Van Cortlandt's are situated the remains of Fort Independence, whose history is so ina Supplement to n. Gaines' Military Gazette, Feb. 9, 1778, No. 1372.

l6o HISTORY OF THE COUNTY OF WESTCHESTER.

separably interwoven with the stirring events of the Revolution. A small portion of its embankments and trenches are yet to be discerned The whole is shaded by a luxuriant grove of native pines. The solitude of this delightful spot is occasionally disturbed by the moaning of the wind among the trees,

And hark! as it comes sighing through the grove, The exhausted gale, a spirit there awakes, That wild and melancholy music makes.

Circuituous paths lead to the landing, while the table land to the east is heavily bordered with the ash, maple, cedar and towering oak.

Hudson, the discoverer of the North River, appears to have been much struck with the first sight of this high and mountainous region.

"It appears from his journal," says Moulton, " that he was not inattentive to the rapid and astonishing elevation of a district of country which, in the course of less than sixty miles, increase from a few feet ahove the water level<* to the lofty height of fifteen hundred feet.6 Sailing leisurely, he had full opportunity to contrast the appearances of the opposite shores. On the left he had the sublime prospect of the pallisade rocks, whose dark columnar front, like a towering battlement, with here and there a projection like tne salient angle of a bastion, presented perpendicular elevations from three to five hundred feet, and, ranging more than thirty miles uninterrupted, (except by the valley of the Nyack.) it at last exhibited an altitude of nearly seven hundred feet." and then vanished from his sight on the remote, but still more elevated range of the High Tourn and Tourn mountains.