Small fortunes were made and the clay beds were excavated until all pay clay was moulded into brick. Then the industry centered in Haverstraw and upper river points. Croton Point, the beautiful peninsula reaching far into the Hudson, embracing with its curved shoreline on the side toward Croton village the charming sheet of water known to the Indians as "Mother's Lap," has a history all its own. The same year in which Stephanus Van Cortlandt was married to Gertrude Schuyler, 1671, his sister Sophia married Andreas Teller.

Evidently through her brother's aid and influence, the Tellers obtained the greater part of Senasqua, as the peninsula was called. The original purchase price was a barrel of rum and twelve blankets. For a century after that, the land was called Teller's Point. Pierre, the son of the Tellers, married Margaret Haines and their twin daughters married men by the names of McCord and Tice. We know that Pierre McCord resided at Croton Landing and that Clarence Tice of Croton and Pierre H. Teller of Harmon remain as descendants of the Tellers of Teller's Point. The Underhill family succeeded the Tellers in the ownership of Teller's Point; and then the modern world demanded that its identity be linked with the river and the village, so called it Croton Point. In its day, Croton Point has been a principality all its own, with seventy-five acres devoted to luscious grapes, large apple orchards and hothouses for the cultivation of roses. William H. Underhill began the manufacture of brick there over a hundred years ago, and for more than fifty years, enameled bricks for tiling and wainscoting made on Croton Point were in great demand. Then the clay stratum was exhausted. For fifteen to twenty years before the World War, Croton Point was anybody's stepchild. During the war, it became perilously near becoming the site of enormous factory plants.