A. Van Cortlandt Manor and the Ferry House, the two red rectangles below the letter A. The route of the ferry across the Croton River is the dotted line, which continues from the Ferry House into the village along the Albany Post Road (today, Nordica Drive and Old Post Road South and North).

B. The two grist mills, owned by the Underhill and Van Cortlandt families, located downstream from Fireman’s Island (then called Goose Island).

C. Bethel Chapel (the lower number 2) and the Quaker Meeting House (the upper number 2). The Quaker Meeting House and Cemetery was once located along the south side of Grand Street near the intersection with Mt. Airy. The land was sold in 1906 and the meeting house was torn down. The remains were moved to other Quaker cemeteries.

D. The two docks on the Hudson River, then called Upper Landing and Lower Landing, are indicated by the number 3. The roads leading down to them became Brook Street and Grand Street.

E. The location where Quaker Bridge is today. This is likely where a military bridge, called New Bridge, was built under orders of General George Washington during the Revolutionary War. Washington and his troops crossed the bridge in 1781 to join the French army in Verplanck, on the way to victory in Yorktown, Virginia. The bridge was gone by 1790, probably washed away by a freshet, which is why there is no line across the river indicating a bridge when the map was made.