The Night Sergeant Douglass Fell
In April 1900, a shot out of the pitch-dark woods above the Cornell Dam construction camp killed a Mount Vernon militia sergeant who was re…
12 min read →Croton History Experimental · reorganization & redesign pending
Seven thousand years of Croton-on-Hudson — stories, a full timeline, and a searchable archive of 10,707,815 words of primary sources, from the Kitchawank shell middens to the New Croton Dam.
Latest from Croton History
All stories →
History feature
When New York Threw a Party for Croton Water
October 14 marks 184 years since the 1842 Croton Water Celebration. Watch our new Croton Ode lyric film and explore the poem, the aqueduct and the historical score behind the anniversary.
History feature
Recent Stories
All 27 stories →
The Handsomest Young Man I Ever Saw
Sometime in the early months of 1781, at the Loyalist cavalry headquarters in Morrisania, Col. James DeLancey sentenced a young Horseneck m…
21 min read →
This Month in Croton History
Full timeline →
Seven Thousand Years in Croton →
The full interactive timeline — from the first shell middens at Croton Point to the present, with sources and deep dives for every era.
Listen to Croton
All works →
♪ The Music New York Wrote About Croton Water →
Two competing Croton Waltzes from 1844, an 1842 temperance song and chorus, and Lydia Maria Child's “Oh, blessed be the Croton!” — original Library of Congress scores, page by page, with full lyric transcriptions.
Explore by Era
Indigenous history
The Kitchawank and 7,000 years at Croton Point
Colonial & the Manor
Van Cortlandt Manor and Dutch Westchester
Revolution & the Neutral Ground
Skinners, Cowboys, and the Arnold-André affair
The Aqueduct & the Dam
The engineering works that built New York
Village formation (1898)
Incorporation and the making of the village
Twentieth century
Harmon, Prohibition, and modern Croton
Explore by Place
Croton Point
Shell middens, vineyards, brickyards, a landfill, a park
Harmon
The suburban development that named a train station
Croton Landing
Steamboats, docks, and the riverfront
Quaker Bridge
The crossing above the gorge
The Dam
The world's tallest masonry dam, 1906
Van Cortlandt Manor
The 86,000-acre colonial estate
Featured Collection
Revolutionary Voices: The McDonald Interviews
Between 1844 and 1851, John M. McDonald interviewed Westchester County's last living Revolutionary War veterans and recorded their testimony in a series of notebooks. Browse 418 items from the collection — professional transcriptions courtesy of the Westchester County Historical Society — searchable page by page alongside the original manuscript images.
Search the Archive
Full-text search across 10,707,815 words in 1,596 source documents — with AI research reports built from the passages you find.