In case you could not enlarge the document below to read. here is the text. SCARSDALE A COMMUNITY like an individual has a personality, that which marks it off as different. All that a man has done and been counts in his character and prestige, so too with a village. Scarsdale, in Westchester County, for example, is what it is partly because of what it was. Deep in the historic background is a romantic beginning. In the same year of Charles the Seconds reign that the plague swept London and surrendered only to the devastating fire, that is in 1666, a sixth son was born in the family of Mayor Heathcote of Chesterfield in the Manor of Scarsdale, Derbyshire. Some twenty-six years later, after his intended wife had transferred her affections to one of his elder brothers, this Caleb Heathcote took his patrimony and set sail for New York. Prospering in trade he soon became one of the leading men of the colony and began to buy up land in Westchester. At the end of the century he purchased of the Widow Ann Richbell the claims her husband had established to land running nine miles back from Long Island Sound to the Bronx River with an average breadth, of two miles. Shortly afterward he purchased the Fox Meadow from the Indian chiefs, Beopo, Cohawney and others and then a bit more to the south along the Bronx rounding out his holdings to the town line of Eastchester. In 1701, being influential in the government of the province, he got these lands exalted into the Manor of Scarsdale, named from his old home. If the English name meant dale of scars or rocks it was as appropriate here as it was there. Scarsdale was one of the nine real manors of New York, six of which were in Westchester County, but it has the distinction of being the last manor granted in the British Empire. The lord of the manor might have held his own courts, which he did not choose to do, but 1.. did actually enjoy a number of special legal rights long since obsolete. The manor, which included Mamaroneck where he built his house, saw no great increase of population; in 1712 there were but five whites and eleven negro slaves within its border. In 1774, his two daughters having long held it in joint tenure, the manor was broken up and the tenants, for the most part, became the proprietors. Mamaroneck being taken off, Scarsdale became a town by the law of March 7, 1788, which did like service for most other Westchester communities. During the Revolution it well knew the tread of armies. In October, 1776, parts of Sir William Howes army passed along the eastern precincts on their way to fight the battle of White Plains. In fact, the battle was begun in Scarsdale near the junction of modern Mamaroneck and Garden Roads where a Hessian detachment from De Heisters division routed and pursued New England soldiers under Colonel Spencer across the Bronx. After the battle General Howe spent some time in the Criffin-Fish House near the site of the first encounter. The house still stands, identified by a bronze marker. Throughout the struggle there were bitter quarrels among neighboring Whigs and Tories. Tradition has it that the Varian house, now better known as Wayside, was the scene of such a fracas when Tory marauders tried to find the family cow which had been locked in the principal room of the house. A generation later Fenimore Cooper, who had married a great grand, daughter of Caleb Heathcote, and at that time lived on the Angevine Farm on Mamaroneck Road, gave the story of those turbulent days a permanent place in literature. Deeply impressed with reminiscent tales he had heard from the aged John Jay, he wrote The Spy in Scarsdale, the first important novel produced in the United States. Shortly after the Revolution two men of note set up their homes in Scarsdale, Richard Morris, the first Chief Justice of the State of New York, and Major William Popham, who had been an aide to Washington. It was the latter who built The Locusts, still standing near the Post Road; and his descendants became in time the leading family of the town. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, however this position might have been claimed by the Tompkins family who occupied most of the old Fox Meadow. Jonathan G. Tompkins was the towns first supervisor, but it was his son, Daniel D., the Farmers Boy of West chester, governor of New York during the War of 1812, who gained most renown. In 1790 Scarsdale had 281 inhabitants and was long the countrys smallest town; it had less than 500 at the time of the Civil War, when there were still more oxen than children within its borders. The Episcopal parish of St. James the Less had been set up in 1852, so that the Q\.laker meeting houses at the south east corner of the town were no longer the sole monuments of religion. The old Varian house, which in the first years of the century had served as a drovers tavern, had returned to less exciting uses as a farm house. In 1853 a New York business man and philanthropist, Charles Butler, had begun to bring together again the old farms of Fox Meadow and in quiet. dignity had set up as the towns leading country gentleman. Life went on tranquilly. Beside the Bronx at the north the Hauboldt· powder-works employed a few men; near the Scarsdale railroad station, built when the tracks were laid in 1847, the old mill wheel creaked round, while in the pond, at the proper season, the farmers washed their sheep. This old Scarsdale persisted, little changed down to the end of the century. In the nineties the new era was begun with the real estate development of the Arthur Manor section bordering East chester, but characteristic standards were set when James G. Cannon shortly afterward laid out the Heathcote Park in spacious and well-landscaped properties, a precedent followed, though with smaller plots, by Robert E. Farley who developed Greenacres, the northern portion of the Hitch, cock estate, as carefully as Mr. Cannon had the southern. The new spirit was evidenced in 1903 when the brick school house, now the village hall, was built and the following year when the Town Club was organized to study the practical problems of the community. Ten years later the town had developed not only new needs and new activities but a considerable degree of pride. Partly to provide for better policing and other functions, and partly to defeat an apprehended movement on the part of White Plains to annex Greenacres, legislation was secured in 1915 erecting Scars dale village with the same boundaries as the town, an arrangement unique in New York State. As more and more new homes encroached upon the open land it was realized that some of what remained must be acquired by the public if the appearance of the village was to be preserved. In 1920 when the population had grown to about 3500, twenty-five acres were purchased from Miss Butler at $70,000. A planning commission was appointed and the village set itself to the task of keeping its distinguished character. In 1922, threatened by an invasion of manufacturing, the village passed a zoning ordinance which was intended to keep Scarsdale a village largely of one-family houses. Twice during the decade other parks were added, supplementing the admirable county park land on its eastern and western borders. About the same time a group of citizens prevented a hasty exploitation of the land about the Scarsdale station then apprehended and began the erection of the fine and strikingly harmonious business buildings that now serve the village and the adjacent territory, a region holding a population of about 13,000. Town pride showed itself even more impressively in the constant development of the schools, with their successful Scarsdale plan of individual instruction. But most of all, perhaps, the community has plumed itself upon the architectural quality of its homes. Few if any towns in the United States have sustained a higher standard. Recognizing and recording this achievement this book has a high value not only to the citizens of Scarsdale but to all who take an interest in such standards.
Posted on: Tue, 20 May 2014 15:43:36 +0000
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