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. Finally Westchester County rescued it. Its five hundred acres are now park land and cannot to be exploited by private enterprise. Religion in Croton during the past three hundred years profited by the Van Cortlandts and the Van Wycks. The methodists obtained their meeting house and cemetery from one; and the Episcopalians and Catholics obtained much from the other. In 1768, when the Methodist missionary, Thomas Ware, crossed over from Long Island to Westchester to promote the Wesleyan faith, he said, "there was not a Methodist on the east side of the Hudson above New York,'' although the great George Whitefield had preached in Peekskill in 1770 and talked from the veranda of the Van Cortlandt Manor House, too. Bishop Francis Asbury made great progress, though, in 1795. Croton must have pleased him, for in his journal of that year these items occur: I had a comfortable time in Croton chapel on Romans 1-16. I returned to Gov. V. C.'s and dined with my dear aged friends. We had all we needed and abundantly more than we desired. The Presbyterians were established by that date. The Reverend