The first village election of Sing Sing was hold on the first Tuesday of May, 1813, when " seven discreet freeholders " were elected trustees. Their names are not preserved, all the early records of the village having been destroyed by fire. In 1813 the celebrated authorization was made to Robert Macomb, from which resulted the construction of " Macomb's Dam " and the consequent complete obstruction of the navigation of the Harlem River, a condition which was a sore grievance to property owners on the Westchester side. In early times the entire Harlem and Spuyten Duyvil waterway was navigable, at certain stages of the tide, for boats of light draught. " Prior to the Revolution," says a writer1 who has given much attention to this subject, "the island [Manhattan] was circumnavigable in vessels of light draught. General Cornwallis pased from the Hudson through Spuyten Duyvil Creek into Harlem River, and down to Sherman's Creek (end of Tenth Avenue), with his troops on board light, draught boats, and scaled the heights at what is now Fort George, during the concerted movement on Fort Washington in the autumn of 1776/' No public interest was felt, however, in preserving this navigable condition. At the end of the eighteenth century Alexander Macomb, a wealthy 1 Mr. Fordlmm Morris.

GENERAL

COUNTY

HISTORY

Kingsbridge and vicinity, and in December, 1800, he obtained from the city authorities a water grant extending across Spuyten Dnyvil Creek just east of the King's Bridge, although it was specified in the grant that a passageway fifteen feet wide should be preserved for small boats and craft. Thereupon he erected a four-story gristmill extending out over the creek, whose power was supplied by the alternate ebb and flow of the tide against its undershot wheels.1 Alexander was succeeded in his property rights by his son Robert, who, not satisfied with the supply of water for the mill, procured a grant to build a dam across the Harlem River from Bussing's Point, oi) the Harlem side, to Devoe's Point, on the Westchester side, "so as to hold the waters of the river for the benefit of the mill at Kingsbridge, thus practically making a tidal millpond between the present site of the Central Bridge at Seventh Avenue and <dd King's Bridge.