A visitor to the present village in 1781 described it as consisting of some twenty houses, quite close together. This considerable growth in population of the Town of Cortlandt, as evidenced by the census returns, between 1700 and 1820, was largely contributed by Peekskill village. According to the author of the article on the Town of Cortlandt in Scharfs History, iron industry of Peekskill dates from 1820, when Stephen Gregory " commenced the manufacture of plowshares. ... At first the manufacture was carried on in an exceedingly primitive style. The fire which melted the iron was brought to the blacksmith's bellows, which proper degree of heat by an ordinary was at first, operated by his wife, and then, as the business expanded,

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by a horse. Pig iron was too large to be melted by this simple apparatus, and he used old stove-plates and old plow eastings instead." He sold the business to his brolher, and after several changes in proprietorship Mr. Reuben R. Finch became the principal owner, ultimately founding an establishment devoted to the exclusive manufacture of stoves. On the 17th of May, 1829, Chief Justice John Jay died at his residence in Bedford in the eighty-fourth year of his age.1 Here he had lived since his retirement from public life in 1801. An earnest laborer in the cause of freedom for the negroes, and the first president of the old New York society for the manumission of slaves, his closing years had been marked by much interest in the rising movement of the times, and two years before his death he had had the great satisfaction of witnessing the permanent abolition of slavery in the State of New York, accomplished on the 4th of July, 1827, agreeably to a legislative enactment which had been passed ten years previously by the recommendation of Governor Tompkins.