By Thomas F. X. Casey, Rockland County Historian

Rockland County is the smallest county in New York State outside the five boroughs of New York City. It is bounded by the Hudson River on the east, the State of New Jersey on the south and the Ramapo Mountains to the north and west. Although the county consists of only 176 square miles, it is a land rich in history.

To a newcomer, Rockland County may appear to be border-to-border housing developments built over the last 40 years, but its historical roots go back almost 400 years – over 10,000 years, if you include Native American history. Records indicate that the first residents were the Indians of the Delaware or Lenni Lenape nation, who were scattered throughout the county in small tribes.

Henry Hudson is credited as the first European to set eyes on what would become Rockland. In 1609, Hudson, an Englishman under commission to the Dutch East India Company sailed up the river, which would one day bear his name. He anchored in both the Tappan Zee and the widest point in the river, off what is now known as Haverstraw. He mistakenly assumed that he had found the legendary "Northwest Passage" to India, and he continued his voyage upstream to Albany before he realized his mistake and headed for home.

Early attempts to settle the county by the Dutch were generally unsuccessful, and in 1664 they handed over the territory to the English. Yet the Dutch did leave a legacy in place names like Duhderberg, Sparkill and High Tor, as well as a small collection of unique sandstone houses.

In 1686, the Duke of York, later to become King James II of England, established the county system and designated our area Orange County. That county included all of present day Rockland and part of what is now Orange County. In the same year, the town of Orangetown was created which encompassed all of modern Rockland County. The precinct of Haverstraw was established in 1719 when it was separated from Orangetown and permitted to hold its own meetings and elect its own officers. Haverstraw was made a town in 1788, and included the present towns of Clarkstown, Ramapo and Stony Point. Clarkstown and Ramapo became towns in 1791, and it was not until 1865 that Stony Point became a town.

The first half of the 18^th Century saw much of the land cleared, homes built, grist and saw mills erected on the numerous small creeks, and general stores opened at Haverstraw and Tappan Slote, present day Piermont. Because of the lack of roads, travel was largely confined to sloops, which made regular trips up and down the river. In 1700, the DeWint House, which still stands, was built in Tappan and later served as George Washington’s headquarters.

In 1691, the first County Courthouse was built in Tappan, but by 1737, the residents of the northern part of the county (modern Orange County), were complaining about the difficulty of attending the county court of Tappan. The Ramapo Mountains were a formidable barrier. As a result of their demands, sessions of the County Court were alternated between Goshen and Tappan. In 1773, a second county courthouse was built in Goshen. In 1774, the county seat was moved to New City, but in some ways this location was even more inaccessible. At least Tappan could be reached by the river, while access to New City was limited to the poor roads.

By the 1770s, the movement to separate what is now Rockland from greater Orange County was in full swing – a process that was completed in February 1798.

During the American Revolution, Rockland became an important crossroads – a vital link between the Northern and Southern colonies, and a scene of conflict and treason.

On July 4, 1774, the people of Orangetown gathered in Yoast Mabie’s House to adopt a series of resolutions that contained the seeds of the great principles which would be later embodied in the Declaration of Independence. The fact that both the Orangetown Resolutions and the Declaration of Independence were adopted on July 4 was a fortuitous coincidence.

There were American fortifications at Sidman’s Fort at Suffern, a blockhouse at Palisades, and larger forts at Stony Point, Bear Mountain and Fort Montgomery. Entire armies and vital supplies passed through Rockland on their way to war. The King’s Ferry in Stony Point and Dobb’s ferry in Palisades linked New York and the southern colonies with New England. King’s Ferry was used by Washington’s Continental Army many times, and in 1781 it carried the French allies on their way to the final battle at Yorktown. In 1775, Dobbs Ferry, run by Molly Sneden, a Tory, carried Martha Washington on her way to Massachusetts to visit her husband.

Two important battles took place in the county – the capture by the British of Fort Clinton at Bear Mountain in October 1777 and the victorious attack by General "Mad Anthony" Wayne’s army on the British fort at Stony Point in July 1779.

There were several small battles in the county when British landing parties attempted to come ashore at Nyack and Haverstraw, only to be beaten back by the local militia.

Rockland County also became famous for the treasonable plot by Benedict Arnold to sell the plans for the fortifications at West Point to the British. His co-conspirator, British Major John Andre, was captured in Tarrytown on his way back to the British lines with the plans. Andre was taken to Tappan where he was tried, found guilty and hanged.

Rockland was also the site of the first formal recognition of the new nation by the British. On May 5, 1783, General Washington received the British Commander, Sir Guy Carleton, at the DeWint House to discuss the terms of the peace treaty. On May 7, Sir Guy received Washington aboard his vessel Perserverance. On this day, the King’s Navy fired its first salute to the flag of the United States of America.

After seven years of war, Rockland County was in a sad state; having been ravaged by British troops, Tories and just plain outlaws. Homes had to be rebuilt and farms restored.

In this period after the war, there were four townships in the old Orange County; Goshen and Cornwall to the north, and Haverstraw and Orangetown to the south. Since Haverstraw and Orangetown had born the brunt of the war, the Supervisors at their annual meetings in 1779 and 1780 voted to decrease the taxes in these towns and increase them in Goshen and Cornwall. This stimulated a movement among northern towns for a separation.

In 1793, residents of the northern towns who wanted a county seat in Goshen began discussions with a group of residents in the Newburgh area. Newburgh was then part of Ulster County and its citizens had to travel 30 miles north to conduct official business. Finally all parties interested in dividing the county came together and the New York Legislature created Rockland County, while also realigning the borders of northern Orange and Ulster Counties. Rockland officially became a county on February 23, 1798.

In the national census of 1800, the total population of the newly created County of Rockland was 6,353.

The town of Ramapo, or Hempstead as it was known until 1829, had the largest number of residents at 1,931. Clarkstown was next with a population of 1,806 followed by Orangetown with 1,337. Haverstraw, which included Stony Point, had 1,229 residents. By this time, Native Americans had virtually disappeared from the county. Slavery existed in a diminished form until 1828.

Improvements in transportation set the pace for development in the first half of the 19^th century. Roads were primitive and transporting products from the western end of the county to the Hudson River was very difficult. After legislative approval, it took 17 years to complete the Nyack Turnpike, which connected Nyack to Suffern, where the Orange Turnpike provided the inland route to Albany. Present day Route 59 roughly follows the path of the Nyack Turnpike.

In 1827, steamboat travel debuted from Nyack to New York City, attracting competition from steamboats later built at Haverstraw and Tappan. To facilitate steamboat traffic from Tappan Landing, a road was built over the marshes to the end of a 500-foot pier, which within a few years became the terminus of the Erie Railroad. Eleazor Lord planned a railroad through the Ramapo Pass to serve New York’s southern tier of counties. Work began in 1838, and the 484 miles of track to Dunkirk on Lake Erie were completed in 1851, making it the second-longest railroad in the world. The President of the United States, Millard Fillmore, and the Secretary of State, Daniel Webster, along with a score of national and state officials, boarded the train at the Piermont Pier for the first trip.

Although agriculture remained dominant in Rockland County well into the 20^th Century, industry saw a gradual growth. Quarries in and around Nyack and in other parts of the county provided stone for many structures outside Rockland as well as in it. Building stone from local quarries went into the old Capitol at Albany, the old Trinity Church in New York, and the first building at Rutgers College.

Large deposits of clay in the Hudson River brought about the beginning of brick manufacturing in Haverstraw in 1771. Haverstraw became the brick-making center of the east in 1817 when James Wood discovered that coal dust could be mixed with clay, reducing the price of the bricks. In 1852, a fresh impetus was added to the industry by Richard VerValen’s invention of the automatic brick machine. The new machine tempered the clay, pressed the malleable clay into molds, and produced bricks of uniform size. For the next 75 years, North Rockland was the source of building materials for the colossal growth of New York City. At one time, the Town of Haverstraw had over 42 brickyards. In January 1906, an entire area, undermined by tunneling below the surface, was engulfed in a landslide of clay, which took 20 lives and destroyed part of the business district. The use of steel and concrete in construction, rather than brick, contributed to the decline of the industry, and the depression of the 1930s struck the final blow.

In Post Revolutionary Rockland, manufacturing was varied. Because of the proximity of iron mines, numerous metal products were made – plows, hoes, railings, nails, machinery, even cannon-balls. Rockland factories made shoes, straw hats, silk and cotton cloth, sulfur matches, and pianos.

Foremost among Rockland’s early industries was J.G. Pierson and Brothers, a large-scale nail manufacturer whose overwhelming success spurred the settlement and development of western Ramapo. While reliable transportation was important to manufacturers such as Pierson, even more essential was water for steam and timber for fuel. The Ramapo Pass offered a plentiful combination of both. For this reason, Pierson relocated his operations in 1795 from New York City to a site along the Orange Turnpike at the base of Torne Mountain.

Pierson immediately set to work on a 120-foot dam across the Ramapo River. By 1813, his Ramapo Works was producing a million pounds of nails annually. The addition of a cotton mill in 1814 nearly doubled the size of the Works, which in 1822 were incorporated under the name "Ramapo Manufacturing Company." With the passing of the Pierson brothers, the Ramapo Works effectively shut down after 1850. During its heydey, however, the Pierson nail factory was a powerful economic stimulus to the region because of its links to existing agricultural and commercial trade.

In the process, Ramapo developed into an agricultural marketplace and a locale for manufacturing innovations. For over a half century, the only school in the county was in Tappan, which was established by the Tappan Reformed Church. The first schoolhouse was built there in 1711 and was used as a school until 1860. The next mention of a school in Rockland County is in the Town of Haverstraw Highway Commissioner’s report in 1796. Schooling in the late 18^th and early 19^th Century in Rockland County was done in the home or by private schoolmasters in their houses or their pupils’ homes. As compulsory education spread, 34 school districts were established in the county by 1829. They were organized on the general concept that a three-mile-square area with a centrally located school would allow five year olds and older to walk to school.

By the middle of the 19^th Century, matters of pubic interest began to receive attention. Debating societies were formed in Haverstraw, Nyack and Nanuet. Halls and "opera houses" were built. Newspapers were established in Nyack and Haverstraw, and a fire in Haverstraw in 1854 brought about the formation of the first volunteer fire company.

Religion also played a prominent part in Rockland’s history. The earliest Dutch Reformed churches, and later the Presbyterian churches, laid the groundwork for other Protestant denominations to flourish in the county. The first Roman Catholic Church In Rockland was St. Peter’s Church in Haverstraw which opened in 1847. Haverstraw was also the site of the congregation of the Sons of Jacob, which completed and dedicated its first temple in 1889.

As in the American Revolution, the men and women of Rockland have served in all of America’s wars. During the war of 1812, Rockland turned out more soldiers in proportion than any other county in the state. Four Union generals and four Medal of Honor recipients lived in Rockland. One of the best kept secrets in the history of the county was the movement of over a million troops through Camp Shanks in Orangetown in World War II.

The dawn of the 20^th Century saw the beginnings of the decline in the number of farms in Rockland and the gradual rise in industry. For example, the California Perfume Company was founded in Suffern in 1897. Today it’s a major cosmetics company known as Avon.

By the 1920s, Rockland County became home to many artists, writers and stage celebrities. Henry Varnum Poor, the painter and muralist; Maxwell Anderson, the playwright; and Kurt Weil, the composer, all lived on South Mountain Road in New City. Edward Hopper, the world-renowned artist, lived in the county as did actresses Helen Hayes and Katherine Cornell and memorable actor Burgess Meredith.

By 1950, there were fewer than 150 farms left in Rockland. Today that number has been reduced to a handful. In the 1950s, homes were built at a rate of more than a thousand a year. Much of this growth was due to the opening of the Tappan Zee Bridge in 1955 and the completion of the Palisades Interstate Parkway and the Thruway during the same decade. Rockland’s rural character was changed forever.

Among Rockland County’s current qualities are its rich history, its economic scope, its unparalleled parkland and its diversity of population. With these extensive attributes Rockland County is primed for the challenges of the new Century.