1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Tarrytown

TARRYTOWN, a village of Westchester county, New York, on the E. bank of the Hudson river, opposite Nyack, with which it is connected by ferry, and about 25 m. N. of New York City. Pop. (1890) 3562; (1900) 4770, of whom 984 were foreign-born and 191 were negroes; (1910, U.S. census) 5600. Tarrytown is served by the New York Central and Hudson River railway, and by interurban electric lines connecting it, via White Plains, with New York City. It is situated on a sloping hill that rises to a considerable height above Tappan Zee, a large expansion of the Hudson river, and is built principally along either side of a broad and winding country highway (laid out in 1723) from New York to Albany, called the King's Highway until the War of Independence, then called the Albany Post Road, and now known (in Tarrytown) as Broadway. South of the village is "yndhurst," the estate of Miss Helen Miller Gould, and to the N.E. is Kaakout (originally "Kijkuit," that is, "lookout," the name of a high promontory), the estate of John D. Rockefeller. In the village are the Hackley School (1899), Irving School (1837), Repton School and the "Castle" School for girls; a Young Men's Lyceum (1899), with a public library (8000 volumes in 1910) and the Tarrytown Hospital (1892). In the vicinity there are large nurseries and market-gardens, and automobiles are manufactured in the village. Tarrytown stands on the site of a Wecquaesgeek Indian village, Alipconk (the place of elms), burned by the Dutch in 1644. The first settlement of whites was made about 1645. There were perhaps a dozen Dutch families here in 1680, when Frederick Philipse (formerly known as Vredryk Flypse) acquired title to several thousand acres in Westchester county, called Philipse Manor. He built, partly of brick brought from Holland, a manor-house (on a point of land now known as Kingsland's Point, a short distance above the present village), a mill and a church, at the mouth of Sleepy Hollow, some three-quarters of a mile above the village; Dr Hamilton Wright Mabie has written: "There is probably no other locality in America, taking into account history, tradition, the old church, the manor-house and the mill, which so entirely conserves the form and spirit of Dutch civilization in the New World." During the War of Independence Tarrytown was the centre of the "Neutral Territory" between the lines of the British and Continental forces, and was the scene of numerous conflicts between the "cowboys" and "skinners," bands of unorganized partisans, the former acting in the name of the colonies, and the latter in that of the king. On the post road, on the 24th of September 1780, Major John Andre was captured by three Continentals, John Paulding, David Williams and Isaac Van Wert; to commemorate the capture a marble shaft surmounted by a bronze statue of a Continental soldier has been erected on the spot. Tarrytown is described in the Sketch Book of Washington Irving, who lived and died at "Sunnyside," within the limits of Tarrytown, was long warden of old Christ Church, and is buried in the Old Sleepy Hollow burying-ground, which adjoins the Dutch Church, and in which Carl Schurz also is buried. Tarrytown was incorporated as a village in 1870. Its name is probably a corrupt form of the Dutch "Tarwen dorp" (wheat town).

See H. B. Dawson, Westchester County in the American Revolution (New York, 1886); and an article by H. W. Mabie in L. P. Powell's Historic Towns of the Middle States (New York, 1899).