Stories
Deep dives into Croton-on-Hudson history, cross-referenced from primary source documents and fact-checked against the archive.
The Cannon Shot That Saved America
How a band of Croton locals forced the HMS Vulture downstream — and accidentally exposed Benedict Arnold's treason
On the evening of September 21, 1780, the British sloop-of-war HMS Vulture rode at anchor in the Hudson River just below Teller's Point — the southernmost tip of the peninsula the Kitchawank had called Navish, and which Dutch and English settlers knew as Croton Point. The Vulture…
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The Fifteen-Year Revenge
A 1626 robbery near Manhattan's Collect Pond set in motion a chain of violence t…
Chief Nimham's Last Stand
The last Wappinger sachem fought a land fraud in London, served under Washington…
The Grape King's Secret: How an 1865 Wine Bore a 7,000-Year-Old Name
Richard T. Underhill built America's first large vineyard on Croton Point, bred …
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Little Italy on the Croton: The Hidden World of the Dam Workers
The New Croton Dam was an engineering triumph. The settlement that built it was a story of exploitation, debt bondage, and a rough community in the Westchester hills that vanished almost without a trace.
The Westchester Tea Party: Thirty Women on Horseback
During the Revolution, women in the Croton Valley organized a mounted raid on a grocer's tea stocks — an act of collective defiance in one of the war's most dangerous landscapes
Slavery at the Patriots' Manor
The Van Cortlandt family hosted Washington, Lafayette, and Rochambeau — while holding both Native Americans and Africans in bondage. A will and a deed tell the story the museum doesn't.
The Other Harmon: From $3,000 Land Scheme to Harlem Renaissance Patron
The name "Harmon" in Croton-Harmon belongs to a real estate developer. But his brother William — who started with the same $3,000 stake — became one of the most important patrons of African-American art in the twentieth century, and gave away fortunes under a dead man's name.
Croton Point's Five Lives: From Kitchawank Fortress to County Park
No other site in the Hudson Valley compresses so much history into so small a space — a peninsula that has been a fortress, a colonial purchase, a vineyard, a brickyard, and a landfill, all on the same ground
Prohibition's Wild Croton: Rum Planes, Submarines, and Undercover Fiddlers
For a dozen years, the quiet commuter village on the Hudson was a node in an international smuggling network — and a stage for some of Prohibition's most improbable scenes
The Poets of Croton Water
When clean water arrived in New York City in 1842, it inspired an outpouring of verse — from the official ode sung at the celebration to a children's poem by one of America's most important abolitionists