Substantially the whole tract passed to Hercules Leut, Richard's son, about 1730. The second of the two strips on the Hudson which always remained independent of the Van Cortlandt estate was a three-hundred-acre parcel fronting on the inner and upper part of Peekskill Bay, which was deeded, on April 25, 1685, to Jacobus DeKay " for the value of four hundred guilders, seawant," and which ultimately became the property of John Krankhyte (ancestor of the Cronkhites). Upon this strip is the Peekskill State Camp of Military Instruction. The area of the Van Cortlandt estate in Westchester County, omitting the two Peekskill strips just noticed, was 86,203 acres, and, adding that of the tract on the opposite side of the Hudson, aggregated 87,713 acres. Van Cortlandt, as a man of large business concerns and important official interests in New York, continued to live in the city, or at least to spend most of his time there, notwithstanding his extensive landed acquisitions and his ultimate design of procuring for them manorial dignity. But it was probably as early as 1683 that the historic mansion of the family at the mouth of the Croton River, which is still standing in a good state of preservation, had its beginning. This house was originally intended as a trading place and a fort, and was built with very thick stoue walls, pierced with loopholes for musketry, all of which have been filled in save one, iu what is now the sitting-room, which is preserved as a memento of olden times and of the antiquity of the dwelling. Situated just where the road from Sing Sing to Croton Landing crosses the wide mouth of the Croton River, where that stream empties into the Hudson, it commands a magnificent view of the broad Tappan Sea. In former times the ferry across the Croton River mouth, which was the only means of reaching the country above without making a wide detour, had its northern terminus near the mansion.